Best Reasons NOT to Start Doing That New Fad Diet

Diets are all over the place. Whether they’re about improving your nutrition, losing weight or simply boosting your wellness and wellbeing, going on a diet can be really bad for your health. Fad diets are the worst for this – you’ll recognise a fad diet because everyone will be going on about it for a short period of time, and then they will find that it’s unsustainable and will move onto the next thing.

 

Fad diets tend to make all kinds of impossible claims. They seem to set themselves up as some kind of ‘miracle’ and tend to say that the dieter will lose a staggering amount of weight in a very short space of time. There is often some kind of celebrity spokesperson who illustrates how effective the detox/starvation routine can be. They are often pictured in a tiny bikini, showing off a very slender body is if to say that any of us can look like that in just six weeks, when the reality is far from being the case. This celebrity will talk about how much her life has improved since going on the diet, and there will never be any mention of the subsequent weight gain (or how all her pictures for the shoot have been airbrushed).

 

Something else to bear in mind – fad diets are boring. When you’re counting out every calorie or every gram of fat, life can become pretty dull – and unfortunately you can become pretty dull too. The only thing worse than a boring diet is a boring dieter, droning on about the calorie content of things or how they’ve cut out certain food groups or that they are having their life changed by some kind of unsustainable milkshake diet.

 

Unfortunately, it’s also the case that any weight loss through a fad diet is likely to be regained, with a few more extra pounds to keep it company!

Categories: diet, Diets, fad, fad diet, Fad Diets, kind, life, reasons, weight

The Werewolf Diet: Nutritional Wellness for Team Jacob

By the looks of things, we’re not getting rid of the vampire/werewolf/zombie craze anytime soon. In fact, now it looks as though these other-worldly creatures are infiltrating your wellbeing, as the latest fad in nutritional wellness reveals something that any Team Jacob girl would go for: The Werewolf Diet.

 

Diet and wellness expert Heather Neal details, ‘The Werewolf Diet is based on the cycles of the moon. The ebb and flow; the waxing and waning. The phases of the moon and their effect on nature and the human body. Or would that be the werewolf body? The theory behind the diet is that just as the moon affects the tide of the ocean, it also affects the water in our bodies. Supposedly, when the moon is full, or at the beginning of a new phase, there’s a 24-hour gravitational effect that can influence whether you can lose weight. Hmm. Reportedly Madonna and Demi Moore are moon-diet followers, so it must be totally legit.’

 

Neal continues, ‘There’s not only one Werewolf Diet — or Moon Diet, as some are calling it — there are two. There’s the basic plan or the extended option. The second option is really just a longer version that entails a different diet for each phase of the moon…Let’s start with the basic plan. It’s a simple 24-hour liquid fast that occurs in sync with the full moon. Water, juice, and nothing else for a full day. Sounds mildly feasible if you’re not the kind of person who will eat their arm off after more than two hours of hunger. The claim is you can drop six pounds during those 24 hours. The diet attributes this weight loss to the body’s increased ability to process toxins during the full and new moon phases, thus the drinking of more fluids. Apparently, it’s important to start the diet the exact minute the full moon starts. No pressure.’

 

According to Neal, ‘As far as the extended plan goes, you’re supposed to eat less when the moon is waxing and avoid eating when the “moonlight shines” (aka after 6pm) when the moon is waning, in addition to fasting during the full and new moons. Detoxifying teas are an added bonus for the new moon fast. There doesn’t seem to be any additional claims or reports to enhanced or greater weight loss with this more complex version of the diet. Although, also hidden in the diet’s website is the warning that you shouldn’t follow this diet for more than six days. I’m still working out how you follow a full moon flow for only six days.’

 

But is there anything in this idea? ‘Maybe it’s just me, but I think it goes without saying that this one’s a little out there,’ says Neal. However, she adds, ‘I guess it’s not so entirely off the wall though, considering how many things actually are affected by the moon. Like sleep cycles and baby births. (People tend to sleep 20 minutes less on nights with a full moon, and moms everywhere know the supposed increased risk of going into labour on a full moon.)…I suppose the only way to find out would be to go on a juice fast for 24 hours during a random day of the week and follow it up with another fast during a full or new moon, then compare the weight loss. But I won’t be signing up for that experiment, thank you very much. I’d turn into a werewolf after missing my first meal…I think I’ll stick with the sun diet: only eat on days the sun rises.’

