Health Alert 94
If you watch television, read magazines, or surf the internet, you have seen dozens of hyped-up diets. Many of you have asked me if various popular diets are effective. In this letter, I’ll address some of the popular diets readers ask me about most frequently.
There are 4 major problems with the most popular weight loss approaches:
? Most are ineffective. They will not make you lose weight.
• If you do lose weight, you cannot sustain it. Studies show over 90% of people who do lose weight through dieting eventually gain 100% of the weight back.
• Many create serious nutritional deficiencies.
• They all fail to differentiate good weight like muscle, bone and internal organs from fat.
The Hollywood Diet: This one often appears in television commercials. You’ll lose only water weight. As soon as you eat or drink anything, you’ll gain the weight back. The occasional fast is not dangerous. But dehydration will make you feel horrible and can be dangerous.
Weight Watchers: Weight Watchers is another failed low fat approach. It is similar to many other diets that count fat and calories. The bigger problem is that most proteins are higher in “points” so dieters are discouraged from eating them. Don’t be duped into skipping protein. Protein:
• enables the body to lose fat efficiently
• Maintains muscle, heart and brain
• lessens metabolic decline with age
• moderates appetite
The Cabbage Soup Diet: The recipe for this diet is floating around the internet and may appear in your mailbox. This diet does not provide your body with the nutrients it needs. Dieters often feel weak and lightheaded. When you do eat again, your body will try to put on extra fat preparing for the next time you starve yourself.
Calorie Counters: They key to healthy eating is where the calories come from. This determines what your body will do with the calories. Let’s say you snack on a candy bar and a soda. The sugar and insulin make you feel tired so you take a nap. Someone else eats the same amount of calories, except they eat fish and spinach. They feel charged and play fetch with their dog for 30 minutes. Who do you think would lose more fat?
Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type: This one is just bad science. This diet uses your blood type to dictate diet. But this has no scientific merit. Blood types evolved hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture and modern foods were available. Therefore, we all ate the same hunter based diet regardless of our blood types. If you have this book, you can get some use out of it. Just follow the high protein “Type O” diet regardless of what your blood type is.
Slim Fast is one of the most foolish dieting fads. The problem is that these shakes are loaded with the worst kind of carbs. They are nothing but “refined junk”. These shakes will not give you the nutrients you need to stay healthy. You will burn of muscle and turn to flab.
Healthy eating is sustainable. But these fad diets are impossible to stay on long-term. As a general guide be wary of diets that:
• Fail to show firm evidence
• Claim rapid weight loss
• Recommend you eat only one food or recipe
• Rely on pills or drinks rather eating well
• Make large claims; too good to be true
Al Sears MD