Nowadays, people will do anything to lose weight. Fad diets have become all the rage, with celebrities and magazines endorsing them. Losing weight can be hard, but trust me, the cookie diet is not the answer. As a nutrition student, these diets got me feeling some type of way.
1. Gluten-free/low-carb diets got me feeling like...
Gluten is a protein y'all. If you are allergic to gluten or if you have Celiac disease, then yes, you should not eat gluten. However, there's nothing in gluten that will make you gain weight. The reason people lose weight on gluten-free diets is because they switch from eating an excess of highly refined carbohydrates to a moderate amount of whole grains.
In terms of low carbohydrate diets, they do help you lose weight, but in the long run, it slows down your metabolism. For each gram of glycogen stored, 3-4 grams of water is stored. Therefore, the weight you initially lose is water weight. After a little while, though, your body starts to go into starvation mode, and your body starts to adjust to under-consuming carbohydrates and will rely on less of them. This, in turn, slows down your metabolism.
2. The cookie diet got me feeling like...
If you could eat cookies all day and still lose weight, would you? Sounds almost too good to be true. Dr. Sanford Siegel created this diet in 2007 — the idea is that you eat a 60-calorie "specialized-formulated cookie" every two hours, and then a 500-700 calorie meal so you'll never feel hungry and get to eat dessert. This diet works for some people because you are eating a calorie-restricted diet, but you're missing out on all the important nutrients food has to offer. Plus, these aren't your grandma's homemade chocolate chip cookies...
3. The HCG Diet got me feeling like...
This new fad diet includes taking HCG, a special hormone that only activates on a extremely low-calorie diet. In the first five days of the diet, you eat high-fat foods and start taking the drops of hormones. Then you drop to a 500-calorie diet for 40 days — which is equivalent to a bagel with cream cheese once a day. If this doesn't scream unhealthy, I don't know what does. FYI, in multiple studies, these hormones have proved not to help in weight loss.
4. The baby food diet got me feeling like...
Want to feel like a kid again? With this diet, you literally can eat like a baby by replacing all of your meals except for dinner with baby food. Yeah, people lose weight, but that's usually because the baby food tastes so awful they don't want to eat it.
5. The vision diet got me feeling like...
For this diet, you have to wear blue glasses to make your food look unappealing so you won't want to eat it. Although these blue glasses are ~incredibly stylish~, this diet did not prove to be successful and just sounds completely ridiculous.
6. The fruitarian diet got me feeling like...
Yup, you guessed it — on this diet you only eat fruit. Sounds healthy right? Even though fruit is packed with nutrients, you can have too much of a good thing. Ashton Kutcher actually tried this diet before a movie and ended up in the hospital, so we recommend you stray away from this one.
So if you're tired of fad diets and feel like this....
...we have some good news for you.
Although it's really tempting to hop on the fad diet train, there really isn't a magic formula or specific way of eating to lose weight. From my studies and talking with other nutritional professionals, my best advice is eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full, and enjoy a balanced variety of foods. Just keep in mind, not everyone's healthy weight is a size double zero. The media has completely skewed society's idea of an ideal body, but an ideal body is the one you feel happiest in.