How to Avoid Fad Diets
How to Avoid Fad Diets
In a modern, fast paced world we live today, more and more people are fast becoming conscious about their bodies, thanks to the celebrity-body craze. The situation is not helped by the obsessive media attention accorded to the subject.
While some people genuinely want to lose weight for health purposes, majority go with the flow. It’s thus easy to see why many have fallen for fad diets.
When you’ve made a decision to lose weight, for whatever reasons, it can be very tempting to try some extreme measures. You’ll feel as though you couldn’t go another day ‘overweight‘. This kind of thinking is the perfect set up for buying into sham dieting schemes. There are a number of pointers that can warn you off fad diets.
Number one red flag
The easiest way to tell a fad diet is one with unrealistic promises. For instance, if a diet promises that you will ‘lose 50 pounds in 33 days’, consider that a fad diet. Diets that promise results within weeks are not practicable.
While losing 50 pounds in four weeks might be true in theory, sticking to the highly restrictive rules is not practical, even for a limited time. Trying to do so will cause serious adverse effects. Avoid such diets like a plague.
Fad diets make extensive use of testimonies
It’s true that you can lose weight on a fad diet. In any case, there are lots of people who can swear by a fad diet, hence the testimonies. However, what the testimonies will not reveal is that the weight loss was temporary.
A fad diet causes rapid loss of fluids from the body, causing weight loss. This creates a deficiency of fluids and other nutrients, and you are likely to eat more food because of a deficiency. The weight will build up again and this causes a sense of failure and depression.
Very low calorie count
This is typical of most fad diets. A very low calorie intake causes fatigue, general weakness and a slowed metabolism. In any case, a low calorie diet is more harmful to your health. Diets that require you to take no more than 1200 and 1400 calories a day for a woman and man respectively are nutritionally deficient. Normal calorie intake should be above the 2000 mark for a healthy body.
Extreme changes
Another of the common signs of fad diets is drastic changes. Typically, fad diets totally eliminate some foods. Again this can be more dangerous than the results it purports to achieve. If a diet is imposing drastic changes to the foods you’ve been consuming, you are better off avoiding it altogether.
No long term solution
Often, fad diets are specified to a few months, within which you will notice the purported changes. There are no clear indications for future course of action once the period has elapsed. For many fad diets, you are supposed get off the program once the defined time has passed.
One important pointer about fad diets is their virtual exclusion of exercise. There is no sustainable way to lose weight through diet only. You need a healthy balance of food intake and exercise to lose weight successfully. A diet plan that excludes exercise is a fad diet.