Categories: cycle, diet, fad, moon, moon diet, nbsp, nutritional wellness, team jacob, Weight Loss, werewolf, Werewolf Diet

The Overnight Diet: Could You Lose Weight While You Sleep?

While a few studies have noted there’s a link between sleep deprivation and weight gain, alongside other wellbeing concerns, you’d hardly be expected to thing that all you need to look like Kate Moss is a good night’s sleep. However, a buzzed-about new diet, “The Overnight Diet,” claims to help you lose two pounds as you sleep during the first day of the diet.

In a sense, maintaining a healthy sleep schedule does help support a healthy diet because, as it has been proven, a deficit of sleep can lead to increased feelings of hunger and overeating as a result. But does it really work the other way around? Sleep wellness expert Michael Breus, PhD, says, ‘It’s not so much that if you sleep, you will lose weight, but if you are sleep-deprived, meaning that you are not getting enough minutes of sleep or good quality sleep, your metabolism will not function properly.’

But maybe adding a diet aspect to this research could shift the balance. For the weight loss programme, you undertake a fast once a week in which you consume only homemade, protein-rich smoothies. Then you follow this with six days of a low-calorie, protein rich diet. According to the diet’s creator, Caroline Apovian, MD, the director of nutrition and weight management at Boston Medical Centre, ‘That first night, you go to sleep, you sleep your eight hours, you are down two pounds. If you continue to get enough sleep every night, you won’t get those hunger pangs. The hunger pangs come from lack of sleep, which induces the hunger hormone to get secreted from your gut.’

However, this promised two pounds will be water, and not fat. It’s true that water weight loss is an important step toward total weight loss – but it does make the “overnight” promise seem a bit less significant. David L. Katz MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP and director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Centre, commented, ‘I keep waiting for us to get tired of going after the new fad diet. But our appetite for these things is insatiable in the culture. The reason this can work in the short term is that it imposes rules. If you go from undisciplined eating, to any diet no matter what the rules are, chances are you’ll lose some weight. But it’s not a realistic way to live.’

The Overnight Diet: Could You Lose Weight While You Sleep?

Categories: fad, Fasting, Overnight Diet

The Truth About What Fad Diets Really Do To Your Health

The hardest thing about losing weight is the length of time that it takes. It can be so daunting to set out on a new diet, and to know that at the rate of one or two pounds per week (the healthy recommended amount of weight loss), it will take months or even years to reach your goal weight. People understandably want to see results quickly, especially when they are doing something as enormously difficult as changing their eating habits. This often leads people to try faddy diets, which promise that they will see results in a short space of time, but the problem is that, often, these types of diets are not good for long-term wellness.

One of the reasons that fad diets don’t work, long term, is that they are not sustainable. They often focus on eating one type of food in isolation, or cutting huge areas of food out of the diet altogether. In order to be sustainable, diets have to be something that you can maintain after the first flush of weight loss is over. As well as being unrealistic, however, these diets may also be damaging to your wellbeing – if not downright dangerous.

Fad diets are unhealthy for a number of reasons, and yet magazine editors continue to promote them.

One of the main reasons that they are unhappy is because they restrict certain food groups. This means that the diet is not balanced, and this can cause all kinds of nutrient deficiencies. Fad diets can also make you feel really run down and lacking in energy, which affects your ability to exercise as well as to enjoy your life.

The huge reductions in calorie intake which can be part of the diet can also slow down your metabolism, making it harder rather than easier to lose weight. When you do finally give up on the restrictive diet, as so often happens, the period of restrictive fasting can make you eat twice as much when the diet comes to an end, piling on more weight than you started with.

The Truth About What Fad Diets Really Do To Your Health

Categories: diet, Diets, fad, Fad Diets, Food, Long term, reasons, unhealthy, weight, Weight Loss