Dangers of Fad Diets

Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 6:36 am

Today, an estimated sixty-five percent of all American adults are obese or overweight. Obesity is known to be a precursor to many debilitating health conditions such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis, and gallbladder disease.

Close to a hundred million Americans go on a weight loss diet in any given year and up to ninety-five percent of them regain the weight they lose within five years. Worse, a third will gain back more weight than they lost, in danger of "yo-yoing" from one popular diet to another. The conventional approach to weight problems, focusing on fad weight loss diets or weight loss drugs, may leave you with just as much weight and the additional burden of ill health.

dangers of fad diets No doubt you have fallen for one or more of the weight loss diet schemes over the years, promising quick and painless weight loss, which are known as fad diets. Fad diets can be best described as a quick means of weight loss that are often only popular for a brief period of time. Many of these quick weight loss diet programs undermine your health, cause physical discomfort, flatulence, and ultimately lead to disappointment when you start regaining weight, shortly after losing it.

Quick weight loss or fat diet programs generally overstress one type of food. They contravene the fundamental principle of good nutrition - to remain healthy one must consume a balanced diet, which includes a variety of foods. Safe, healthy, and permanent weight reduction is what’s truly lost among the thousands of popular diet schemes.

Some of the weight loss diet schemes reign supreme briefly, only to fade out. While some wane from popularity due to being unproductive or unsafe, some simply lose the public's curiosity. Fad diets can range from methodologies as deeply entrenched as Atkins diet, the South Beach Diet, the Grapefruit diet, Cabbage Soup diet, the Rotation diet, Beverly Hills diet, Breatharian, Ornish Plan, Special K Challenge diet – the list goes on and on.

It needs to be understood that the weight loss claims made by advocates of these diets are not only fleeting but unhealthy as well. Diets like the cabbage soup diet and the grapefruit diet are going to, in the case of the cabbage soup diet, make you flatulent and, in both cases, have you only regain the weight immediately afterward.

Fad diets will often overemphasize a single kind of food or type of food (such as eliminating a certain food, or eating only certain combinations of foods) in conjunction with the basic idea that the body makes up the difference in energy by breaking down and utilizing some part of itself, essentially converting matter into energy. This self-cannibalism, or catabolism as it is referred, typically starts with breakdown of stored body fat.

Diets like these don’t take into account that people that are truly committed to weight loss are also working out several days a week, so, there would be a lack of calories needed to properly refuel the body. Basically, nutritional problems arise when a so-called “superfood” becomes the focal point of a diet.

The example diet program that falls into the superfood category is the cabbage soup diet. This one along with some other unadorned diets have originated supposedly from hospitals. Diets such as the cabbage soup diet have been allegedly used by patients the week before undergoing heart surgery. By the end of the week, after having only eaten cabbage soup and fruits and vegetables , one is supposed to lose anywhere between 10-17 pounds. Unfortunately, one cannot maintain such a restricted diet for any prolonged period without feeling the ill effects of such a poor diet, such as vitamin deficiencies and the toxic repercussions of cannibalized muscle tissue.

Furthermore, this tremendous weight loss cannot be maintained once normal eating patterns are resumed since water constitutes a large percentage of the weight being lost and, to make matters worse, these diets provide no plan on how to gradually and safely reduce calories without compromising your own health. No matter how great the food is, none should be treated as a panacea. All diets need to be balanced as best as possible so that no ill effects arise.