Morning Banana Diet

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 Morning 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.

Other Banana Diets

The Morning Banana Diet is not the first weight loss banana diet. There have been various word-of-mouth banana diets over the years that work a bit differently from the Morning Banana Diet. Their goal was to discourage you from overeating at meals by having you eat a relatively satiating banana before all meals to fill you up, rather than limited bananas to breakfast.

Morning Banana Diet

In this sense these older banana diets were variations on the Grapefruit Diet or the Cabbage Soup Diet. Grapefruits and cabbage soup fill you up, the latter with liquid. (Grapefruits also affect your sense of taste to make eating food immediately after less pleasant.)

Reporter Mary-Liz Shaw of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a 2003 article traced morning banana diets to the late 1970s, when they paired banana eating with old-style diet foods like cottage cheese.

A January 2003 revival of the Banana Diet by "slimming editor" Sally Ann Voak of the UK's Sun newspaper caused a brief resurgence. Touting a potential 14-pound weight loss over 28 days, the "medically approved" diet provoked a one-day increase in banana purchases of 30 percent at UK food retailer Tesco.

Shortly after the Sun's series on the diet ended, in classic UK tabloid fashion the paper panicked their loyal, dieting readers with a story predicting the imminent destruction of the entire world banana crop due to a vicious fungal disease called Sigatoka. The only hope to save the fruit, according to the Sun, was in developing a genetically modified fungus-resistant Frankenfood banana, a fate particularly horrifying to the GM-food-phobic UK public.

Thankfully, bananas are still with us.

Another Japanese Banana Diet

With various publishers in Japan trying to capitalize on the banana diet boom, variations are beginning to branch off from the original "Asa Banana Diet" developed by Hamachi. A recent example is publisher Izumi Shoten's Banana Plus Detox Soup Diet book. This book is based on a diet variation devised by a Dr. Kazuyoshi Fujimoto, who prescribes a banana with water before every meal.

Jumping on two bandwagons at once, Dr. Fujimoto also recommends a detox soup made from six super-veggies (tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, onions, green peppers, and celery) for some of the dieter's dinners. This sounds like the soup that Master Cleanse dieters eat when they are coming off of their maple syrup lemonade "fast." In addition to "detoxifying" you, the soup is conveniently low calorie, presumably resulting in additional weight loss. 

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, and you haven't restricted your diet with extreme food limitations.

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