How many times of late have you bumped into an acquaintance looking suspiciously hollow-cheeked where once they carried a few extra pounds and thought to yourself, ‘Aha, Ozempic!’
The injectable drug, which acts as an appetite suppressant, has become the buzzword in weight loss, used by everyone from A-listers and politicians to friends and colleagues.
But Ozempic’s crown could soon be snatched by a product promising to be the next holy grail for weight loss: SiPore.
The drinkable gel (no stabbing yourself with a needle for this one) contains silica, which is said to slow down the digestive process to make you feel fuller longer. Still in the clinical trial phase, it is expected to be available by 2025.
But what if you’re needle-phobic and can’t wait two years for the weird-sounding silica?
Despite the success of new weight-loss jab Ozempic, Gen Z social media users have got behind a much older – and humbler – magic bullet for dieters: cottage cheese
Well, there is an unlikely third magic bullet for dieters that social media can’t seem to get enough of right now: cottage cheese.
Runny yet chewy. Gritty yet slimy. Fresh yet putrid. Cottage cheese may be one of the foulest foods ever invented, and it was the slimming bane of my teenage years, when I ate tubs of the stuff.
But, after years in the diet wilderness, thanks to newer, trendier diets, it’s back in vogue.
Supermarkets are reporting a boom in sales — and it’s largely down to Generation Z, who seem oddly obsessed with the stuff their mothers and grandmothers forced down when trying to shift flab decades ago.
Cottage cheese-related videos on TikTok have clocked up more than 450 million views, including recipes for cakes, ice cream and savoury dips.
The fashion for paleo and ketogenic diets, which are high protein and low carb — made popular by fitness guru Joe Wicks — makes it the perfect choice.
It’s considered a ‘complete protein’ since it contains all nine essential amino acids the body cannot make on its own. It’s also high in calcium and B vitamins.
What a shame then that it looks exactly like cellulite, the very thing most people are trying to avoid when they eat it.
When I was a child, every adult woman in my life seemed to be on the Scarsdale diet, a draconian calorie-restrictive two-week plan where dieters could lose up to a stone in weight, with cottage cheese playing a key role.
Little wonder that by the time I was a teenager at my girls’ school in the early 1980s, cottage cheese was a staple in our lunchboxes.
Cottage cheese-related videos on TikTok, including recipes for cakes, ice cream and savoury dips, have been viewed more than 450 million times
Obsessed with being able to zip up our drainpipe jeans at the weekend, we would diet during the week in preparation.
We thought eating cottage cheese and Ryvita at lunchtime (with a radish on top if we were feeling especially fancy) was the height of sophistication.
The little yoghurt-like cartons of the stuff were made by a company called Eden Vale. The good news was that they were just 99 calories.
The bad news was that, after three hours in a lunchbox inside a school locker, a faint vomit-like whiff would fill the room when you opened the pot.
Then you’d have to drain away the murky warm liquid whey that had collected on top of the cheese. Yum!
We’d dish spoonfuls of it onto our crispbreads, trying hard not to retch with every mouthful.
The taste lingered, too, since it had a nasty habit of coating the roof of your mouth and tongue for many hours afterwards.
There must have been prisoners eating tastier food than we were back then. But if it meant dropping a few pounds and looking as good in our skintight jeans as Shirlie and Dee C Lee in the Wham! videos, then it was worth suffering for.
By the time I hit my 20s, cottage cheese had fallen out of favour; powdered tomato soup was the way to go when I wanted to drop a bit of weight for a holiday.
With a list of ingredients that sounded more like a chemistry experiment, the meal replacement packets were clearly not actual food. But I still drank litres of it all the same.
Considering cottage cheese to be ‘one of the foulest foods ever invented’ for its strange texture and distinctive smell, Claudia Connell just can’t get back on board with this particular diet trend
Tomato was the only flavour that was vaguely palatable, as the vegetables in the other dried soups stayed rock hard, like little lumps of grit.
It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I started to follow popular diet plans. WeightWatchers was a huge success — at first.
