14 DAY TRIAL // They often say that, for a diet to work, it needs to be healthy and not perceived as too complex. They also say that, for a diet to work, the dieter must have full awareness of the problem at hand and to understand that action must be taken to solve it. Tatiana Yumasheva knows that the secret behind a diet’s success or failure lies in the reward or punishment it entails, as she says for the Daily Mail.
According to Yumasheva, who is Boris Yeltsin’s daughter and a friend of Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, she and her friends have devised the perfect approach to the problem of losing weight: fear of punishment. A diet will certainly not fail if the slimmer believes the punishment s/he gets for falling off the wagon is severe or humiliating enough. The same goes for the reward, which can be impressive, thus motivating the dieter to stick with the regime until they get the results they want.
“First, there must be a group of people losing weight. Friends, acquaintances at work, relatives, it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re not doing this alone,” Yumasheva says. “The next element, the most important – it is the key thing – is the penalty. The punishment must be truly terrible. In fact, this is the essence of my method. If you do not lose weight by a certain date, then the punishment must happen to you,” she adds.
Tatiana herself claims to have lost 22 pounds sticking by this method. Fear of punishment is a great incentive, she insists, and was the only thing that would work for her. “There must be no way out. Try it. It works. […] If I failed to shed ten kilos (22lbs), I had to wear only a long evening dress to work – and talk to everyone only in English. To me this would be real humiliation, and I clearly couldn’t allow it. The puppet show on TV was already depicting me as a monster and each new rumor about me was worse than the last one. If I had to endure this punishment, everyone would say Yeltsin’s daughter had gone crazy,” Yumasheva goes on to say.
She and her group of Kremlin dieters would meet regularly every Friday for two months, which was the limit time to lose the extra weight. However, under the agreement, meetings would go on for another 4 months, as all dieters had to keep the weight off for at least half a year. Yumasheva calls it the Kremlin Punishment Diet method; nutritionists would clearly say it’s more a question of taking control and keeping it that’s key to her sustainable weight loss.