Fad Dieting Disasters

This is the latest, greatest, weight-loss diet, guaranteed to melt away fat and cellulite and give you the body you’ve always wanted in less time than it takes to tie your shoes…

Ok, now back to reality! You can’t pick up a magazine or watch television these days without being bombarded by quick-fix fad dieting ads like these. But if you look carefully at the small print, there is always a disclaimer, such as “Results not typical” or “Used in conjunction with healthy eating and exercise.”

Because truthfully, no one can lose weight and get healthy using only a fad diet; there has to be a balance of healthful nutrition and exercise in order to lose weight and keep it off for good. When you’re done with this lesson, you’ll be an expert on fad diets, what they do and don’t do for your body, and how they can affect your physical and emotional health.

Here’s How to Identify a Fad Diet:

It sounds too good to be true.
It makes outlandish promises.
It “guarantees” extreme weight loss in a short period of time.
It excludes one or more foods.
It overemphasizes one or more foods.
It categorizes foods into “good” and “bad” lists.
It severely restricts calories to fewer than 1,200 a day.
It claims you can “trick” your body in some way.

Most fads force the body to lose weight in one of three ways: through elimination of one or more food groups, through severe calorie restriction, or through the use of stimulant pills or drinks.

Many fads eliminate one or more types of foods, such as fruit, meat, carbohydrates, or fats. To me, these are the worst types of fads. They drill it into your brain that certain foods are “forbidden,” at the same time offering no information about how to balance your nutrition properly.

Over the long term, elimination diets can cause vitamin and mineral deficiency, nausea, dizziness, weakness, constipation, hair loss, and irritability. Moreover, they set you up for absolute failure once you’re done with the diet; your craving and desire for those “forbidden” foods usually causes you to binge on them when you go back to normal eating, causing weight gain and emotional distress.

The most popular type of elimination diet these days is the permanently low-carbohydrate diet. Many of my clients have tried this type of diet, not only because of dramatic “weight” loss during the first week, but also because they were able to eat their vice foods such as butter, sour cream, egg yolks, and fatty meats without feeling guilty. Still, low-carb dieters often lose up to 10 pounds in the first week without really trying. But what did they lose? Was it fat? No. Mostly it was water.

During the first week of a carb-restrictive diet, your body converts the carbohydrates and glycogen, which is stored energy, left in your system into glucose, or blood sugar, the energy used to run your metabolism, brain, and other vital systems.

Since glycogen is stored in the muscles and liver with three to four times its weight in water, when you break down and use a pound of glycogen, you’ll also eliminate 3 to 4 pounds of water through the urine. Many people perceive this as weight loss, but it’s simply metabolic dehydration. Once the glycogen is gone, you’ll feel sluggish, tired, distracted, and irritable as your body tries to use fat as its primary fuel source, putting a huge strain on your kidneys.

Your brain demands glucose to function, but since glucose comes from carbohydrates—which you’re not eating—your brain gets crabby. In addition to feeling rotten and overloading your kidneys, “weight” loss slows dramatically and sometimes even stops after the first two weeks. There is no more excess water to excrete, and your body is now being forced to use body fat as fuel, which would be great if you could actually keep it up! But realistically, no one can. Human beings need carbohydrates to function properly—period.

Here is the ugly underbelly of this sort of diet that no one ever tells you about: Once you go off the diet and return to eating carbs, your body experiences a huge rebound. Your cells, starved for glucose, gorge themselves, and hence take on water to help digest the glucose for energy. Severe bloating often occurs, which many depressed dieters perceive as weight gain.

This causes feelings of failure and a cavalier attitude toward eating; dieters think, this diet didn’t work either, so who cares if I eat a whole pizza? I’m doomed anyhow. In addition, the sudden influx of glucose can cause headaches, stomach aches, and intestinal distress.

All in all, low-carb diets and elimination diets are for the birds! Human beings were designed to eat a variety of foods from all five food groups. Elimination of one or more of these groups goes against the balance of nature.

Many other fad diets rely on severe caloric restriction to force the body to lose weight, some promoting a daily intake of fewer than 1,000 calories a day! That’s just plain starvation, and if that’s your bag, sign up for Survivor! At least you’ll have a shot at a million dollars in the end.

The nickname for these diets—“crash diets”—is amazingly appropriate because that is exactly what happens to your metabolism—it crashes and burns! If your body is not receiving adequate fuel, it goes into a starvation mode, hoarding any calories taken in and storing them as body fat. Your body becomes resistant and unwilling to release those stored calories for use as fuel for fear of going through another long stretch of starvation, so in order to create glucose to fuel the body and brain, the body turns to protein.

Protein is much easier to break down than fat, and as you already know, your body is holding on to that fat for dear life, since it has no idea how long you’re going to be “starving.” So guess where it gets the protein to make the glucose? Your muscles! You’ll literally cannibalize your muscle tissues for use as fuel instead of fat if you’re not taking in enough calories.

If you continue a pattern of calorie-restrictive diets or stay on one of these plans for an extended period of time, your body eventually resets its basal metabolic rate to a lower level than it was at before. It adapts, becomes more efficient, and functions day to day on fewer calories than it needed previously, making it even more difficult for you to lose weight!

Calorie-restrictive diets can also perpetuate a habit of bingeing. Once dieters are done with the program, they eat anything and everything they were denied while on the diet, and then some. Your body wants the calories physically as much as you want them mentally, but since your body takes a bit longer to understand that you’re done “starving,” it continues to hoard calories, storing them as more body fat. Therefore, a repeated pattern of calorie-restrictive diets will in fact make you fatter rather than skinnier!

To lose weight, you do have to limit your caloric intake, but in a healthy way. You have to eat enough calories to fuel your metabolism during the day and enable you to function, but you should be eating few enough to encourage your body to use fat weight as fuel.

To make things even worse, for every pound of lean tissue you lose through crash dieting, you burn 30–50 fewer calories per day! This will drastically lower your metabolism.

On the Fast Track to Fat Loss program we will teach you how to eat properly, exercise, and learn everything you need to succeed long term. Trust me, fad diet do more harm then good over the long term. They stress your body physically, causing your weight to yo-yo and
wreaking havoc on your metabolism. Nothing beats solid, sensible nutrition and regular exercise when it comes to losing weight and changing your life forever! We look forward to helping you – every step of the way.