It seems like every supermodel or celebrity endorses some crazy diet fad or another. These celebrities (especially the models like Gigi Hadid or Gisele Bundchen) have admittedly fantastic bodies, so it’s easy for us to wonder if these diets truly work.
I’ve never been much of an advocate for diets. The diet business seems to be structured around our inevitable failure. Do your best until you fail, and then try again for a higher price.
As regular people, why do we think we have the capacity to maintain a celebrity diet, such as Kim Kardashian’s much-publicized Atkins diet? They have access to personal trainers, a convenient Whole Foods location, top-notch ingredients, and ample time to commit to a strict diet regime.
Our lives don’t resemble the lives of celebrities whatsoever, so here’s why maintaining one of their diets is near impossible.
1. You don’t have a personal chef.
At least, I don’t think you do. Assuming you’re a broke college student like me, chances are pretty good that you live off of easy meals like pasta or frozen pizza. It’s quite time-consuming and difficult to simulate a celebrity’s eating patterns on your own, so luckily, you don’t have to.
2. Dining like a celebrity is expensive.
I don’t know about you, but I do not have wiggle room for organic fruits and vegetables, fancy oil or dairy/gluten/salt/sugar/trans fat/saturated fat/any fat-free items. Even juice cleanses are pricey! No, thanks, I’ll stick to my Kraft Dinner and frozen vegetables.
3. They are not a ‘lifestyle.’
These strict celebrity diet rules aren’t sustainable. Kim Kardashian’s famous Atkins diet promotes protein and very low carbs.
It has four phases; in the first, you can only have 20 or fewer grams of carbs per day. By the fourth phase, when you’ve lost weight, you’re allowed to eat a “healthy” amount of carbs as long as you don’t regain the weight.
Sorry, but this sounds like a sad lifestyle. I’m not an advocate for a junk food-only diet, but I am an advocate for allowing yourself everything in moderation.
4. Experts say it won’t work.
Spoiler alert: your diet will fail. Experts have said that the diets that have come out on top are the ones that are sustainable and don’t cut out large food groups or completely eliminate things. The diets that celebrities promote often eliminate entire food groups (anything with carbs or sugar, for example), which will just leave you tired and hungry.
5. Life is too short to skip dessert.
If you ignored everything in this article, this is the one point to take home. Life is simply too short not to enjoy it. Skipping dinner with friends, not indulging in birthday cake or being the party pooper at happy hour isn’t worth the current diet fad. A healthy lifestyle is sustainable with the occasional treat here and there.
At the end of the day, we aren’t celebrities. We’re people with jobs, school, friends, families, living spaces to maintain, errands to run, relationships to tend to, work to do, books to read, and time to spend on ourselves. Our focus is already so spread out, we shouldn’t place it on attaining a celebrity body. Rather, we should work towards having bodies that help us function, support us and make us feel good.