The 10 best diets from Japan, chosen by women’s magazine readers
Fytte magazine, a diet, beauty and health monthly for Japanese women, recently asked their readers to choose the weight loss diets that they think are the most effective. Fytte reports on the results in their July issue, with ten top diets and diet techniques, many of which are unknown in the United States.
Although the amounts of weight lost may not sound dramatic to American readers of Woman’s World and viewers of The Biggest Loser, remember that obesity is not yet the problem in Japan that it is in the United States. To get an idea of how large a weight loss these diets represent when adjusted relative to the overall body weight distribution in Japan, think of an approximate “conversion rate” of 1 pound of excess Japanese fat equaling 5 American pounds.
1. The Tofu and Soybean Diet
The most effective diet in the view of Fytte readers was the Tofu and Soybean Diet. Readers who were profiled in the magazine had lost from 16 to 33 pounds. In the Tofu and Soybean Diet, the dieter substitutes tofu or soybeans for meal ingredients like rice and meat, particularly at dinnertime.
23-year-old Satchi had gained weight during college by living on rice and beef bowls, fast food, and fried foods, but by preparing tofu in a way that it resembled meat, she was able to lose 33 pounds and slim her waist by 11 inches, going from a pant size of large to small.
Looking over the various reader profiles, it seems like this diet may work if you can stick to it. Tofu is generally lower calorie than the items that readers replaced with it. In addition, the foods readers made from tofu and soybeans look rather unappetizing, which would act as an appetite suppressant. For example, among the reader-contributed recipes is pizza with tofu crust — not bread dough with soy powder mixed in, but an actual thin slice of tofu. Yuck! One reader baked bagels using the tofu byproduct “okara,” and another made agar-based gelatin containing whole cooked soybeans. The highest calorie recipe was a tofu, banana, and spinach mousse, which came in at 138 calories. That should kill your appetite for the day!
2. Keeping a Diet Journal
In second place among Fytte’s readers was the practice of keeping a diet journal. Readers who tried this recorded their meals, weight, exercise, and goals. In addition readers reported that writing down their feelings each day helped them to reset themselves emotionally if they were going off track.
Some readers had their husbands contribute motivating messages to their journals. Readers who kept a diet journal lost up to 22 pounds.
3. The Cabbage Diet
Number 3 with Fytte’s readers was the Cabbage Diet. This is similar in principle to the Tofu and Soybean Diet. Cabbage, usually in shredded form, replaces part of the rice that Japanese would normally eat with each meal, and shredded cabbage is used as a between meal snack.
Judging by the menus sent in by readers who successfully used this diet plan, the diet derives its success not only by the reduction in rice eaten, but by an overall reduction in portions and fatty fried food. In other words, readers started out simply replacing rice with cabbage, but their dieting success motivated them to go beyond that and cut down on their food intake in general.
The weight loss with this diet averaged about 5 pounds, but 26-year-old Ai Uemura lost 33 pounds by packing sauted cabbage in her bento lunch box.
4. Pelvis Exercises
Many Fytte readers were excited by the Pelvis Exercise program. This involves using hula hoops, learning how to belly dance, and doing tummy-focused calisthenics. Readers reported waist slimming effects of up to 3-1/2 inches.
5. Yoga and Breathing Exercises
Yoga and breathing exercises were also popular. Readers reported that their stress levels dropped, their daily rhythms and sleep patterns improved, and their eating patterns became more regular and healthy, to the extent that one 27-year-old reader reported a 33-pound weight loss.
6. The 200-calorie Sweet Snack Diet
Readers who reported that they often felt hungry between meals, leading to stress and overeating, tried out the 200-calorie Sweet Snack Diet. About half of the readers preferred gelatin style snacks, mostly konjac or agar derived gelatins, sometimes containing tofu or fruit pieces. Other readers ate yogurt, soy protein bars,or  multigrain crackers. Some just drank a diet cola or chewed gum.
Readers without a sweet tooth ate dried kombu seaweed snacks, reporting that the tough chewiness of them satisfied their desire to chew on something despite containing few calories.
7. Ear and Foot Acupressure
Can putting pressure on certain points of your body cause you to lose weight? Fytte quotes a Japanese academic who believes in the traditional Chinese medical principle that various organs can be influenced remotely by manipulating body pressure points.
Fytte readers seemed to like the magical, effortless aspect of this technique, and one reader claimed it helped her to lose 6 pounds.
What are the details of this technique? Glad you asked: Twice daily, after nightly bathing and before going to bed, do each of the following for 10 seconds each, on each side of your body …
- Pinch your tragus (that’s the little tab in front of your ear canal)
- Press a finger against your skull just behind your ear, right above above the earlobe
- Press a finger against the middle of the back side of your knee
- Press a finger against the middle of the back of the thickest part of your thigh
- Press a couple of fingers against the middle of the bottom of your foot just in front of your heel
8. The Bath Time Diet
The Bath Time Diet seems to be a variation of the Yoga and Breathing technique, in that it aims to relieve stress. Some Fytte readers put bath salts in their bath water (including exotic aromas like “strawberry milk” scent) and put on a favorite CD or plug their iPod into portable speakers.
35-year-old Koyomi claims to have lost a whopping 57 pounds because of her 45-minute daily baths. Hmmm.
9. The Mixed Grain Diet
As Makiko Ito has written about on Just Hungry, packets of exotic mixed grains, seeds, and small beans are marketed in Japan as additives to add some excitement to plain white rice. The premise of the Mixed Grain Diet is that the chewy, hearty texture of mixed grains and even ordinary brown rice added to other foods, including soups and gyoza potsticker filling, will increase their power to satisfy hunger without overeating. A 27-year-old housewife lost 9 pounds this way.
10. Running
Finally, we come to a weight loss technique that is more popular in the United States than in Japan: running. A 21-year-old college student reported losing 13 pounds this way. In Japan you don’t see joggers or outdoor exercisers quite as much as in the United States, so to avoid feeling self conscious 28-year-old diet runner “Wakaromi” said she wears a baseball cap pulled far down over her face, tuning out her surroundings with an MP3 player.
11. The Morning Banana Diet
There’s more? Well, yes, there’s an eleventh diet not in the list of 10, but mentioned elsewhere in the magazine to tell you about. The Morning Banana Diet is the brainchild of a 31-year-old Japanese salaryman and his pharmacist wife. He lost 40 pounds on the diet, and when he posted about it on the internet, it quickly grew into a frenzy.
What is this diet? On the face of it, there’s not much to it. The basic rules are that you eat one or more bananas for breakfast, drink only water, and eat dinner as early as possible. Other than that, you can eat normally at lunch and dinner.
It would seem that the success of this diet would depend a lot on what “normal” is for you, but tens of thousands of Japanese have given it a try, and it’s popularity is spreading from the internet to magazines like Fytte, to several books that have been published on it. For a bit more detail on the diet (and there is a bit more to it), there’s an English language Morning Banana Diet Web site.
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