Fad Diets: Do they work?
It is not surprising that many people wonder why fad diets are bad when they seem to get results. You will find many sites on the internet claiming significant weight loss in just a few days. That type of weight loss is always temporary. It is usually 90% water which will be put straight back on as soon as your body rehydrates, which it must do if you are not going to suffer severe health problems or die.
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.
What’s wrong with fad diets
1. If a diet promises dramatic weight loss, it usually works by eliminating some specific type of food from your diet, sometimes even saying you can eat all you want of other foods, but just not these. This kind of diet leads to unbalanced eating, which can cause severe nutritional deficiencies over just a few weeks, even if you take supplements. Sticking to this kind of diet, even if it does cause you to lose weight at first, is definitely doing more harm then good over the long run.
2. Restricting the type of food like this often produces very boring meals, as you have little flexibility in what you cook. This can lead you to start craving the forbidden foods, even if only because you know you’re not supposed to eat them. Then when you break your diet, you feel guilty, and think it is your own fault for failing, when really you just need a better diet.
3. Most fad diets do not follow recommendations of the American Heart Association and similar bodies for fat levels in the diet. Often the diet will recommend high fat foods and low carbs which if taken long term, could result in heart disease. The promoters may tell you that the diet is only intended to be followed for a short time. But you probably will not reach your goal weight in that time, and then what? You either continue with a plan that is not good for your health, or stop and probably gain back what you lost.
4. If you follow a fad diet exactly, it will cause you to miss out on the variety of foods your body. That’s right, your body is designed to function best when eating many different kinds of food, and not to live on just one or two small food groups.
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.
Whatever the publicity materials may say, these diets will not help you in the long term. The best way to sustain weight loss is to eat a varied and healthy diet, do not overeat, exercise regularly and avoid fad diets.