Whenever you’re in a moany mood about your weight, there always seems to be a trusty friend or colleague nearby who comes out with “Oh, there’s this new diet you have to try!” However, before you take their advice, stop and think about what that fad diet is doing to you wellness. We’ve compiled a list of six disaster diets that, if you have any regard for your wellbeing, you should avoid like the plague.
1. The Raw Food Diet
The raw food diet is rich in all plant-based foods – including fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and sprouted seeds, grains, and beans – so you may be wondering why it has made it onto a list of diets to avoid. While any dietician is likely to agree that it’s good to eat minimally processed foods, processing sometimes boosts the bio-availability of several key nutrients and inactivates some of the unhealthy compounds. This diet is going to involve a lot of complicated food preparation, which is just impractical if you’re as busy as most of us are these days.
2. The hCG Diet
On this diet, you eat 500 to 800 calories per day, and supplement with injections of the pregnancy hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). The problem with this diet is that eating anything below 1,000 calories a day is really unsafe, and of course you’re going to lose weight even if you inject yourself with liquid chocolate. The hCG injections raise a lot of red flags among wellness experts, who don’t know if it’s safe to inject, and all that speedy weight loss is just going to come back with a vengeance once you realise that only a Barbie doll could survive on so few calories.
3. The Master Cleanse
According to Karla Campbell, MS, RD, a dietician in Long Beach, California, this diet involves “cleansing” your body with a concoction of squeezed lemons, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper, which you drink several times a day for 10 days. Then, with the aim of cleaning out you GI tract and bowels, you down a nightly herbal laxative tea, as well as a quart of salt water first thing in the morning. Not only is there no evidence to support the effectiveness of this diet, but it lacks so many key nutrients that you’d be hard-pressed to find a dietician who would advocate the master cleanse. Campbell adds, ‘Dieters who try it end up losing lean body mass, and then when they are “cleansed” and go back to their old ways, they gain fat. They end up being a fatter version of their old selves.’
4. The Cabbage Soup Diet.
A lot of people believe this diet is recommended by the American Heart Association (AHA), but the health organisation – and others – has made it very clear that this fad diet is to be avoided at all costs. It involves a seven-day cycle based on all-you-can-eat “fat-burning” cabbage soup, which is a mix of cabbage, carrots, celery, tomatoes, peppers, and onions. The one saving grace of this diet is that it provides plenty of liquids and nutrient-packed veggies, but there’s no way you can sustain this lifestyle if you cherish food, or living, at all. The cabbage soup diet restricts too many food groups, which means you’ll be back where you started before too long.
5. Breatharian Diet
Words cannot describe how ridiculous this diet is. Literally, you live on air alone, with no food or water – that’s it! Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure you’d die if you went a few days without water, or a few weeks without food. Enthusiasts for this diet say that your body aligns with the universe, or some such mumbo-jumbo, and you won’t need water or food. I’m thinking those enthusiasts are sneaking cheese burgers in between all that Universal alignment.