I loved the camaraderie of attending classes, and I hit my target in just three months. Although the 50-something me now laughs heartily at the fact that I was only 10st and size 12 when I joined — a ‘fat’ weight and size I’d give anything to be today.
Twenty years on, I still remember that I was allocated 13 points a day; a tin of tomatoes on toast was only three points, so became a daily staple.
Jelly in its undissolved state had no points at all, meaning I spent many weeks eating almost nothing but tomatoes and jelly.
I celebrated hitting 8st 8lb by going out . . . a lot. This, of course, meant eating and drinking, and by the time I reached 40, I was nudging 12st.
This time, I jumped on the low carb bandwagon. I bought the Atkins diet book and ate more meat than the average puma.
Bacon and sausage for breakfast, chicken for lunch and more meat for dinner. No potatoes.
You were allowed cheese, but if you couldn’t have bread or crackers, then what was the point? You were allowed cream, but if you couldn’t have desserts, how would you eat it?
I didn’t become one of the women who squirted the canned stuff directly into their mouths . . . but I thought about it.
As a teenager keen to lose weight, Claudia ate yoghurt-like cartons of cottage cheese, which contained only 99 calories (stock image)
Atkins didn’t work for me. While friends were dropping weight, I didn’t lose a pound and felt light-headed most of the time.
Then came the Dukan diet, which began with a two-week ‘attack plan’ of no dairy, sugar or carbs.
Forced to eat little else but chicken, prawns and, aargh, low-fat cottage cheese, I shed a measly two pounds, and suffered the worst migraines of my life.
I had some success with the one-meal-a-day plan (aka OMAD). Initially, I lost a stone from eating one satisfying and balanced meal at lunchtime.
But then my one meal started to get ever more epic, containing more calories than I’d usually eat over the course of three meals. Surprise, surprise, the weight went back on.
The thing is that yo-yo dieters like me all know, deep down, that there’s no wonder drug or magic pill, no elixir of thin that works in the long term except sensible eating.
Yet, daftly, we always chase the next miracle solution. The next fad that other (thinner) people seem to swear by.
This is why I tried the weight loss jab Saxenda last year. Containing the diabetes drug liraglutide, it works in the same way as semaglutide, which goes by the brand names of Ozempic and Wegovy.
Injected daily, instead of weekly, it is said to halt cravings to the extent that the user sometimes forgets to eat. Now, that really would be a miracle.
I took my first dose and woke up the next day with the thought of breakfast, or any kind of food, turning my stomach.
As schoolgirls, Claudia and her friends thought eating cottage cheese and Ryvita at lunchtime was the height of sophistication, despite the ‘faint vomit-like whiff’ their pots gave off
By the second day, I’d barely forced down a slice of toast and an apple, but had horrible stomach pains and cramps.
On the third day, I headed out to meet a friend and — out of nowhere — spontaneously vomited in the street in front of horrified onlookers.
I took to my bed and decided that was the end of Saxenda for me. I’ll do a lot of things to be thin, but puking in front of my neighbours isn’t one of them.
Having read the details about SiPore, I have to say that doesn’t hold much appeal either — there’s got to be better ways of feeling full than swallowing microscopic doses of silica.
Which, of course, brings us back to the dreaded cottage cheese. To make it, enzymes or live cultures of bacteria are added to milk, separating out the curds (the milk solids, fats and proteins) from the whey (the liquid).
For all its shortcomings, however, cottage cheese is a ‘complete protein’ since it contains all nine essential amino acids the body cannot make on its own. It’s also high in calcium and B vitamins
Being a fairly simple process, many people are now making their own at home — you can do this using white vinegar, or buy rennet, a mixture of enzymes, online —attempting to jazz things up with different flavourings and posting the results on social media.
Good for them. I’ll pass though. To me, it will always look like bleached frogspawn and taste like milk that’s been left in the blazing sun for a week.
Besides, my dreams of getting into size 10 drainpipes have been replaced with ones of buttoning up a size 14 blazer.
So, yes, a little portion of the lumpy stuff may only be 99 calories — but so is a banana, and guess which one I’ll be going for?
