Going Bananas Over The Morning Banana Diet

The morning banana diet plan was developed by Hitoshi Watanabe, a preventive medicine practitioner in Tokyo, and his pharmacist wife, Sumiko. When opera singer Kumiko Mori announced to the public that she lost 15 pounds just by following the said diet plan, Japanese consumers storm their way to the grocery stores and started filling their kitchens with stocks of bananas.  

The Morning Banana Diet is a very simple plan. All you have to do is to eat any amount of banana during breakfast and drink room-temperature water. Then, you can eat whatever you like for lunch, dinner, and snacks, as long as you don't eat after 8 p.m. The only restrictions: No desserts after meals and the only beverage you may take with meals is room-temperature water. And the nice thing about this diet plan is that "no exercise" is required. Of course, you can exercise if you want but the diet plan never requires it. Wow!

I am not a nutritionist or a medical science practitioner but I really have doubts with this diet plan. What is so special with bananas that Japanese are going bananas? There are different versions of explanations on how bananas work to promote weight loss. One theory explains bananas have a special kind of enzymes that speed up digestion causing rapid weight loss. Another theory talks about a so-called resistant starch, a type of fiber that is supposed to promote fullness and increase fat burning. Resistant starch is found naturally in carbohydrate foods such as potatoes, grains, green bananas and beans - but you have to eat them cold in order for it to resist digestion in the small intestines (where most digestion occur) and in order for it to pass directly to the large bowel, thus fewer calories will be absorbed by our body. But if you think of it, bananas and other fruits are always part of the zillions and zillions of diet plans that came out in this planet but it never created similar craze like that of the "Morning Banana Diet".

Another confusing element of this plan is you can eat anything for lunch and dinner... and mind you, no exercise required.  Pure common sense tells us that in order to lose weight, you need to be physically active and control calories.And to stay healthy you should choose healthy foods. Right?

Anyway, the best way to find out if this diet plan really works is to try it myself... By the way, I think one of the requirements of the Morning Banana Diet is that you should be an opera singer...