New Fad Diets

The newsflash is that these diets don’t offer long-term success, and they are usually not very balanced nutritionally.  People are often willing to try any type that promises weight loss because they want to look or feel better or wear a smaller dress size. Companies that promote fad diets take advantage of people’s hopes and dreams. This appeals to the person who prefers the quick fix of a fad diet instead of making the effort to lose weight through long-term changes in their eating and exercise habits.

You would be surprised at the number of diets that you might actually consider to be healthy diets that are actually classified as fad diets by the American Medical Association. These included controlled carbohydrate diets such as Dr Atkin’s New Diet Revolution, the Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet and Sugar Busters. Also villainous are high carbohydrate low fat diets such as The Pritikin Principle and The Good Carbohydrate Revolution. Controlled portion sizes, as recommended in the Volumetrics Weight Control Plan are considered to be a form of food deprivation.  Food combining is also a diet scam and is the diet recommended in Fit for Life and Suzanne Somers’ Somersizing.  Liquid Diets such as Slim-Fast and herbal diet pills such as Slim-Fast and Dexatrim Natural are also considered to be components of fad dieting.

Fad diets become popular because some of them do work for a short time. A good example of this is the Cabbage Soup Diet, which is actually a food deprivation diet that is not nutritionally balanced. The same thing goes for a coffee and grapefruit diet, which has the additional component of removing water from the body that can result in an initial weight loss.  These diets restrict the number of calories you take in so of course you will lose weight. Of course most people are unable to keep this up as most fad diets involve too much food deprivation or force the dieter to consume the same food over and over again.  Many modern fad diets also insist that people skip meals, which is a bad idea as many studies show that muscle replaces fat only when several small meals are eaten in a day. Many modern fad diets also do not have specific recommendations for an exercise program to go with them, which is no way to lose weight.

To make matters even worse, people who do use modern fad diets usually end up gaining back any weight that they lost plus some. This is called yo-yo dieting and is a vicious unhealthy cycle that should be avoided at all costs.