fad diets
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
Despite much scientific information concerning the dangers of fad diets, the health and diet aisles of the bookstores are still chocked full of new and old books of fad diets. Fad diets promise quick, easy weight loss with little effort, and usually no mention of an exercise regiment. More and more scientific evidence is showing that in order to have a sensible diet, there must be a combination of all the food groups (O'Dea, 2003). Fad diets usually tend to overemphasize one particular food group, while banning others. Banning certain foods or food groups is one of the biggest mistakes that people make on fad diets. While banning certain foods or food groups can deprive the body of important vitamins and minerals that are vital to overall health, it will also lead to cravings and subsequent binges, usually causing weight gain instead of weight loss. Another problem of limiting food groups is that it establishes "good" and "bad" foods instead of establishing "good" and "bad" eating habits (Bren, 2002)
Fad diets are relatively easy to recognize. Several identifying features of these diets are a promise of quick, effortless weight loss, a limitation of certain food groups, an excessively low calorie intake, or an unbalanced proportion of nutrients. While the promise of rapid weight loss is usually upheld, the majority of the weight lost is water weight and will rarely have long term effects. One major drawback to this method of quick weight loss is the improper nutrition of these fad diets can result in a potential loss of muscle density along with any fat that is lost...