Almost everywhere you turn, fad diets are appearing. They often deliver results, but at what cost? Is there a healthier but still effective option?
You’re joining your friend for lunch. She looks great. She’s shed the extra twenty pounds that she’s been carrying since college, and she’s dressed in a slinky black outfit that makes you a bit envious. When you question her about it, she tells you she’s been on the Atkins diet. She proceeds to recount how she ate a pile of bacon for breakfast, and some pork rinds for a midmorning snack, and you feel your eyes widen in shock when she orders a double cheeseburger off the menu. Is this really a smart diet?
“Are you really going to eat that?” You stare in awe at the size of the two monster hamburger patties. She quickly peels the bread off her burger, discarding it on the side of her plate.
“Sure,” She quips. “I can eat all the meat I want, cooked anyway I want.”
With all the fad diets circling around, it’s important to evaluate a diet before signing on. Is it really a smart diet? Sure, your friend looks amazing, but can it really be healthy to eat a pound of bacon and greasy burger meat every day? It doesn’t sound like a smart diet. The fact is that your body needs carbohydrates for energy, and people on the Atkins diet have reported fatigue and even experienced high blood pressure.
The same is true of low fat diets. While you may drop weight fairly easily by limiting your fat grams, it’s not really a smart diet. Your body actually needs some fats. These fat-free foods are often loaded with extra sugar to make them taste better.
There are literally too many current fad diets to list. Most of them include loading up on a particular type of food while depriving yourself of other foods. In the case of diets like Atkins diet, you are not allowed to eat carbohydrates. What you aren’t being told is that this is not a smart diet. Not only does your body need carbohydrates, it also shifts into carbohydrate starvation mode when you finally splurge on one, storing it as fat. Your body doesn’t know when it will get this type of fuel again.
Most physicians will tell you that a smart diet consists of a variety of different food groups. This means incorporating every group (even carbohydrates) in moderation.
The bottom line is that to lose weight, you simply have to cut calories. Although most people acknowledge this would be a smart diet, they often crave the immediate results that some not-so-smart diets offer.
Perhaps you’ve tried smart dieting. You’ve selected the proper foods, you’ve even developed an exercise plan, but you’re miserable. The weight isn’t coming off all that quickly, and quite frankly, you’re just starving. That’s the reason you binged on the pizza from Dominos last night, and it’s probably the reason you thought you deserved that extra helping of mashed potatoes. If only you could stick to a smart diet without feeling deprived.
The good news is that you can. I’m not talking about diet pills because you’re probably smart enough to know the dangers of those products. I’m talking about a vegetable… an all natural cactus-style plant literally changing the way people look at dieting. If you missed the specials on the Today show and 60 Minutes, let me fill you in. Hoodia Gordonii is a plant from the South African desert. Bushmen used it for centuries to ward off hunger. It tricks your body into thinking that you’ve eaten, limiting your consumption by up to 2000 calories a day.
Remember that a smart diet is one that limits calories, not one that tells you to avoid certain food groups entirely. With Hoodia Gordonii, you will have the extra willpower you need to commit to a smart diet. It’s easy when you’re not hungry. Best of all, this isn’t a drug. It’s a vegetable, so it’s healthy and safe. Say goodbye to fad diets and give something smart a try.
Martin Stanwyck
http://www.articlesbase.com/advice-articles/the-dangers-of-fad-dieting-41163.html
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
What are the dangers of fad dieting for weight loss?
What are the danger of fad dieting for weight loss?
.Weight regain, nutrition issues (depending on the diet), metabolism issues (if calorie intake was too low), and if supplements or pills are used some have potentially harmful side-effects.
To lose weight a person should eat right and exercise…no fad diets required or desired.
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former obese person
There is only one healthy way to lose weight. Diet and exercise.
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Fad dieting for weight loss is actually counter productive. It backfires upon the person dieting and makes him or her even fatter after the dieting period is over.
As soon as our body senses that it has too survive on a very calorie restricted eating plan for some time then it immediately goes in a starvation mode. This essential measure for long term survival and reproduction is programmed in our genes during the gradual evolution of our species.
Our body will start burning lean muscle tissue and water and utilize all the calories from food to get the necessary calories to
maintain our basal metabolic rate. Also, our body simultaneously tries to preserve as much fatty tissue as possible since fat is a reserve of energy. On the other hand, lean muscle tissue takes up eight times more calories for maintenance as compared to fatty tissue.
When we come out of a diet, our body will have already lost a lot of muscle tissue and water and stored more fat. Furthermore, it has acquired the tendency to store more fat in expectation of a future famine.
Thus any sort of restrictive dieting such as low calorie diet, low fat diet does not work in the long run.
A large number of University studies have confirmed this scientific fact.
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Published studies in medical journals.
Ezine Articles
http://spartanpowerfitnessformen.com/spartanpowerblog/
Hi Tazza, the truth is you can get in a lot of trouble with fad diets.
Basically there is no way around doing the simple things that work for weight loss (drink more water, move more – exercise, and eat healthier) but the marketing geniuses that sell you fad diets know that you don’t want to do the work so they market their products as lose weight quick.
Many of these fads can be dangerous as well as highly harmful. But here is some advice you can use.
Add one new healthy food periodically as you remove one unhealthy food . This can be done weekly, bi -weekly, monthly, or whatever is best for you. But, do it consistently until your food habits are healthy. You can replace unhealthy snack food with fruit smoothies and still satisfy yourself.
This method may work better than a diet because it is designed to use small changes which lead to life long health and weight loss.
Hope that helps. If there is anything more I can do for you just drop me a line.
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