And what of the claim that tomatoes are a ‘fat-burning’ food? Turns out that’s just not true.
‘Tomatoes do not possess fat burning properties,’ says Matt.
‘Although they only provide around 20 calories per 100g, the calories gained from eating the tomato will still be greater than the body uses to digest them. This obviously means you will not be losing weight.’
And other experts agree with him.
‘Simply eating tomatoes will not cause you to lose weight or burn fat. No foods causes weight loss,’ explains nutritionist Jenny Tomei.
‘To lose weight you need to burn more calories than you consume. Exercise causes you to burn more calories, but ultimately you will likely have to decrease the amount of total calories that you eat.’
And nutritionist Karen Austin calls the claims ‘total rubbish.’
‘There is no such thing as a food that burns fat, only foods that are lower in calories, or foods that help to fill you up more,’ Karen tells us.
‘Obviously she will drop weight if she’s swapping high calorie snacks for tomatoes because they are lower in calories – it’s not rocket science is it it?
‘This diet is not sustainable and only encourages the public to believe that there is a quick fix.
‘Losing weight that quickly will just be muscle loss and water – not fat. Repeating a pattern of drastic weight loss will damage the metabolism making future weight loss even harder if not impossible.’
For Remi, the tomato diet wasn’t a long-term plan and she stressed that eating in that way was not ‘sustainable’ for long periods of time, but that it was to see how her body reacts to the food over a week.
She also supplemented her diet with regular exercise and workouts.
Adding more tomatoes to an already balanced diet isn’t likely to cause you any harm, and tomatoes actually have lots of benefits.
But those benefits do not include fat-burning. So don’t be fooled into thinking this diet could be a shortcut to losing weight. It just doesn’t work like that.
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