Why fad diets don't work!

It has long been accepted that the best diet is a balanced one; on the other hand, the basis for most FAD diets tends to be a regime which restricts us from specific food types, and are therefore by their very nature unbalanced diets. If a balanced diet is good and an unbalanced diet is bad, why should anyone wonder why a FAD diet didn’t work?

In addition to the simple fact that an unbalanced diet probably isn’t very healthy for you, a FAD diet probably requires you to weigh what you eat and demands that you buy food from a very short list of choices.

Following the diet is an effort and a chore and is therefore un-enjoyable – even when you may begin to see results. You long to be able to relax your regime and go back to being able to enjoy what you eat and so when you do, the weight reducing element of the diet disappears and the pounds pile back on again. Trying to break this cycle we look vainly to the world of science to satisfy our need for a short-cut, in the hope that we will lose our excess weight overnight and become healthier with long lasting results for zero effort.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a diet which talks about restricting and starving you of anything should set the alarm bells ringing. A balanced diet requires food from all of the food groups – even fat – in order to keep us healthy. For instance, most FAD diets outlaw essential fatty acids (EFA’S) found in foods such as avocados and nuts simply because they are classed as fats. However, these fatty acids play an ‘essential’ role and are responsible for the breaking down of any bad fats in your body, so you can see that it would not be a good idea to remove them from your diet. Similarly, dieters are commonly told to avoid prawns because they are high in cholesterol. This is actually true, but in actual fact cholesterol in food you eat doesn’t get absorbed during digestion. Our bodies produce varying amounts of cholesterol dependant on the amount of saturated fat we consume. Fish and shellfish contain very small amounts of saturated fat and so are actually food types you should eat more of, and not cut out as many diets instruct. There are many more examples of food that are considered to be ‘bad’ for dieters, but which have an important role to play in a healthy eating plan.

I hope that by now you can see that any diet which restricts specific food types creates an imbalance which is not sustainable in the long run, which of course makes it a pointless exercise to begin with.

Balance is the long-term answer. Eat a bit of everything and don’t cut out anything completely. Sounds good doesn’t it? And you’ll be happy to know that it isn’t hard to achieve when you understand a little of how your body deals with food.