They come and go, diets – they just get called different things......

There have been many variations on the Eat a Very Restricted Range of Foods Diet, eg. cabbage soup and only cabbage soup throughout the day. Because you will get heartily sick of any one thing, even Belgian chocolate ice cream, and certainly not eat as many calories in total as provided by a varied diet, your overall calorie intake will be reduced and you will lose weight.

There are quite a few variations to the Restrict the Number of Times You Eat Diet, eg. The Warrior Diet. You will again not have your usual fuel intake, even if you stuff yourself on the reduced opportunities allowed.

There are the really popular takes on the Emphasise One Food Group Over Another Diet, which come around regularly in various guises. The granddaddy of the protein pushers to date has been The Atkins Diet, which men liked because they thought it was a license to pig-out on meaty stuff. We sometimes get fat prioritiser diets, sometimes based around faddy French bistro food: this type of thing has snob appeal. We often get carbohydrate disciples, often because they can appeal to women, who often don't like masses of meat anyway. There's been quite a spate of this kind of stuff in recent times, largely based around the concept of a Glycemic Index. Your grandmother understood this kind of stuff when she tried to send her kids off on cold mornings with porridge inside them. In fact, trying to build some long-acting carbohydrate into a healthy diet is as old as the history of eating and is largely instinctive; the catch, again, is doing this to the neglect of other food groups.

There are many incarnations of the Combinations of Foods Diet, eg. take any two from the lists provided, two or three times a day. It's a slightly more complicated evolution of the above diets, with the huge advantage that it can be almost endlessly rehashed because of the virtually unlimited number of combinations available. Again, there's no magic, just a calorie ceiling.

There are many competitors vying for your attention with the Buy It in a Box Diet. The majority of these attempts to create high profit pre-packaged diets rely on the dressing-up of very overpriced dried milk powder, frequently with a smattering of industrial spray-on vitamins to create the right impression. It's a great way to help reduce the milk powder surplus.

There are church halls and sports centres in every corner of the country hosting the Public Humiliation Diet. There is a tremendous incentive to starve yourself for at least half the week when you know, as your time comes round again to get on those scales, it's either high fives, or utter embarrassment. Always remember to take your watch off first and take any pennies out of your pockets – it makes such a difference.

- In reality there are only three equations which matter and which stand true in the face of all this dieting nonsense: if you eat more calories than your body uses, you will put on weight; if you eat fewer calories than your body uses, you will lose weight; if you eat more or less the same number of calories as your body uses, your weight will stay about the same. No-one is an exception to these simple truths. When it comes to dieting, just about everything else is bullshit – and vastly profitable bullshit, too.

What is more variable and evolving is how dieting is viewed. There's been a marked drift - from issues of overweight being a bit of a problem, on towards overweight people being a disgrace. There is a strong sense of overweight individuals becoming the “other”, the sloppy and the unacceptable. The fatness bullies are at work and “Go on a diet!” is their war cry.

Whilst academics and nutritionalists increasingly agree that dieting as traditionally pursued can be quite counter-productive, the wall of cultural noise to the contrary still shuts out reason.

So the overweight go on diets, repeatedly, and, remarkably often, continue to increase in weight. And the non-overweight stare wistfully at the glamorous dieting game they are sold by a relentless slimming industry through a largely unquestioning media. The go-on-a-diet messages are plastered everywhere they watch, listen and read. So they have a go – everyone's at it, after all. Quite a few of them end up with destroyed eating rhythms and perhaps also putting weight on.

It needs to be said time and again - in a context and language that people can readily understand - that dieting is, of itself, a major problem.

This section is devoted to an ongoing commentary on the slimming market and evolving dieting trends.