subject: Fad Diets Waste Your Time [print this page] It seems to be a sign of our times that just as people are searching for a quick and easy way out of their financial problems, more and more people are searching for a quick and easy way to lose weight.
One diet popular during the last great depression was heavily promoted by the citrus farming interests and was called the Hollywood 18 Day Diet. All you had to do was to eat 600 calories a day of nothing but grapefruit and oranges. If you didn't lose weight I'm sure it at least succeeded in keeping you regular.
Another fad that's been around for a long time is the Cabbage Soup Diet. Showing real staying power, this one just celebrated its 30th birthday. It is sometimes known as the Mayo Clinic Diet, maybe to make it seem a little more legitimate. This is despite the fact that the actual Mayo Clinic denies knowing anything about it. Health experts unanimously agree that eating only cabbage soup is not only a bad strategy for losing weight, it also deprives your body of the vital nutrition it needs.
Now the latest fad in dieting is called the Baby Food diet and claims to be embraced by the Hollywood elite. Apparently the key to losing weight on this one seems to be to eat nothing but baby food. 14 jars a day, to be specific. The diets proponents claim that Jennifer Aniston has declared this diet to be a winner despite the fact that she denies eating any baby food in almost 40 years.
So what's wrong with a diet of nothing but baby food? Health and nutrition experts say that those little jars of mush provide all the vitamins and minerals a body needs for health so it won't do you any harm to live on it. The problem is, how long can you continue to eat baby food? And what happens when you stop? What happens is, your bad old eating habits are still there ready to take right over again and you will almost immediately gain the weight that you lost right back.
If your goal is to lose weight and keep it off, you will have to give up the idea of a quick fix. You didn't gain all that extra weight quickly and losing it will also take time. After the fad diets come and go there seems to be three golden rules that always seem to work.
1. Swear off junk food. These tiny calorie bombs almost force you to take in way more calories than your body needs while depriving you of the essential elements of nutrition.
2. Eat lots of small meals. Five or six small meals is much better for your body than one huge one. When you eat, your body takes what you need for metabolism and whatever's left gets stored as fat. Stop eating before you get to that point and skip the fat saving step.
3. Make exercise a part of your day. If you're serious about losing weight, exercise is a must have. There's an added bonus that you eat even more because you're burning even more. And as you workout, your metabolic rate is increasing and this rate will stay higher even when you're not at the gym. The extra muscle you gain will burn calories at an even higher rate.
If you can find a diet plan that incorporates these three principals and stick with it, you can't help but succeed in the weight loss battle.
