There is a fundamental problem with dieting, and it is this: everyone wants to look like the girl who has been on a diet, but nobody actually wants to be her. Because dieting isn’t fun, it isn’t hot and it isn’t sexy. It is, in fact, embarrassing and boring — and, what’s more, it makes you seem boring.

Dieting says certain things about you. It says that you care enough about what you look like to go hungry. It says that you’re controlling enough to separate your carbs from your proteins, strange enough to spend a day living solely off bananas and skewed enough to ingest all food in puréed form. In short, it says that you’re self-obsessed, you place a premium on your appearance and you are willing to suffer for it. It also screams: “I have eaten only carrots for three months to fit into these sequined knickers.” None of which constitute a very good look.

And yet, thanks to our perennial quest for self-improvement and the generally held misconception that we, too, could morph into Cheryl Cole given the right eating plan and decent hair extensions, each January we throw ourselves into yet another unrealistic eating plan in pursuit of our goals. The latest diet fad causing excitement is Alli diet pills. Despite being approved for sale in America by the Food and Drug Administration in June 2007, the pills have yet to be given the green light for sale in Europe. However, they’re available online — and when they arrived in the Style office, you could have been forgiven for thinking we had seen a streaker for all the screaming. We fell upon them: one of us is getting married, another is trying to lose baby weight and, well, I am always on a diet. Alli pills are the new guilty secret being passed among the obsessed.

They work by preventing the fat-digesting enzyme lipase from breaking down the fat you eat — meaning it just passes through you, rather than being stored up as piled-on pounds. All you need to do is take a pill with each meal. However, there is a price to pay. You may be able to eat and drink what you like, but these pills come with warnings of “treatment effects”, such as loose, hard-to-control stools and “increased gas with oily spotting”. It’s not enough to put me off — I’ve already swallowed two days’ worth, as have several people who sit near me. Crazy, I know.

Not all diets have to be extreme, and if it’s success you’re after, opt for a rational one — one that changes the way you eat for ever. Style’s new time-defying diet encourages three meals a day, not one — or seven. It includes food that you will want to eat and could serve to other people (salmon with saffron mayonnaise and marinated chicken with sweet-potato chips — mmm, yes please), and it doesn’t force you to cut out anything — bread and pudding are allowed. Instead, it encourages a sensible, healthy approach to eating that helps your skin, hair and nails, as well as your waistline. I’m all lined up to do it. Just maybe with an Alli chaser.

Mindfulness: the new buzzword

So, dieting really doesn’t work, not, at any rate, according to Oprah, the US talk-show doyenne and possibly the world’s most famous dieter. For she admits, in this month’s edition of her own O magazine, that she has put on about 40lb in the past 12 months, to hit the 200lb mark once more. “How did I let this happen again?” she moans, describing herself as “mad” and “embarrassed”. But this time, claims Oprah, change is a-coming. From now on, her approach to weight loss will not be about denial, but about “self-care”. Her solution also happens to be one of the key catchwords for 2009: mindfulness.

Mindfulness is a Buddhist- based discipline, beloved of A-listers such as Meg Ryan, which involves paying deliberate, nonjudgmental attention to your thoughts and body in the ”present moment”. In other words, rather than trying to change what you are doing, you simply observe yourself doing it. This doesn’t mean it’s okay to neck back another leftover mince pie because you’re living in the moment; it means becoming aware of the thought processes and emotions that led you to that mince pie in the first place. But, while Oprah’s endorsement will no doubt send new diet books such as Susan Alber’s Eat Drink and Be Mindful to the top of the bestseller lists, the concept goes way beyond the post-Christmas bulge.

Mindfulness-based therapies are fast becoming an important (and evidence-based) tool in mainstream psychology, and used to tackle ailments such as depression, stress, anxiety, substance abuse, cancer recovery and chronic pain. Hollywood is not far behind the trend. The actress Goldie Hawn, for instance, runs the Hawn Foundation to promote ”mindful awareness” programmes in schools, which help children to gain an understanding of their own thoughts and feelings. Oprah herself recently taught the world to ”live in the now” with a series of free, interactive online seminars inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s mindful self-help book, A New Earth. And Rumer Willis, daughter of Demi Moore, has even just had ”be present” tattooed down her ribcage.

The concept is this: in daily life, whether it’s in double maths or the boardroom, you must tune in to your thoughts and body without judging them. This discipline, say devotees, allows you to step back from your ego, so becoming self-accepting, calm and confident (and, ultimately, more successful).

How exactly do you tune into ”the now”? The guide to Tolle’s book on Oprah’s website offers little enlightenment at first glance. Negativity, it seems, is tackled by ”becoming transparent” — let whatever is stressing you (the car alarm, the barking dog) pass right through you. For self-awareness, try to be ”friendly towards the present moment”. If this sounds hard — or like just more gobbledygook — you can download endless explanatory podcasts and audio files, or get automatic weekly “meditations” sent directly to your iPod.

With rampant materialism backfiring on us and financial stress now the norm, could mindfulness actually be the modern-day panacea? Clinical trials back up its effectiveness (one found that mindfulness- based cognitive therapy almost halved the rates of relapse in people with depression). For addiction (eating included), techniques such as ”urge surfing” work wonders. ”You learn to feel the urge coming — to smoke, eat or shoot up — and observe it building, peaking and passing,” explains Michael Chaskalson of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, a programme based on the work of Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn, a leader in the field of mindfulness therapies. ”It’s just an urge — you don’t need to act on it.”

Whether this leads to an Oprah-style ”aha!” moment or a second chocolate brownie depends on your diligence.

For more information on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, go to www.mbsr.co.uk

Lucy Atkins

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