Has anyone heard or used the "flexitarian diet"?

Lolzers @the Japanese semi-vegetarian diet (SVD), cited in the first link:

The SVD diet included daily intake of rice, vegetables, fruits, and occasional intake of fish, meat, and other animal-based foods. They also refrained from foods reported as risk factors for IBD like sweets, bread, dairy, and fast food

They make it sound so innocuous - "rice, vegetables, fruits". What they forgot to tell you that being a citizen of Japan in order to obtain the ingredients was practically mandatory:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877178/figure/F2/

Interesting all the same, but a westernised SVD version really needs to be devised and tested.

Not at our health food store... Sushi rice, soy sauce and rice vinegar is about your lot when it comes to Japanese cuisine in this country. Admittedly, might be able to order everything online though.

The diet calls itself 'semi' vegetarian, but it's more like 9/10ths vegetarian. Meat is only allowed once a fortnight and fish once a week - and even then, it was only half the usual amount, whatever that is, so no blow outs in a fast food joint :-/

There's just a lot of stuff I wouldn't know how to translate to western foods - like seaweed, beancurd, soyabeans, etc. I dunno, it'd be a bit like expecting a Japanese person to live off English ploughman's lunches, roast beef and potatoes, etc.