When dieting, your body is going through a process of deprivation. You are reducing calories as well as sustenance, forcing the body to start eating itself to maintain.
This reaction, of course, burns off weight as the body then consumes fat cells and muscle for energy.
In this process, your diet should work like full coverage on a car insurance policy for your vehicle, providing your body a guiding path towards safe weight loss even though you’re not eating as much as you used to. Losing weight might even score you discounts from your insurance providers.
Unfortunately, fad diets can have the opposite effect, sending people into unhealthy conditions by not providing a balanced reduction of caloric and nutrient intake.
Instead, such programs focus on techniques or ideas that result in quick, but many times harmful, weight loss. Worse, once people go off these programs, the weight comes back and frequently increases. Four diet fads in particular are problematic.
The Atkins Fad
- Approach: Book guideline, self-imposed
- Focus: protien-oriented, removes carbohydrates
- Risk: poor balanced nutrition mix potentially causing health problems
The Atkins diet fad breaks the rule of a balanced, nutritional intake. The premise of the diet plan involves eating primarily meat and protein.
Yes, a diet follower can lose weight on the program, mainly due to consuming less food and mostly by eating mass protein rather than carbohydrates and processed sugars.
However, many a user has found himself (men tend to like Atkins for some carnivorous reason) with gout as a result. This was just one of the many symptoms that occur with an imbalanced diet, missing fiber and vegetables.
Urg, Me Caveman
- Approach: Book guideline, self-imposed
- Focus: protien-oriented, removes carbohydrates
- Risk: poor balanced nutrition mix potentially causing health problems
A variation of the Atkins approach, the Caveman diet fad also attracts the super physical and male mentalities by creating an eating program mainly focused on meat and vegetables. The problem is, it’s nowhere close to the truth.
Cavemen predominantly fed on nuts, fruit, roots, and some meat when they were lucky enough to catch prey. Cavemen also died very quickly compared to modern lifespans due in part to a very imbalanced nutritional eating practice.
What physical prowess they did have was due to constant foraging and fighting to survive. We’re not quite in the same environment anymore, so nutritional imbalances will have more effect on us over time.
Surgery
- Approach: Drastic invasive surgery, required a medical professional
- Focus: Physical fat removal or constriction of the stomach
- Risk: High risk of surgical infection which could kill
Considered an extreme form of dieting, weight reduction surgery should only be considered for the severely obese. Even then, each case should be carefully considered, coming to the conclusion that exercise and proper eating will not result in any healthy outcomes at all.
Gastric bypass being the most common, weight surgery involves either constricting the ability to consume or removal of fat already deposited.
Both surgery types have high risks due to surgical entry and infection. Further, both don’t change behavior. Once that fat is gone, people still eat like before, eventually gaining the weight back with new fat cells.
Gastric bypass also avoids thinking since the body is constricted, not the mind. Once the constriction is removed, again behavior can take over with old habits, resulting in expensive diet failure.
Liquid Diets and Magic Pills
- Approach: Package instructions, self-imposed
- Focus: Artificial products eaten instead of real food
- Risk: does not promote conscious lifestyle change, weight comes back later on
Liquid diets and diet pills are decades old and both rely on artificial means for weight loss. Liquid diets use a pre-mixed protein drink to replace food at meal time.
Diet pills use a chemical ingredient to suppress hunger and stop eating as much. Both work as mental crutches since the person then doesn’t need to think about reducing portions or exercising.
As a result, when the dieter goes off the program, the weight comes back. However, these products make money; they are easy to follow and require far less work or deprivation than actual exercise and thinking about food portions.
In comparison, successful dieting programs involve both a conscious effort to eat less and an ongoing regimen to physical exercise. Both sustain higher metabolism and body strength which utilize food being eaten rather than letting it add to fat cells around the waist and body areas.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
