A new diet born on the Internet in Japan

As elsewhere, people in Japan who are trying to lose weight gather together on internet forums and social networking sites to pick up diet tips and give each other support. Recently on Mixi, one of the most popular social networking sites in Japan, the diet musings of one of the members and the enthusiastic contributions of others in the community coalesced to produce a new and simple diet program that has jumped into the mainstream Japanese media and resulted in three books and many magazine articles. This diet was dubbed the Asa Banana Diet. Japan is known for kaizen, the gradual refinement and improvement of manufacturing and other processes, and the Asa Banana Diet is in effect Japan’s kaizen of a diet classic, the Banana Diet.

Simple, cheap, and stress free: The Morning Banana Diet

The Morning Banana Diet brings this diet to the West, slightly adapted to our foods and culture. The gist is that you eat a banana for breakfast. Of course no diet is without fine print and footnotes, so we’ve collected up some of the received wisdom about the diet in order to present you with its main practices here.

Nevertheless, the Morning Banana Diet remains pretty simple. It’s a diet for people who don’t want to bother with a diet, who don’t want to read a book (although there are books on it in Japan), who are basically in control of things but need a little structure. It’s a diet for a Japanese level of overweight, 5 to 35 pounds overweight, perhaps up to 50, not an American Biggest Loser level of obesity, where a more hardcore, but less simple, diet regimen is called for.

Simple and free: Get started now!

You have nothing to lose but a few pounds.

Give it two weeks. If the Morning Banana Diet doesn’t work for you, then you can move on to another diet, knowing that you haven’t been taking dangerous drugs or supplements, you’ve been eating a natural, nutritious, high fiber food (it’s certainly better than a cookie diet, right?), and you haven’t restricted your diet with extreme food limitations.

To start today, all you need to do is:

   1. Buy bananas at your local market
   2. Register for the free forum here
   3. Introduce yourself on the forum
   4. Make your first Morning Banana Diet Journal post