Very low calorie diets should not be used.

I think that VLCD should not be used because the commercial basis for these diets makes it necessary to undermine the faith of obese patients in conventional diets. This attitude is reinforced, for commercial reasons, by counsellors who are neither as independent nor as expert as the company suggests. The net effect is that obese people are put to additional expense to buy a product that they do not need, and their confidence in their ability to control their own diet is unnecessarily destroyed.