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Trendy Diets: Too Good to be True

Perhaps you heard about the raw food diet at lunch with your girlfriends last week. Or maybe the person in the next cubicle told you about how she lost six pounds in one week on the cabbage soup diet.

The list of fad diets is long — and creative! The alkaline diet, lunar diet, Master Cleanse, Sleeping Beauty, the Paleo diet, the Atkins diet, South Beach, grapefruit diet, and dozens more all come and go and create a significant buzz.

When you don’t get the nutrients you need, you can be moody, have headaches, become constipated, have diarrhea, or experience other side effects.

You might love to find a shortcut to losing weight, but fad diets are a poor idea for many reasons. Here’s why:

• Fad eating is difficult to maintain. Your life is probably complicated enough without following a rigid plan.
• Rapid weight loss is the wrong kind of loss. If you lose weight quickly, you’re losing muscle and water – not fat. You didn’t gain the weight overnight, so don’t expect to lose it quickly. Generally speaking, you should target a weight loss of one or two pounds a week.
• Rapid weight loss is temporary. Fad diets rarely lead to permanent weight lost. Slow, steady weight loss is more likely to last.
• Experiencing a fast weight loss can be bad for your heart.
• Losing more than three pounds a week after the first few weeks may increase your chances of developing gallstones.
• Many fad diets cheat your body of what it needs — and you’ll pay the price. Some diets don’t allow you to eat certain foods that you need for good, well-rounded nutrition. When you don’t get the nutrients you need, you can be moody, have headaches, become constipated, have diarrhea, or experience other side effects.
• Many fad diets often include eating too much of a particular food, which can be detrimental to your health. For instance, the cabbage soup diet includes too much sodium, and the Atkins diet has too much protein for your body.
• If you’re a mom, jumping on the latest craze and abandoning healthy eating practices probably isn’t what you want to teach your kids.

What About Weight Loss Medications Or Supplements?

Taking weight loss medications or supplements may seem like an easy way to shed the pounds. But do your homework, warns family physician Joseph Allen, MD.

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Source: Joseph Allen, MD, Premier Health Family Care of Vandalia; National Institutes of Health; American Heart Association