Many college girls who have faced the Freshman Fifteen begin dieting to slim down, but Japanese young women have taken the weight obsession to a new level with the Morning Banana Diet. The Morning Banana Diet, which involves eating bananas only for breakfast, has become such a craze in Japan that it is difficult to obtain bananas in the country in the afternoon.

According to TIME:

Hiromi Ohtaki of Dole Japan, a leading banana importer, sees the boom in sales as largely due to Morning Banana Diet — bananas don't normally sell well during summer, and this year's summer has been especially hot. Still, over the past 4 months, demand has driven Dole Japan to increase its banana imports by upward of 25%, and even then supplies could not keep pace with demand. "In a way this is an emergency," explains Ohtaki. "We've been importing bananas from the Philippines for the past 40 years, but this is the first time something like this happened to us, and we find it very difficult to cope."

The Morning Banana Diet regime is simple: A banana (or as many as you want) and room temperature water for breakfast; eat anything you like for lunch and dinner (by 8 p.m.). A three o'clock snack is okay, but no desserts after meals, and you have to go to bed before midnight. Sumiko Watanabe, a pharmacist in Osaka designed this stress-free diet to help increase the metabolism of her husband Hitoshi Watanabe, who had been rather overweight. In due course, Mr. Watanabe lost 37 pounds and introduced the diet on mixi, one of Japan's largest social networking services. Morning Banana Diet books published since March have sold over 730,000 copies, and some have been translated and published in South Korea and Taiwan.

The rather basic diet seems a bit silly really. One might even venture to say, “This shit is bananas.” At the end of the day, adding fruit to one’s diet is a common sense and simple way to lose weight though, and that’s appealing.