Fad Diets: Why Are They Bad?
It 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. 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. Fad diets can make you sick. As they rarely follow the established recommendations for good health, for instance including the wrong balance of fats and carbohydrates, they put you at risk of a number of problems such as diabetes or heart disease. The seller may say that the diet is only supposed to be followed for a shrot term, but what if you don’t lose enough in that time? Do you just keep going? If you do go off the diet, the chances are that you will quickly gain back the weight you lost, and have an even harder time losing it next time.
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.
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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