Living on 800 calories a day may sound insane, but you will have to surrender your prejudices about quick weight-loss regimes because it seems they might work after all

Crash diets, as we all know, don’t work. They are potentially dangerous, hard to maintain and the people who manage to lose weight on them invariably gain it back, and then some. It is not clear how we all came to know this, because a growing body of clinical evidence seems to suggest the opposite: crash diets do work. They may, in fact, work better than anything else.

In The Big Crash Diet Experiment, Dr Javid Abdelmoneim sought to investigate – with the help of four volunteers – the possibility that Very Low Calorie Diets (VLCDs) may provide more effective weight loss than the slow-and-steady approach recommended by the NHS for most people. “This is a controversial experiment,” he said, “but if it delivers, we may have to think again about crash diets.” Dr Abdelmoneim, by the way, does not strike one as the sort of person who has ever eaten an entire tub of ice-cream for emotional reasons.

Unlike old quick weight-loss regimes, modern VLCDs can be nutritionally complex. Although it is not for everybody, a crash diet can help to reset one’s approach to food, making relapse less likely, not more. The regime Dr Abdelmoneim is testing is a nine-week, liquid-only diet with a daily intake of 800 calories. You have to surrender a lot of your received prejudices against crash dieting to make this sound anything less than insane.

Among the volunteers were Father Paul Lomas, an overweight, married Catholic priest (yes, a lot to take in there; he used to be an Anglican, and got dispensation, but I had to Google that). He wants to be around for his grandchildren, but he has just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Tracy still cooks meals for six, even though her kids have left home. Rebecca’s diet consists almost entirely of takeaways (“We got invited to our kebab man’s wedding”) and Yolande has fatty liver disease.

So difficult was the regime that for the first week the dieters were taken to a house in Rochdale, away from family and friends to embark on the diet together. There were tears and grumpiness at the start, but it was a mark of the maturity of the programme that it didn’t make a huge drama out the misery of the participants’ hunger.

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If your only question is “Did it work?”, then the answer is a resounding yes. The results were immediate and dramatic. All four volunteers lost a considerable amount of weight – to the extent that they changed shape before our eyes. There was 20% less of Father Paul overall, and his diabetes went into remission. Rebecca lost nearly three stone. Yolande’s liver fat was reduced by a third. Four months on, all four had changed their eating habits and lost still more weight.

Against this overwhelmingly positive outcome, one had to weigh a note of caution from Dr Jonathan Valabhji, the NHS national clinical director for diabetes and obesity: even if it is shown to work and be safe, crash dieting might turn out to be too expensive for the health service because of the number of GP contact hours required. As this programme made abundantly clear, getting through nine weeks of 800 calories a day takes a huge amount of support.

Another eye-opening health programme followed: The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs (BBC One), fronted by Dr Chris van Tulleken, who questions why we are blindly medicating ourselves – and, in this series, our children – in spite of the known risks, and often without evidence that the drugs are even working. In his mission to “get Britain’s kids off the drugs they don’t need”, Van Tulleken has an appealingly dogged streak, and a good way with young people.

This week’s episode dealt primarily with teenagers and depression, an issue that dovetails with one of Van Tulleken’s prevailing preoccupations: the idea that drug company profits, rather than best practice, have driven the huge rise in prescription medication. In that sense it is a show more geared to confirming our prejudices than overturning them – who doesn’t think we’re over-medicating our children? – but its findings were no less shocking for that: of the 14 drugs commonly prescribed to adolescents for depression in the UK, only only one – Fluoxetine – has been shown to have any effect at all. If your outrage prescription is running low, top yourself up here.