What's Wrong with Fad Diets?

If you can lose weight from a fad diet, why not embrace it?

Lots of reasons, actually.

Fad diets come up from time to time, each promising fast and significant weight loss results in a short amount of time. Often, these diets focus on results over health. And that's why you might want to read the fine print – and why you might want to stay away.

The Internet and the classified ads in magazines and newspapers are often ripe with weight loss ads that promise huge losses in only a few days or weeks.

This kind of weight loss is often possible, but, in almost each case, the weight loss is temporary and is primarily due to a loss of water weight. When your body rehydrates itself (which is a natural and healthy process), the weight you lost will often come back, and, in the process, your sense of willpower and confidence will have taken a beating.

Fad diets also often ask you to focus on one food type, while eliminating others. But a healthy diet is a balanced diet, so you need to be wary of any diet that has you eliminating or greatly restricting entire food groups.

Some of these crash diets will also recommend that you make up for this lost nutrition with the intake of vitamins and supplements, which the diet purveyor will likely be glad to sell you. The downside is this: your body may not be able to adequately absorb these supplemental vitamins and minerals unless you take the supplements with food, and these foods may not even be on the list approved by your extreme diet plan.

Because they are so extreme, these kinds of diets are generally harder to stick to than simply restricting your calories and moving more. Don't be surprised if you have food cravings unlike any you've had before. This is your body's way of telling you it's missing something. And because a fad diet is so difficult to stay on, you might feel like you don't have any willpower at all as you bounce on and off the diet.

The truth is, a balanced diet is easier to stick to than many of the fad diets out there today. The classic diet advice is the best advice: Eat less and move more.

Even if you can stick to a fad diet until you've lost the weight, you haven't made healthy changes to the way you manage food and exercise. Once you get off the diet, you are more likely to gain back the weight you have lost, and that's bad for your body and for your emotional well-being and self esteem.

The optimal way to get a handle on your weight, once and for all, is to eat a variety of healthy foods. It is to eat less (but not to eat so little that you get crabby or unhealthy) and to move your body more.

This simple formula really does work, and it's easy to find established and sound weight loss programs that embrace these simple techniques.

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