The world Internet has been taken over today by the Morning Banana Diet. On social networks, blogs and forums everybody is talking about it and some people are saying its just a scam.
Basically all you need to do is eat a banana for breakfast, have a glass of water and you lose weight even if you eat lots of other foods during the day.
The Telegraph has this to say:
The soaring popularity of the banana has resulted in sales rising by as much as 70 per cent in the past week in some supermarkets, prompting prices to increase and importers to purchase more of the fruit.
“It’s the first time bananas have been quite so scarce,” a spokesman for Dole Japan Company, the largest banana importer in the country, told Japanese media.The trend for eating bananas recently gathered pace following a string of television programmes proclaiming the success of the banana diet.
As a result, sales of bananas at Life Corp, a major supermarket chain, reportedly increased 70 per cent last week while a department store in central Osaka also reported August sales up 50 per cent from last year and regularly selling out by early afternoon.
The reason I’m writing about this here is that the whole Morning Banana Diet thing seems to have been started by a forum post on the Internet and now everybody is signing up to forums and mailing lists to get the diet tips. What do you think will happen to them when they fail to lose weight by eating bananas? That’s right, the mailing lists and forums can send them offers for real diets and make money from them.
Update from the people behind the website:
The diet was originally posted in a Mixi.jp forum in July 2006. Mixi foums about the diet have tens of thousands of members. The Watanabes personal history and background is well known in the Japanese media and was nicely summarized by Time. They’ve published two books, which have been marketed in the standard fashion in bookstores.
MorningBanana.com was put up in July 2008 to discuss the diet in English and has a privacy policy that says we will not use e-mail addresses in forum signups for any purpose. The recent publicity broadsided us and was not part of any scheme, but rather was because of a news story about a banana shortage that Time picked up on that we had no control over.
Image credit bananas at flickr
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Sounds like crap. This does not really make any sense although doing a Google Blog Search you can see that it is a really popular idea.
People are always looking for a shortcut to losing weight and if lots of people are talking about it they think it will be true
It never ceases to amaze me what people can convince themselves to believe. However, hats off to the marketers who are capitalizing on this opportunity.
Here’s some more on it: http://morningbanana.com
lol Lets face it, it cant work any worse than the other hundred million diets out there that the naive and gullible keep buying eh?
I totally agree with Tyler. I wonder if we’ll ever get out of this “quick fix” mentality. Who ever invented it was a genius but has made the entire world population semi-stupid
it’s no surprise that diets are one of the biggest money spinners in the world, and it’s easy to see why, “eat fruit, drink water” – it’s hardly a revelation is it yet it makes the ones who know how to market it very well off indeed
if you can devise a diet that involves blogging, you’ll be quids in
Wait a minute..
You mean I have eaten 28 bananas in the last 2 weeks and I am not going to loose any weight?
Doh. Back to the Big Mac diet.
Informative.
I think if you do the banana in the morning with water then eat sensibly the rest of the day, it has the potential of working. However, I dont believe you can eat pizza and chips the rest of the day and lose weight. Ive eaten a banana with water in the morning then eaten pretty healthy the rest of the day (Im a college student, so its usually rice and beans or an egg sandwich on wheat bread, sometimes a sandwich from Subway) and while I havent dropped ten pounds yet, I feel well throughout the day and my weight has gone down some. Now this doesnt really follow what the diet says, but its worked for me so Ill keep tryin it.
This diet is mostly common sense that if it hadn’t been wrapped up in a “diet” fad people may have continued to ignore. The average person already knows everything that the diet tells you and knows that it is what hey “should” be doing. Eating breakfast, drinking water, actually eating lunch and snack (you should eat every 4 hours to keep your energy up) and not eating dinner 4 hours before sleeping. And lets not forget a good nights rest. Its all common sense. Of course toss in a banana for fiber to help push all the bad stuff your other food leaves behind is a great tip too, oh and the diet also discourages pop,chips,donuts,ice cream and other junk food.
Yes, it is a fad diet. But does it deserve to be called such? Does it not have merit? Does it not have all the “lazy” dieters (such as myself) getting off they’re behinds and doing “something”? Although the diet says that you can eat “whatever you want”, most people on a diet will try to eat healthy and if they mess up and eat a pizza, they won’t feel too bad and quit too early. Also (for emotional support) some web sites suggest that you keep a journal (I keep a blogger), this way you will have a support network of people all doing the same thing, seeing they’re results and knowing you can succeed if only you don’t give in too early. Which i personally believe is the number one killer of diets, giving up too early…
Personally, i think its great
Anyways, thats my opinion!
Regards,
Angie
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