There are many different schools of thought out there when it comes to losing weight. The only thing they all agree on is that you need to burn more energy than you take in. So to make that happen should you be doing a low-fat diet? How about low-carb? Or should you stop worrying about all that and just eat less? I don't know for sure one way or the other and I won't pretend to. Nutritional science is constantly changing and part of why is because we don't really understand how our bodies work as much as we'd like to think we do. The human body is a complex system. It's more like a nation's economy than some simple machine where you do this and it does that. So instead of writing a series of articles on how to lose weight, I'm writing one on what not to do. Part 1: Beware of fad diets Part 2: Don't focus on losing weight. Focus on losing fat. Part 3: You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet. Part 4: Stop obsessing over calorie counts. Part 5: Don't diet in a straight line. In the first of this five part series, I will talk about fad diets and why you should stop to think before trying one. What is a fad diet? By definition, a fad diet is a diet that has not stood the test of time. There are many that exist. Each has its own group of supporters who swear by it, and a group of detractors who hate on it. Each diet also has testimonials to prove it works: "I've been doing [Paleo / Low-Carb / No-Carb / Low Fat / Atkins / Intermittent Fasting / Juice Cleansing / insert diet here] for two years now and I'm feeling better than ever! I've lost over 50 lbs." What's wrong with fad diets? Let's pretend you're in charge of two laborers. You assign one guy to carry heavy bags of cement mix from one end of the site to the other, where someone else's crew is working. The other guy you assign to do something easy like counting the number of bags that get moved. The bags need to keep coming because the other crew needs the cement for paving, so you don't let either of your guys take breaks. Everything starts off fine so you leave them alone and go tend to other business. After a few hours you come back and find that the first guy is exhausted and is dropping bags left and right. Cement mix is all over the floor and the pace of work has slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile, the second guy is bored with his light workload. Realizing that this isn't working, you have the two guys switch roles. You come back in fifteen minutes and things are looking good. The first guy feels better from the rest, and the second guy is no longer bored. Since the second guy is fresh, bags aren't being dropped and work is back on track. Do you think that since things are great after fifteen minutes, you can come back in a few hours and things will still be fine? Same thing with diets. If you've been eating garbage for twenty years, anything that changes this will work at first. But does this mean that it's healthy in the long run? Nobody knows for sure because the fad diet hasn't been scrutinized over several generations, with all confounding variables eliminated. Maybe it's healthy, but maybe it isn't. Keep in mind that at one point people used to think smoking and trans fats were healthy. Do you really want to risk jumping from your current bad diet to another? What if, say, thirty years later we find out that eliminating carbs completely causes cancer? Anyway... this is not something I can answer for you about the diet you choose. This is just something to think about when you start one. Back to the testimonials... "I've been doing [Paleo / Low-Carb / No-Carb / Low Fat / Atkins / Intermittent Fasting / Juice Cleansing / insert diet here] for two years now and I'm feeling better than ever! I've lost over 50 lbs." This may be fine... but stick to this diet for twenty years and then let us know what your health is like. The standard American diet doesn't turn you into an obese diabetic overnight. So beware when you hear "I've been doing this for a year and I feel great." The scientific research that says it's okay now can just as easily say it's bad for you tomorrow. The main point here is that when you try something that's new, risk is always involved. Two examples - Intermittent Fasting and the Paleo diet Let's take a look at two popular diets that are in vogue right now (as of 2016 at least). I will use Intermittent Fasting as the first example because it was something I've tried and even seen success with. Intermittent Fasting is when you fast from food for a specified period of the day in order to lose weight. The idea behind fasting itself is nothing new. It's stood the test of time and has been done for thousands of years. Jesus fasted. Many other religions incorporate fasting in one form or another. Intermittent Fasting, on the other hand, in the many forms that you see it on the internet, is a fad diet. One popular variation has you skip breakfast every single day. Others have you eat only one meal a day, or eat every other day. Again, I've tried the first variation and had success with it, but now that I look back and thing about it... is it really healthy to skip certain meals every day in the long run? Also, how is it intermittent if you're doing it every day? There are plenty of historical precedents for fasting every once in a while, but not that many to show you what happens when you do it every single day. The other example is the Paleo diet. This is another one that I've dabbled with here and there. The goal of this diet is to emulate the way man ate before the widespread introduction of agriculture (a.k.a. the Paleolithic era). This diet cuts out things like processed foods, grains, legumes, and dairy. To be clear, my point here is not to criticize the philosophical idea behind it. Instead I will scrutinize the fad diet known as Paleo. The first problem with the Paleo diet is, we don't really know what exactly the real paleolithic diet was like. We weren't there and don't have much of a written record to work with, so we can only speculate. However, there's evidence that suggests that paleolithic man in fact ate some of the foods banned by the Paleo diet (like grains).[1] Also, one group's diet may have been completely different from another group in a different part of the world.[1] But the bigger problem is that the Paleo diet seems more like a collection of arbitrary rules than an attempt to express its underlying philosophy. Check out this long list of rules. As an example, legumes (ie. beans, peanuts, etc) are banned. There's a whole article about legumes on the diet creator's website called Beans and Legumes: Are they Paleo? It's basically a long dissertation about why they are supposedly unhealthy, but not one mention about whether or not Paleolithic man actually ate them. The diet also bans sweets and processed foods, but allows oils. I don't know about you, but I can't picture a caveman frying his food in a pan with oil (which by the way has to be processed from whole foods). Speaking of processed foods, this is banned: But this is somehow allowed... Again, I'm not criticizing the idea behind Paleo, I'm criticizing the fad diet itself, and all other fad diets with poorly thought out rules. Notice how nobody remembers any fad diets from the 1800s. We only have basic rules of thumb passed down to us. Things like: eat less sweets... cut down on portions... stay away from overly processed foods... don't drink soda... fast from foods... if it didn't exist 100 years ago, don't eat it... etc. That's because the test of time either proves the fad diet to be completely worthless, or flushes out the poorly thought out rules to the point where the diet is no longer a "diet". In summary...
I don't want to say that you shouldn't go on a certain diet. Instead my advice is to think about the risks, whether the rules make sense or not, and avoid taking a new fad to an extreme. In the next part of this series, I will talk about the difference between weight loss and fat loss. Part 1: Beware of fad diets Part 2: Don't focus on losing weight. Focus on losing fat. Part 3: You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet. Part 4: Stop obsessing over calorie counts. Part 5: Don't diet in a straight line. Thank you and God bless. References
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