Friday, February 15, 2008

Popular Fad Diets

I wanted to start this blog on popular fad diets because I've noticed that people will try anything and most popular fad diets don't work.

Thats the reason they're called fad diets - people use them for a while and they may or may not see results and then they move on to the next thing. Not only are these fad diets ineffective, most of them are risky healthwise and controversial.

Most fad diets are based on the premise that you have to starve yourself in order to lose weight. There's a lot of don't eat this - eat that and some people just don't get to eat the foods they love. Well if you're going to lose weight then you have to make some sacrifices right?

Discipline plays a role in making any diet work...following a diet to the T will usually produce results. Problem is most of these diets, even if you follow them to the T will cause some other complication. Some of them are what I would term 'starvation diet' which is the wrong approach to losing weight. You do not need to starve yourself to lose weight.

Some of these popular fad diets gain popularity when some Hollywood star mentioned that it worked for them. Like the cabbage soup diet, which tv star Jaime Pressley credited for her losing her post pregnancy pounds and the maple syrup diet which Beyonce used to get in shape for her role in Dreamgirls.

Others are downright dangerous and controversial like the Kimkins diet which became a scandal after a woman posted fake pics on a website and lured overweight women into paying to access the membership. The diet seemed to work for some but caused various health issues in the long run until the truth was exposed.

The inspiration for this blog came from a recent popular fad diet called the 5 bite diet - it is said to be dangerous and works like a gastric bypass without the surgery. Gastric bypass surgery itself is very dangerous.

There are better ways to lose weight effectively without subjecting yourself to dangerous and short termed diets that don't work. That said, there are diets that do work very well as long as you have the discipline to stick to them.