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Fad Diets: What are they?
As opposed to healthy means of controlling weight, which promote healthful lifestyle changes that support long term results, fad diets focus on quick weight loss and use short term results to gain support and followers. A good principle with which to approach any diet or exercise plan you are considering is to ask whether you see yourself eating that way for the rest of your life. If the answer is not an unequivocal "yes," then consider it a fad diet!
Critically analyze the information and ads you see about diets by looking for the following:
1. Do the results people are claiming to have sound miraculous? They are probably not true!
IF CLAIMS SOUND TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, THEY PROBABLY ARE. Here are some examples:
"Lose 30 Pounds in Just 30 Days." As a guideline, the faster you lose weight, the more likely you are to gain it back.
"John Doe Lost 84 Pounds in Six Weeks." Don't be misled by someone else's weight-loss claims.
Fad diets rarely have any permanent effect. called "crash" diets often send dieters into a cycle of quick weight loss followed by a "rebound" weight gain once normal eating resumes. Only 5 percent of dieters actually keep weight off in the long run.
2. Where’s the variety?
Fad diets often rely on limited food selection (think the Cabbage soup diet or the Grapefruit diet). This leads to a definiciency in nutrients because you can't get all the vitamins and minerals your body needs from any one food source. Also, fad diets tend to increase desire for fats, proteins, or food not eating
3. Rely on testimonials as evidence
Testimonials ignore individual differences, use celebrities (Oprah Winfrey), name their diets after famous cities (Beverly Hills or South Beach diet), and pay lay spokespersons.
4. Cure-alls
The marketers of fad diets often claim that they will work for everyone, and they ignore body type, personality, and weight.
5. No long term behaviors are set in place
To lose weight safely and keep it off requires long-term changes in daily eating and exercise habits. Many experts recommend a goal of losing about a pound a week. A modest reduction of 500 calories per day will achieve this goal, since a total reduction of 3,500 calories would be reched over the course of a week.
6. Ignore or attack dieticians, physicians, and scientific approaches that may discredit their claims.
People want to believe that in this age of scientific innovations and medical knowledge, miraculous and effortless weight-loss methods exist. "Eat All You Want and Still Lose Weight!" or "Melt Fat Away While You Sleep!" These diets often promote quick weight loss through means that merely result in losing body water, glycogen stores, and lean muscle mass
Examples of Fad Diets
The Zone
Reduce carbohydrate consumption to 40%
Increase protein to 30% of calories
Maintain fat intake at 30%
Encourages the notion that that carbs cause excess insulin output in the body which leads to increased fat storage.
It's not that insulin resistance causes obesity, but obesity that brings on insulin resistance, sometimes leading to diabetes.
The Atkins Diet
Promotes a high protein diet and initially eliminates carbohydrates entirely from the diet.
Thsi diet is hard on the liver as it is forced to produce glucose (the main energy source for body that is normally supplied by carbs in the diet). Results in protein tissue loss because your body is using proteins from tissue to create glucose. It also causes loss of essential minerals such as potassium in the urine. Weight is regained when a normal diet is resumed as protein tissue is rebuilt and glucose stores are built up.
Weight Watchers
Utilizes a point system to account for food, forcing you to categorize foods as "good" or bad." Gradually reduces caloric intake to levels as low as 1000 calories a day, which is too low and you cannot obtain all nutrients if this is maintained too long.
Beverly Hills Diet
This particular diet is based on the false idea that food gets stuck in the body, and that a mix of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats together confuses the body's digestive system and triggers weight gain.
Presents the notion that the presence of one type of digestive enzyme destroys the effect of another (a protein-digesting enzyme, for example, destroys the effects of a carbohydrate-digesting enzyme).
Advocates separating the three main types of foods at meals to prevent poor digestion and weight gain.
With this simple theory, the author has reinvented the human digestion system.
Another nail in the coffin of this plan is that it discredits physical fitness as a healthy component of weight loss by saying, "The only reason exercise helps reduce weight is because the person exercising is too busy exercising to eat."
Results in an inadequate intake of protein and fat, and the nutrients found in the foods containing them, such as zinc, iron, vitamin B-12, calcium and essential fatty acids.
Try to use these principles to create your own fad diet statement to see how easy it is for anyone to make a particular eating plan seem safe, sound, and effective. Here are some common features of fad diet ads that you can start with:
• easy • effortless • guaranteed • miraculous • magical • breakthrough • new discovery • mysterious • exotic • secret • exclusive • ancient