Following The Latest Fad Diets
The internet is full of the latest tips, tricks, and fads to help everyone get that perfect body. In the case of most fad diets, they offer fast results and often wacky guidelines to follow. Remember the cabbage soup diet? What about the cayenne pepper detox drink? Or the grapefruit juice diet? All of these diets offer oddly restrictive “secrets” to help melt pounds and make the user thin.
Most of these diets have fallen out of fashion, although there are always others in the wings waiting to take their place. So what are these fad diets REALLY doing to your body? I mean, they can’t all be bad, can they?
In a word… Yes. Read on to learn more.
What Fad Diets Do To Your Body
(1) Dropping Water Weight And Dehydrating Your Body
Who wouldn’t want to lose 5 to 10 pounds in a week? How motivating to see the number on the scale drop so quickly! The problem with many fad diets can be found in their focus on tonics and detox drinks, and not enough on proper hydration. Let’s face it: when you shed lots of weight in the first week of your diet, what you are losing is water… not fat. This is often the goal of the creators of these fad diets: to highlight their “efficacy” and make people believe that they have discovered a miracle cure.
(2) Losing Nutrition Instead Of Fat
From carbs to calories, glutens to dairy, most fad diets focus on cutting something from your diet. In some cases, removing some foods can be a smart and healthy option. Fad diets, however, tend to focus on a one-size-fits-all, wholesale approach to cutting. Often times, this means cutting out valuable nutrients that your body needs to function. What is lost in the diet is balanced nutrition in favor of fad recipes.
(3) Loss Of Motivation, Instead Of Weight
Many of these restrictive diets, especially the hyper fad diets that include long “cleansing” periods, will leave the dieter feeling tired and lethargic. After all, what happens when you feel thirsty and hungry? You feel weak and unmotivated. Food and water act as fuel for the body, giving it energy to exercise. Too little nutrition and you are more likely to feel too tired for the gym, which is not the way to winning the weight loss game in the long run.
(4) The Only Thing Lighter Is Your Wallet
Many fad diets come with a string of accessories to help you “maximize” your efforts, like special vitamins or books and guides. That is one of the biggest warning signs when it comes to identifying a fad diet from a healthy lifestyle shift. The more the diet promises, the more you are willing to spend on supplements and ancillary purchases; before long, you end up buying a modern day snake oil.
(5) The Cycle Continues With Broken Hearts (Literally)
Just like the fad diets that inspire them, many users find that the weight they try to lose comes and goes. Rapid weight loss and then rapid weight gain may be more detrimental than not losing weight in the first place. A CNN article points to the damage that a fluctuating BMI can do to the heart muscle, particularly in women. The study followed its participants for over eleven years and determined that yo-yo dieting was associated with a 66% increased risk in coronary related deaths. That’s a fad no one wants to see continue.
Cooking Healthy Academy Can Move You Beyond The Fads
We understand that fad diets seem really alluring. Who doesn’t want to lose weight quickly? We know the pull of wanting to feel better about your body. The old adage rings true, however. If it seems too good to be true, well then it probably is. We would offer another addendum to this cliche: if it seems too weird to be true then it probably is as well. So often, slow and steady is the way to go in terms of weight loss and lifestyle changes. It seems like a much harder way to tackle weight issues, and in some cases it is. But like most things in life, the things that are worth doing take work.
You don’t have to do the work alone, though! Cooking Healthy Academy is a community built on helping our members motivate and empower each other, under the guidance of Maureen Wielansky, to make big changes. Do you want to move beyond the fads? Join us today, send us a message if you’d like to learn how.
