I've started my day with an old-fashioned diet inclusion - a glass of water with lemon. I squeezed out the juice of half an average lemon and mixed it with cold water - then down the hatch before anything else!

Lemon-and-water is advice I've seen around for years. It's often listed on diet plans supposedly as an early morning cleanser or detox. The diets tell you that the lemon can "magically melt away unwanted fat" - something we all love to hear. In all honesty, I suspect it's just a low-calorie stomach filler that stops you stuffing your face with a croissant or bacon burger.

The basis of the dreaded Lemon Detox Diet?

My hunch is that lemon-and-water was the inspiration for the wildy-ridiculous Lemon Detox Diet that's been doing the rounds for a couple of years now. It has you believing that you'll drop three dress sizes in a week and detoxify your liver just by sipping this tin of lemon syrup mixed up with water.

Anyway, does the lemon-and-water thing each morning actually work? Who knows? As far as I can tell, no-one has done the research but here's one promising fact.

Lemon's acidity can lower the GI (Glycaemic Index) of whatever else you eat immediately afterwards so any bread or cereal you eat for breakfast may take longer to be digested and absorbed which helps keep you satisfied for longer. Or so the theory goes.

It's not doing any harm - both water and lemon juice have zero kilojoules (calories) and they naturally hydrate your body after a night's sleep. But strip away the fat? Who are you kidding?

My little experiment

I'm starting a mini-experiment of my own. For the next five days, I'm going to drink a glass as soon as I get up and record my feelings of hunger and fullness for the day. Will I feel fuller in the morning and so eat less? (A good thing as I need to lose weight. I've put on a bit after a lazy holiday recently in the Greek islands and Turkey - all that lovely food!)

Will the lemon-and-water do anything to make me return to my usual weight? Let's see.

It's now one hour since I drank the first glass and I must say I'm not ravenously hungry as yet but just getting to that peckish stage. About a 3 on my Hunger-Fullness log which I use as a way of rating how hungry I feel. Follow my posts for the next week and see how I fare .....