Characteristics of Fad Diets
Preying on desperate dieters, creators of fad diets may try and coax you into eating nothing but cabbage soup for weeks on end with rickety promises of weight loss, peace of mind and superior health. These diets can be difficult to follow and may pose serious health consequences, such as vitamin deficiency and disease. In 2007, Marketdata Enterprises estimated that the diet industry was generating about $55 billion dollars annually, which can be attributed to the 72 million dieters in America.
Your body requires a well-rounded diet for energy, function, tissue repair, immunity and maintenance. Seeming to disregard this, the creators of fad diets encourage you to ban or exalt a particular food or food group, maintaining that certain foods are bad and should never be eaten, while others have newly discovered, magical fat-burning powers. A diet plan requiring you to forgo balanced meals in favor of a single food -- or concoction of tree syrup, lemon juice and cayenne pepper -- will leave you bereft of enough whole grains, dairy, vegetables, fruit and protein-rich foods and may cause you to dread meal time.
Too Good to Be True
Fad diets propagate claims that promise maximum weight loss with minimal effort in a short amount of time. These assertions can be very attractive to cyclic dieters who are frustrated and looking for a quick fix, but losing 30 pounds in 30 days is not recommended. You may lose weight initially, but this is often regained as soon as the regimen is over because you are not shown how to eat a balanced diet. According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, rapid weight loss can result in loss of water, muscle and bone mass, while your intention may have been to get rid of fat.
Fad diets often fault genetics, hormone imbalances or improper cleansing function for unwanted weight gain instead of the likely relation to excessive intake of calories or insufficient levels of physical activity. Other usual scapegoats are carbohydrates and fat, as if their consumption can cause imbalances in the body and restricting them will restore your body's balance. Advertisements for these diets often attribute any weight loss to non-evidenced based tactics instead of the fact that they are often extremely low in calories, considering calorie reduction produces weight loss.
Not Backed by Experts
Fad diets are not backed by a large body of evidence and rarely garner support from the scientific community. Instead, their far-reaching conclusions may be drawn from a single study and offered up as substantiation. There is also the looming possibility of undocumented side effects that may be unfavorable to health and longevity. For example, the claim that your blood type comes with a specifically tailored diet that calls for the omission or consumption of certain foods is not backed by scientific evidence, according to New York University’s Langone Medical Center.
A healthy diet is one that is low in added sugar, cholesterol and saturated fat, and stresses correct portion sizes of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat or fat-free dairy and lean protein. In order to lose weight, you must burn more calories than you consume. There are 3,500 calories in a pound, so a decrease of 250 to 500 calories per day will result in weight losses of about 1/2 to 1 pound per week, which is recommended by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
- Emax Health: U.S. Weight Loss Market To Reach 58 Billion in 2007
- U.S. Department of Agriculture: Food Groups
- Office of Dietary Supplements: Dietary Supplement Fact Sheets
- Cleveland Clinic: Fad Diets
- University of Maryland: Weight Control and Diet
- Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Staying Away From Fad Diets
- University of Illinois at Chicago: Fad Diets and Food Trends
- New York University: The Blood Type Diet
- Weight-control Information Network: Weight Loss and Nutrition Myths
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