Eat and run

So you think you know all about diet and exercise? These days we are bombarded with information and advice about healthy eating and taking exercise, but after a while much of this can become conflicting or confusing. As we head into the Christmas binge season, find out how good you are at separating the facts from the fiction with this true or false quiz.

Crash diets can make you gain weight.

TRUE Strange as it seems, this can indeed happen, particularly if you are constantly on one diet or another or began dieting at a very early age.

Drastic diets cause your brain to send out messages telling your body to store fat because there's a famine! Your metabolism then slows down and it becomes more and more difficult to maintain weight loss, and you may actually gain. Think about it: the financial survival of slimming clubs and manufacturers of dieting products depends on dieters returning again and again. With crash dieting you lose essential water and muscle as well as fat, so even if your bathroom scales indicate that you are lighter, this does not necessarily mean you are losing fat.