People with list fetishes can get off on the new TV Asahi variety show, "Japan's Best 100" (Sunday, 6:56 p.m.), which each week runs down the Top 100 products, services or ideas related to a given topic. The premiere show covered "all you can eat" restaurants throughout Japan. Perhaps as a kind of rebuttal (or antidote), tonight's show is about dieting methods.
Given the size of the diet industry in Japan and the fact that 60 percent of Japanese women believe they are overweight, 100 is probably just a fraction of the available methods. In any case, among the more popular ways of losing weight and trimming centimeters is the famous konnyaku diet. Konnyaku is a relatively flavorless, calorie-free gelatinous food made from boiled plants. If that's not ascetic enough for you, the program also discusses various forms of fasting.
The guests run the gamut, so to speak. At the high end are the famously enhanced Kano sisters, who make most of their money shilling for a certain diet-cosmetics company. At the other end is Osaka comedian Hanako Yamada, whose short, shapeless frame would seem to indicate that she has little interest in dieting, though, apparently, she's tried quite a few methods to no avail.