Healthcare, Health Insurance, Vitamins, Nutrition

A fad diet is a fashionable diet plan that promises to help you lose weight more often than not in a relatively short time. A fad diet frequently attracts a lot of media coverage, which then attracts a large number of overweight people to try it in order to get back in shape. Fad diets are often soon discredited, but they keep raising their head from time to time.

The grapefruit diet was or is an example of a fad diet. People wanted to accept as true that you could lose weight solely by eating. The food in this instance was grapefruits, but there is also a cabbage diet. The trouble with these fad diets is that their slimming effect is only temporary, because you cannot eat only cabbage or grapefruit for the rest of your life, so the weight comes back as soon as you go back to normal.

‘If you always do what you always done, you will always get what you always got’ is a true saying. But what is worse is that a lot of of these diets can be injurious to your health.

However, do not think that fad diets are a new trend. Fad diets or fad medicines have an ancient history going back to fake witch doctors, medicine men and quack doctors who doubled as barbers! Fad practitioners have a prolonged and scandalous history and they are still alive and doing very well, thank you very much, today.

These days, medicine is too tightly regulated for them, so they have turned their attention to gullible, despondent dieters. Most of those that take up a fad diet are overweight teens longing to look like their favourite film idol.

Fad diets more often than not concentrate on reducing or completely eliminating carbohydrates. It is the low intake of carbohydrates that brings about the fast loss of weight. In fact, this rapid loss is due to the rapid loss of water that these low-carb diets stimulate. Much of the fat might still be there, so that when you stop the diet, your body re-absorbs its normal amount of water and the lost weight is put back on just as fast as it was discarded.

In the normal course of events, carbohydrates are the basis of energy for work and exercise, but with these fad diets, the carbs are no longer there, so the body starts to break down its stockpile of fat. This may seem beneficial but it is not necessarily so. The ketones resulting from the breakdown of fat are excreted via urine and often increased quantities of urine, which can cause dehydration. People with certain medical conditions have to be very careful too; diabetics, for example.

Fad diets are popular, but they can be very detrimental to your body and when they do not have the desired result in the long-term, it can be very depressing leading to comfort eating. This is why many people begin a fad diet, lose weight and are radiant for a month or two, but then slip back when they are approaching their ideal weight. They go back to their old ways and the weight begins to come back. They become depressed, certain that they will never be able to lose weight; they comfort eat some more, maybe giving up any hope of regaining a normal weight permanently.