Antonia Hoyle

Why summer diets don’t work

It‘s science, stupid

  • From Spectator Life

Tis the season to eat salads and wear skimpy clothes. At least, that’s what we’re led to believe, egged on by adverts featuring bikini-clad models, barely-there fashion in shops, television series such as Love Island that equate sunshine with slender figures and the perennial expectation that we should by now be ‘beach body ready’.

We’re undoubtedly more sociable in summer. A study last year found that we’re twice as likely to make excuses to avoid a social event in the winter

Yet quite aside from the idiocy of only being ‘allowed’ to enjoy the warm weather when we’re deemed aesthetically agreeable enough by unidentified authorities, summer isn’t ever when we are at our slimmest, is it? 

At least not according to the bathroom scales currently clocking me at half a stone heavier than I was four months ago. I am always approaching my heaviest in July, my weight peaking at the end of August when jeans I slip on effortlessly in the winter months are bursting at the seams and I am practically begging the clocks to go back so I can feel good in denim again.

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