diet

The word diet comes from the Greek word ‘diaita’, used in the past to refer to a person's whole mode of life. Today, the term diet is usually restricted to people's eating and drinking habits: their daily pattern of eating, the quality and quantity of their food, and the frequency of eating. To many people the word means a prescribed allowance or selection of food for some specific purpose. In this sense, a diet may be used to control weight or for health reasons. Weight control diets may be used to maintain a constant weight, to gain weight, or to lose weight. Most people, however, think of diets as restrictive and aimed at weight loss. Around 15 million people in the UK are on some kind of weight-loss diet. These diets are rarely successful. One sports nutritionist estimated that 95 per cent of those who go on a strict diet to lose weight quickly not only regain the weight within a year, but also regain proportionately more fat than muscle. See also weight-loss maintenance.