A Headcorn accountant has become a weight loss guru, after an experiment to try 10 diets in 50 days made him a bestselling author.

Andy Leeks, 35, set himself the task of losing 25lbs by varying his eating regime each week, from calorie counting to cabbage soup and even baby food.

Mr Leeks, who lives in Sharps Field, said: “I’m one of those guys who struggle to lose weight and I’ve spent 10 years as a yo-yo dieter, getting excited when I start a new one and it works and then getting bored and frustrated when the weight goes back on.

“I thought if I changed diet every few days I would keep that initial enthusiasm going for longer - but it does a lot to your body.”

The hardest, he says, was the juice diet.

“Having to drink sludge was not fun, especially when my family were sitting down to wholesome meals and I had my Shrek juice, as my daughter called it,” he said.

But the raw food diet had the greatest consequences - leaving him hospitalised and claiming he was malnourished.

Video: Reporter Graham Stothard hears how most of Andy's diets had a slim chance of success

“I couldn’t get on with the raw food diet, and ended up getting quite ill on that one. I got some strange looks on the baby food one, especially when I went out to grab lunch, or a pouch, at Starbucks.”

The dad-of-two also reported some side-effects on the cabbage soup diet, with bad breath and wind getting bad reviews from wife Emma and daughters Charlotte, five, and Sophie, one.

He started out at 16 stone but despite shedding more than 30lbs in the 50 days - around 15% of his body weight - he doesn’t recommend his method.

Instead he has concluded that the only way to remain at a healthy weight is to follow the NHS’s healthy eating advice, and his advice now appears on the authority’s website.

He said: “I came to the conclusion that diets aren’t the answer. The truth is a lot of diets don’t address the pyschological issues around eating.

"It is all about changing your lifestyle. In that respect the NHS was the best for me because it has so much good advice about things like portion sizes and no food is off limits.”

So far the book has sold hundreds of copies, reached the number one spot on Amazon for biographies, and number 38 in the overall Kindle charts.

It has also featured on Australian TV and the Yahoo health pages, which get around 35 million hits per day.

Minimize Me: 10 Diets to Lose 25lbs in 50 Days is available from www.amazon.co.uk for £1.99.

The diets Andy tried

5:2 diet - you eat normally for five days a week and fast on the other two days

Special K diet - replacing two meals a day with a bowl of cereal

NHS weight loss - a plan tailored around a balanced diet

Juice fast - consuming only fruit and vegetable juices

Atkins - a low-carb, high-protein diet

Raw food diet - sticking to uncooked fruits, veggies, seeds and nuts

Baby food diet - replacing two meals with pureed baby food

Calorie counting - sticking to a daily calorie allowance

Grapefruit diet - a low calorie, low carbohydrate, diet with grapefruit consumed three times daily

Cabbage soup diet - a week long diet based on lots of soup, fruit and veg

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