What Is A Fad Diet? A fad diet can be described as any diet that is of the moment, usually being promoted heavily via a book or in the magazine media.
Invariably they claim outstanding results for very little effort and show amazing before and after pictures to substantiate their claims.
There are also the newer fad diets as well that offer a more pseudo scientific approach to losing weight, trouble is none of the science really stands up to scrutiny, indeed these claims are false and can actually be harmful to your health as well as failing to meet any sustainable weight loss.
How Do Fad diets Work? Fad diets are usually centered on a higher consumption of fats or proteins while stressing to go easy on or, in some cases, completely cut out carbohydrates.
It is the low intake of carbohydrates that brings about rapid weight loss.
In fact, this rapid loss is the loss of water that glycogen has stored.
With loss of glycogen, the large amount of water stored in it is also lost and body weight drops.
The fats are still there and as the fad diets are given up, the body regains its proportion of water lost.
Weight is put back on as fast as it was lost.
Normally, carbohydrates remain the source of energy for work.
With fad diets, the carbohydrates are no longer there so the body starts using the stored fat, breaking it down.
This may appear beneficial but in fact it is not.
In the absence of carbohydrates, fats cannot be completely oxidized and put to work.
Hence, the body feels fatigued and weak.
In addition, the ketone molecules resulting from the fat-breakdown accumulate in the blood and are excreted out via urine, causing dehydration.
Are Fad Diets Harmful To Health? Not all are although most place stresses on your body that are in no way beneficial, even the ones that do not cut out food groups can be very restrictive of calories and send our bodies into starvation mode so cannot be considered safe.
Diets that are too calorie restrictive can cause serious damage to our systems and should be avoided.
In Summary! Given the harmful health effects of fad diets, it is important for us, especially the weight-conscious people, to recognize and beware of these diet plans.
Watch out for diets that: *Make promises about amazing weight loss *Restrict our consumption of a particular food group *Show us outlandish before and after pictures *Expect a large upfront investment to join in *Claim to have THE SECRET TO WEIGHT LOSS Fad diets may be popular but this does not make them work and they can be very hurtful to our bodies and are best avoided.
The real secret to weight loss is available to us all and is not really a secret!