What Is a Fad Diet?
A fad diet is any trendy diet that promises fast and easy weight loss. They are tempting and the advertisements for the fad diets lure you in with magnificent claims of weight loss. Just imagine -- no need to worry about counting calories or exercises, just follow the rules and the extra pounds fall right off. When something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't, so don't fall for the fad diet hype.How do you know you are looking at a fad diet? Some typical signs are:
- Claims of fast and easy weight loss
- Elimination of certain food groups or bad foods
- Includes dietary supplements impressively labeled as fat burners and metabolism boosters
- Tells you that foods need to be specifically combined for proper digestion to occur
- No need for exercise
- Highlights specific foods, such as grapefruit, maple syrup and lemonade or special soups
Some people develop a pattern called "yo-yoing" or weight-cycling, which is losing weight, gaining weight and losing it again and repeating this pattern for many years. Some experts believe that weight-cycling is unhealthy. There really isn't any evidence to support this idea, but obviously it isn't as effective as adopting a healthy balanced diet that you can follow for a lifetime.
Don't fall for the claims of extreme weight-loss "fat-burner" supplements. Take your eyes off the svelte woman (who just lost 30 pounds in a few weeks!) and look down at the bottom of the ad. You will see a disclaimer in tiny letters, "weight-loss not typical, your results may vary." That means people don't lose much weight.
Some diets require you to eliminate certain food groups with claims that we haven't evolved enough as a species to eat wheat, or beef and tomatoes doesn’t match your blood type. These are interesting theories, but have little evidence. Some people do need to eliminate certain foods due to allergies or metabolic disorders such as celiac disease, but most of us need to choose foods from all of the food groups every day.
A few fad diets require you to combine certain types of foods stating that your body can't digest carbs with proteins or fats. This is absurd. Your digestive system uses specific enzymes for digestion of different foods and they don't cancel each other out -- in fact, they all work quite nicely together.
Are Any Fad Diets Healthy? What About Low-Fat or Low-Carb Diets?
The Mediterranean diet, low-fat diets, and low-carb diets are the big kids on the dietary block and each has a fair amount of research backing some of their claims. In the short term, low-carb diets tend to result in more weight loss, but long-term results aren't well known since research studies rarely last more than one year.These fad diets have their good points. Mediterranean diets include lots of fruits, vegetables and healthy fats. Low-carb diets eliminate excess sugar and high fructose corn syrup that add empty calories and low-fat diets prohibit unhealthy saturated and trans-fats.
On the downside, following these diets means you run the risk of eliminating healthy nutrients such as complex carbohydrates, dietary fiber or essential fatty acids. They have strict rules that may make the diets easy to follow in the beginning but eventually the rules feel too restricting and you fall off the diet and go back to your old habits. These diets only work when you stay on them so that means you have to be on a diet the rest of your life to be successful. Seems like too much pressure to me.
