Why Fad Diets Don’t Work
Fad diets: trendy weight-loss “solutions” that promote rapid or easy weight loss. While that’s a broad definition, you’ve most likely heard of many of these diets, especially if you’ve tried or are currently trying to lose weight. The apple cider vinegar diet, the grapefruit diet, the Master Cleanse…the list goes on.
While these diets are touted as the latest and greatest way to lose weight, the vast majority of them are more detrimental to your body’s health than they are conducive to weight loss.
How to Identify a Fad Diet
It promises a “quick fix” or “fast results.” A healthy weight-loss plan shouldn’t promise to help you lose more than one or two pounds a week.
It’s a temporary plan with no reference to after the diet “ends.” Healthy weight loss and weight maintenance come from healthy lifestyle changes. While those changes may evolve over time, they are intended to be lifelong, sustainable strategies, not followed for a month and abandoned.
It drastically cuts your daily caloric intake. Fad diets that essentially rely on starvation may seem promising from anecdotal evidence. However, the weight endorsers claim they lost in the first few weeks isn’t fat—it’s water weight, and it’ll come right back after the diet ends. And that’s not even mentioning just how much damage you can do to your body by depriving it of the energy it needs.
It removes an essential food group or nutrient from your diet, or it promotes a “super food” as the key to weight loss. A balanced diet helps keep your body healthy, and there’s no one food or combination of foods that will magically “unlock” your body’s ability to lose weight.
It promotes a supplement, shake, bar, or the like as the “key” to weight loss. This is just an attempt to get you to spend more money. These “solutions” usually rely on the same method of water weight loss, usually via laxatives or something similar.
It seems too good to be true—most likely because it is.
Why Fad Diets Fail
The various rules fad diets rely on may differ, but they all have one thing in common: they’re not sustainable. While you may actually lose weight in the first few weeks of a new “program,” the large majority of participants gain their weight back after the fad diet ends.
There’s a reason these fad diets promise to help you drop a seemingly impossible amount of weight in just a few weeks—they’re not meant to be lifelong strategies for healthy eating. Even if you were to extend fad diet eating habits past the end of the proposed program, you likely wouldn’t be able to continue it for long. Fad diets are so restrictive that they’re often counterproductive, leading people to binge to make up for the lack of calories or nutrients.
The goal of fad diets isn’t to help you form healthy habits or promote a lifestyle change; it’s to create something trendy and make money by preying on insecurities. Fad diets are a “quick fix” to a problem that can’t be quickly fixed. Obesity doesn’t happen overnight—it can’t be solved overnight, either.
Healthy, lasting weight loss is a result of a balanced diet, regular exercise, and an improved relationship with food. However, it’s true that these lifestyle changes don’t work for everyone, and, in those cases, a bariatric procedure may be necessary to help patients achieve the results they desire.
If you’ve been unsuccessful with losing weight through traditional means of diet and exercise, the Lap-Band® gastric banding system may help. To learn more about the weight-loss solutions offered by Lap-Band Indiana, visit our website.