Are Fad Diets to Blame?

I have to agree, I think Fad Diets are just adding to the confusion. As a personal trainer, I get asked lots of questions about what’s best to eat. My advice is always the same, get back to basics. A clean diet, with a good variation of fresh foods has to be the best. With everything cooked from scratch using fresh ingredients such as lean meats, fresh fish, fresh fruit and veggies, dairy and whole grains. Most people would lose weight quite easily if they just adopted this approach. In most cases their eating habits are bad to begin with taking in foods with too much fat, sugar and salt. Cutting out these foods would make a big difference to most people without even going on a diet. Fad diets are very often not sustainable for the long term. Therefore cleaning up your current diet is the best starting point. That way you learn for yourself what’s good and what’s bad. I encourage clients to keep a food diary for at least 7 days. By highlighting the poor food choices and then finding a healthier alternative they are taking responsibility for themselves and also learning what’s best for them. I find people are always looking for a quick solution and this is what fad diets often claim to provide. A change in what you eat should be a lifestyle change and not just something for the next 2 weeks.

I agree... though as simple as it seemed, the Eat Clean Diet was the first diet book I ever bothered with, and the first time I tried anything but counting Calories (which is what I was taught in school), despite never having any success -- and lo and behold, it changed everything. For the first time, I lost quite a bit of body fat and my athletic performance improved significantly. So I can't be too hard on all diet books- the ones that are basically healthy, at least they're getting information out there.

cari from ditch diets

Well I couldn't agree more, there are many diet myths out there and in my opinion, the 'what to eat' myth is just one of them: I like to stick with ONE SIMPLE rule when it comes to eating:

The closer foods are to how they appear in nature - the better.

I also think the government's "intervention" is adding to the confusion. Especially when they change their recommendations every few years. It's especially problematic when different industries can basically buy political support for their products and ensure that their commodities will be consumed (hence the absurd amount of grains recommended in the 1st version of the Food Pyramid).

We don't have an understanding of real nutrition at all in the US anymore. REAL nutrition can be healing the Hippocrates quote suggests..."let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food."

Unfortunately, Government guidelines are one of leading teachings in nutrition classes at universities these days. So our doctors are not properly informed on nutrition either, thus spreading bad nutrition dogma.

Ali Hale

I think there's a temptation to look for the quick-fix miracle solution to our problems in all sorts of areas, not just dieting.

The thing is, dieting isn't especially complex. Most folk can lose weight and get healthier by simply cutting down on stuff they *know* isn't good for them ... chips, candy, cake, etc ... and by eating more fresh fruits and veggies. Now, as a bit of a chocoholic myself, I can see why some people wish there was some easier magic solution -- but it's really that simple.

I think the biggest problem is that we define a healthy diet inaccurately; instead of really focusing on nutrition, everyone focuses on macronutrient percentages. That's stupid IMO. We should be focusing on meeting essential nutrient requirements as first and foremost, but instead we fret over how much fat or carbohydrate is in the diet. If you're targeting essential nutrients, guess what? You have to eat real food and limit junk and at the end of the day, your macronutrient percentages are what they are, which is why variuos countries, that are far healthier than we are, eat different diets that aren't even close to each other. Like in Japan they eat lots of fish and not as much fat, but in Spain they gobble up fat and eat less carbohydrate. Both of those countries live longer and healthier than we do, all the while we push eating percentages of calories are protein, fat and carbohydrate when we really should be talking about essential nutrients, which is what other countries kick out butt eating correctly!

J. Foster

The term "Fad Diet" is virtually meaningless. It means one thing to one person, something else to another. People will always be writing books hashing out pretty much the same old information over and over.

SueK24

I'm surprised you're including the Zone in this article. It is the diet of the reknowned Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Univestity, and with all the published study behind it, it's hardly what would be considered a fad diet.

Jody - Fit at 52

It is a known fact that many "diet & weight loss" books out in the stores are to make money. Many are crazy, others prove nothing & a very few actually have some good info in them. It is all about making money for most of them & YES, it is confusing to people.. especially because many do not want to research the validity of them.

If you eat whole foods, less processed foods & keep moving, that is a good start! BUT, people keep falling for the quick fix because the effective way is too hard or takes too long.... there is not a quick fix... it does take work & determination & patience & dedication. You don't have to be perfect but you do have to do something!

Spectra

I tried a few "fad" diets as an overweight teenager; most of which were diets that my mom was also trying at the same time. One that I remember well was a diet of basically tuna fish, melba toast, cucumbers, and eggs. It lasted exactly a week and to this day I still can't stand melba toast.

I didn't have success until I started learning about nutrition in my college biochem courses. I realized that I could get a lot more satisfaction from "real" foods like veggies, fruits, lean meats, and whole grains. I used the WW points system to keep track of how many calories I was getting, but I basically made up my own plan using a combination of Volumetrics and WW. I think most people would lose weight if they would eat more "real" food...most people do not realize just how many calories they can pack into processed foods. Plus, those kinds of things do not fill you up. Seriously, before I ate healthy foods, my typical breakfast was 2 PopTarts and a 20 ounce Frappuccino...almost 800 calories' worth of food and I was always starving again by 9 or 10 am. Once I started eating oatmeal and fruit for breakfast, I felt full a LOT longer and found it easier to skip vending machine raids between meals.

Melanie | Dietriffic

Book authors and the government constantly present differing ideas of how to lose weight, which is very confusing for people. But, I think if you are careful about who you listen to, good advice is out there.

This is evidenced my many of your comments--you guys know exactly how to eat well, so you haven't been totally confused by the media or government guidelines!

But, I suppose for others it is confusing, and perhaps the government doesn't help by changing their advice from time to time--however, surely they only do this in response to solid new research, not on a whim, so in theory this should be the better advice to listen to???

I think people need to realise that just because someone writes a book, it doesn't mean they are an authority on the subject, many are simply out to make money.

A problem human beings share is a tendency to fall for the ‘see food’ diet. Our primitive genetic coding sometimes tells us when food’s available, just incase there’s a shortage tomorrow – and if crispy, golden, succulent goodies confront us at every street corner, we don’t always stop to ask our stomach if we are genuinely hungry.

Of course this weakness has been fully exploited by the big diet companies and the supermarkets too. The shops are full of products claiming to be low fat or low calorie, but they aren’t really the slimming solutions that they appear to be.

How do you define slimming food? An orange? An avocado? A chicken salad? Or is it a pre-packaged ready meal with low-fat written all over it that looks very much like high-fat, deep fried product we’d actually prefer to eat? Are we really going to change our eating habits permanently by drinking three imitation chocolate milkshakes everyday for a month? Or are our bodies going to be even more confused when we finally give up the pretend party food and start introducing weird stuff like fish and tomatoes and brown rice?

Another problem with special diet foods is that, in order to make them taste as good as real food, a lot of sugar or chemicals have to be added. So a low-fat label often means high sugar. A Sunday Times article in February 1999 by Steve Farrar and Tom Robbins revealed that many leading slimming products (including diet drinks) are simply loaded with sugar which can be addictive as well as harmful; according to the same article, refined sugar consumption could be responsible for the deaths of 3000 British women a year with heart disease.

And for chemicals, well, that’s a controversial subject and the jury is still out on a lot of them. But in the meantime it’s safer to stick with the simplest and most natural basic ingredients instead of putting stuff in our bodies that we haven’t learned to deal with.

So, weighing up the evidence, it seems that the best thing about diet meals is that they are much more expensive than real food so you probably can’t afford to buy as many of them.