Mar 09 2011
The Birthday Present and the CSIRO diet

For the household manager, having to decide every day what to cook for the family, and then doing the shopping to make sure you’ve got the ingredients, and then actually cooking, is a drag (or so I’m told by those who would know).

So my colleague Paul’s present to his wife Lesley seems like a pretty good one.

Paul undertook to cook dinner – every night – for 2 months!

(Mind you, I suspect that Lesley has cooked dinner – every night – for the previous 30 years)

What’s more, each night would be a different creation – working systematically through the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet Book One and Book Two page by page. This is a pretty big ask for someone whose previous speciality was Tomato on Toast.

Apparently the experiment, now some weeks in, has been going very well. A Masterchef is born!

The CSIRO Total Well Being Diet is a high protein, low carbohydrate diet.

This is based on research showing that a high protein diet was more effective than a high carbohydrate diet for weight loss, and for improvement in blood lipids, and appeared to have lower drop-out rates.

The CSIRO suggest it is especially suitable for women.

(it worries me a little bit that a diet suggesting we should eat more red meat was sponsored by Meat and Livestock Australia.

Unfortunately, studies done by the CSIRO suggest that although you can lose weight on any diet, long term adherence is poor.

Here is some examples of the high protein and high carbohydrate diets.