Impossible promises

If you read about a slimming diet that promises to make you lose 5 kg in five days, then beware - this is a Fad Diet. The human body is not geared to lose real weight derived from fat in such a short time. Human metabolism has its own clock and any diet that promises you a loss of more than 0.5 to 1 kg in seven days, is pulling the wool over your eyes.

Yes, you may see your weight going down rapidly for those first few days, but if you are just losing water, you will pick all those kgs up again, the minute you stop the Fad Diet.

Another distressing aspect of these impossible promise diets is that you tend to regain all the weight you have lost in record time and often shoot up to a new high. This type of slimming diet can easily trap you in the snares of ‘Yo-Yo dieting’ and set you on the road of perpetual dieting.

Unbalanced food intake

Beware of Fad Diets that tell you to eat only one category of food, e.g. only protein or only fruit. Let’s have a look at the latter type of diet. Fruit and vegetables are brimming with antioxidants, vitamins, bioflavonoids, dietary fibre, and protective nutrients, but if you are told to only eat fruit and vegetables to lose weight, you will be doing yourself harm in the long run.

A two to three days cleansing diet based on fresh, raw fruit and/or vegetables, is perfectly acceptable provided you don’t try and carry on with this type of eating for weeks on end. If you do, you may lose weight, but will be in danger of developing all kinds of deficiencies. Fruit and vegetables are brimming with goodness, but are deficient in protein, iron, calcium and many other minerals, vitamin B12, and omega-fatty acids.

To remain healthy and lose weight, you need to eat a mix of foods, not just one category. So if you hear of a sliming diet that tells you to cut out ‘all protein’ or ‘all carbohydrate’ or ‘all fat’ then you know it is not balanced and can lead to all kinds of problems.

Even a low-fat diet, which is one of the most successful diets for losing weight, still contains some fat to provide the essential fatty acids your body requires to stay healthy.

Starvation diets

Very-low-energy diets are sometimes used to treat people suffering from gross obesity. In general, this type of diet should only be used under the strict supervision of a medical doctor and a clinical dietician.

If you are given a slimming diet that restricts your food intake to a few lettuce leaves and the odd tomato, and you get so hungry that your head spins and you feel faint all the time, then you know that this is a Fad Diet. You may lose weight on this kind of diet, but you won’t be able to keep it up and once you stop, your body goes into overdrive to try and restore its normal balance. Having received the message ‘Food supply cut off’, the body will try and conserve energy and slow down weight-loss processes and restart storing fat.

Believe it or not, most people lose weight most efficiently when they are not starving, but eating a balanced, low-fat, high-fibre diet that lets them feel comfortably satiated and ‘normal’.

So if you are walking around in a daze and craving food all day, you will know that the slimming diet you are using is a Fad Diet and will not help you to achieve your goal of permanent weight-loss.

Dr. I.V. van Heerden, registered dietician.