Fad Diets: Do they work?
Friday, August 26th, 2011It shouldn’t be surprising that, with all the positive press they get, it can be easy to get caught up in the hype and start thinking that fad diets really work. The trouble is, although they do work for the first week or two, this is really only water weight loss and you soon gain it all back when your body rehydrates. Trying to achieve permanent fat loss from these kinds of diets is doomed to failure, and can even cause serious health complications.
In the best case, a fad diet will prove to be a reasonable nutrition plan, that you could have gotten for free from your doctor, that has just been hyped up to make lots of money for the inventor. In the worst case, it might be an entirely unstable crash diet, that no-one could healthily keep up for more then a couple of days. In either case, the real point of the diet is not to help you lose weight, but to help the “inventor” look fashionable and get rich.
The bad of fad diets
1. Diets that promise quick and easy weight loss are usually based on eating more of one food type and none of another. These do not give the benefits that you would get from a balanced diet. They may suggest you take supplements but many supplements are not absorbed by the body unless they are taken along with the foods that the diet has banned. After a few weeks, if you stick to it that long, you may begin to develop nutritional deficiencies.
2. This kind of food-type restriction can also be very boring. After the novelty wears off, you are left having little choice in what you eat, and will start craving the forbidden foods, if only because you can’t have them! This may make you feel guilty, thinking it is your fault for failing to follow the diet, when really you need a better diet plan.
3. Fad diets rarely follow guidelines for good health. Sometimes they might excuse this by saying that you are only supposed to follow the diet for a short time, or by claiming that established scientific studies are wrong. The truth is, following these kinds of extreme diets can put you at risk of a variety of illnesses, such as diabetes, heart disease, or even cancer. and then when you stop the diet, you’ll gain back all the weight you lost very quickly, and have to start all over again.
4. Many fad diets do not help you to incorporate enough servings of fruits and vegetables in your weight loss program, or give you the variety of foods that your body needs.
5. Any diet that promises you will lose weight fast is at best giving you a temporary solution that will only work in the short term. To achieve a permanently lower weight, you need to make permanent changes in your diet and lifestyle. Following fashionable diet trends will just lead you in a rapid cycle of large weight loss followed by equally large weight gain afterwards, which is even worse for your health than staying overweight the whole time would be.
In most cases you get what you pay for, but not when it comes to dieting. All of these high-profile fad diets are little more then scams, designed to take your money without caring if you actually manage to lose weight. If you are really serious about getting in shape, I’m afraid you have no choice but to start eating healthily and exercising regularly - fad dieting just won’t do!
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