The hardest thing about losing weight is the length of time that it takes. It can be so daunting to set out on a new diet, and to know that at the rate of one or two pounds per week (the healthy recommended amount of weight loss), it will take months or even years to reach your goal weight. People understandably want to see results quickly, especially when they are doing something as enormously difficult as changing their eating habits. This often leads people to try faddy diets, which promise that they will see results in a short space of time, but the problem is that, often, these types of diets are not good for long-term wellness.
One of the reasons that fad diets don’t work, long term, is that they are not sustainable. They often focus on eating one type of food in isolation, or cutting huge areas of food out of the diet altogether. In order to be sustainable, diets have to be something that you can maintain after the first flush of weight loss is over. As well as being unrealistic, however, these diets may also be damaging to your wellbeing – if not downright dangerous.
Fad diets are unhealthy for a number of reasons, and yet magazine editors continue to promote them.
One of the main reasons that they are unhappy is because they restrict certain food groups. This means that the diet is not balanced, and this can cause all kinds of nutrient deficiencies. Fad diets can also make you feel really run down and lacking in energy, which affects your ability to exercise as well as to enjoy your life.
The huge reductions in calorie intake which can be part of the diet can also slow down your metabolism, making it harder rather than easier to lose weight. When you do finally give up on the restrictive diet, as so often happens, the period of restrictive fasting can make you eat twice as much when the diet comes to an end, piling on more weight than you started with.