How to Tell a Food Fad from a Dependable Diet
February 1st, 2009 Posted by: Johanna Williams
More then 60% of all adults in the united states are overweight. That’s 127 million people, who weigh too much. I know you don’t want to be one of them, and probably most people would like to lose some weight, so why don’t they do it?
I suspect the real problem is that the vast majority of fad diets, are just that - fads. They may work for the first week or so, but after that you would be better off if you had never started. You can spend years trying hundreds of different fad diets before stumbling on one that really works.
So, if you want to find a real diet that actually works, you need some way of telling which are the fake ones. Here, I’m going to give you the information you need to pick out the diets that can make you lose weight, and keep it off. Before you even buy the book.
The first thing to check is the guarantee. If there’s no money back guarantee, don’t bother. If it doesn’t help you lose at least a little weight within the first month, it’s probably not going to work and you might as well send it back.
Besides the guarantee, you should also look at how much time you need to notice the effects. Surprisingly, the longer this time is the more likely the diet is to be real. If they say anything more then 10lb a week, I’d get suspicious. The best diets usually offer 5lb or less weight loss per week.
You can’t be too careful with your health, a dumping a load of fat very quickly will wreak havoc with your system. Besides which, even if you do get the weight off, you need a long term plan to make sure it stays off. It’s rare for a diet to keep working months after you’ve used it to lose weight, and even rarer for someone to want to stick to the diet!
Of course, not every diet is like this. Sometimes, you can lose weight very quickly. For instance, I knew a woman who wanted to lose 60 pounds. She started going to the gym every day, and working out hard for three hours. At the end of the first week, she had dropped 20lb. Now, that’s rather a special case, but it shows what can be done. these diets aren’t telling you to work out though, they’re telling you to sit at home and eat. To me, that seems like a bad idea. It’s just common sense - food goes in, you never use it, what happens?
If they say you don’t need to worry about the amount of food you eat, then it’s either a scam, or they want you to gorge on completely non-nutritious foods so that you feel full, while getting absolutely no benefit. that is incredibly unhealthy, and can often cause serious permanent health problems, much worse then just being overweight.
Now, how to tell a program that will really work. If they promise you gradual gains, that’s good. If they give you real reasons, and not just ‘I’m a doctor, believe what I say’, that’s another one. Workouts are good, recipes are good, any kind of guide is good, and of course motivation is essential. If you can find anything that offers you all of these, and otherwise seems reasonable, then there’s a good chance it might actually work.
