If you are after a short-time, restrictive fix, then a fad diet may be for you. If you are looking for a healthy, consistent weight-loss that will ultimately take longer to achieve but has much more benefits and will not compromise your health, only positively affect it in the long-run, then a healthy, balanced diet – where no foods are off the cards – is for you.
There have been some crazy diets advertised throughout the years, such as ‘the baby food diet’ which offers fully grown adults jar after jar of mushy food as a replacement for breakfast and lunch, or the more recent and popular 5:2 diet which allows you to eat as you normally would for five days and then drastically restrict your calorie intake to just 500 mere calories a day for the remaining two days. Juice Plus is another corporation that prides itself on supplementation as a means of diet, and the costs are pretty large to maintain this diet. They pride themselves on meal replacements with shakes and bars, fruit and vegetables being the main source of the diet and juice-based tablets/capsules that are to be consumed multiple times daily. Then there’s CICO which is more of a metabolic principle than a diet. Basically you can eat whatever you want as long as you work it off. It’s all about watching the calories you take in versus the ones you burn. How healthy it is, is really up to the dieter and their choice of foods.
Why are we opting for such extreme measures?
Researching all of these ‘creative’ and new ways to diet (and for corporations behind these diets to make a lot of money from it) I just can’t help but think ‘what happened to the good, non-harmful, old-fashioned way of weight-loss which entails eating a healthy, balanced diet and eating in moderation? Why are so many people now looking to go to such extremes, and spend a lot of money in the process, on some of these diets when it can be so simple?
We now live in an era where people aren’t patient and want results, and quick. These diets promise fast results and on paper they look too good to be true, and in most cases that’s because they are. You may lose weight quickly in the beginning, but maintaining that is made extremely hard, if not impossible. If the diet you are following makes some foods completely off-limits and has resulted in a massive amount of weight loss in a short space of time. These are unmaintainable and cannot be kept up long-time without some detrimental effects to your health, and even general mood.
Avoid the fad diet.
If weight loss is the aim, then research more into a diet that is right and suited to you, and doesn’t restrict you from any foods that you like to eat or that promotes any extremes within the diet for weight loss – that is the difference between a healthy diet and spotting a fad diet from a mile away – they are everywhere and it is so easy to be sucked into the amazing results that they promote, but what they don’t tell you is the cost of that diet or the restrictions you will have to face if it were to work, or that the effects of it are merely short-term and not the long-term that you are after.
