Fad Diets: Why You Shouldn’t Use Them & The Alternative Ways To Shed Pounds
How to lose weight safely and effectively
Fad diets may sound like the perfect solution to your weight loss worries but, in reality, they offer more problems than benefits.
Everybody knows that being overweight is bad for our health, but losing weight and keeping it off is often more difficult than it sounds. In desperation, many people turn to fad diets which promise rapid weight loss in return for sticking to certain rules – from cutting out all carbohydrates, to intermittent fasting, or eating according to your blood type.
However, while these diets can offer impressive short-term results, they also come with a number of potential problems.
Nutritional deficiencies
The majority of fad diets require you to exclude one or more food groups, or even limit you to eating one or two foods in total. The human body needs a varied diet in order to operate properly, and following a restricted diet can result in you losing out on essential vitamins and nutrients. Over the long term this can be detrimental to your health, causing nutritional deficiencies, which can lead to conditions such as anaemia, osteoporosis and depression.
Unhealthy relationship with food
Another problem with fad diets is that they can exacerbate any issues you may have with food and eating, or even create new ones. The extreme and restrictive nature of these kinds of diets makes it all too easy to become obsessive about food, and in some cases this unhealthy behaviour can even spiral into an eating disorder.
They don’t work
Perhaps the biggest issue with fad diets is that they don’t actually work. While these diets may yield short term results, the majority of them are unsustainable in the longer term. And when you revert back to your old eating habits, you’ll soon find the weight you’ve lost piling back on – and maybe even a bit more for good measure!
What’s more, fad dieting is actually unnecessary. There are far more effective ways to lose weight and improve your health.
A healthy, balanced diet
The key to effective weight loss is a healthy, balanced diet. However, this doesn’t have to mean sticking to a strict, calorie-controlled eating plan and depriving yourself. Instead, follow a healthy but tasty diet that is full of fresh fruit and vegetables, wholegrains, and lean proteins.
A healthy diet also means practicing portion control. Portions have grown larger over the years and many of us are eating more than we need to without even realising. By reducing your portions, you can cut your calorie intake, which in turn will help you to shift the pounds more quickly.
Exercise regularly
Taking regular exercise is also a critical part of losing weight and keeping it off. Physical activity burns calories, builds muscle and boosts metabolism so it’s a weight loss win-win. Experts recommend that you get at least 150 minutes of exercise a week, which can be broken into smaller chunks across the seven days.
Weight loss hypnosis
However, while maintaining a healthy diet and taking regular exercise is the key to losing weight, many people struggle to stick to this in reality. If this is the case for you, you may want to consider alternative treatments such as weight loss hypnosis, which offers a safer and more effective solution than fad diets.
Also known as gastric band hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis combines hypnotherapy and visualisation techniques with counselling approaches and talking therapies such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Neurolinguistic Programming. This enables therapists to get to the root of any issues, helping clients to develop a healthier relationship with food and make a permanent, positive lifestyle change.
