Posts Tagged ‘popular diets’

Crash weight loss plans and fad diets are an unwelcome alternative to permanent healthy eating habits, according to the American Heart Association.

Many of these fad diets, such as the notorious and outright silly Cabbage Soup Diet, will undermine your health, cause physical discomfort (abdominal discomfort and flatulence (gas) ) and lead to the ping-pong effect of gaining weight soon after losing it. In other words the risks aren’t worth the rewards.

Quick-weight-loss diets generally put far too much focus on one particular food or type of food. They violate the first principle of good nutrition which is to eat a balanced diet including a variety of foods. Because no one food has all the nutrients needed for good health, these diets can result in a lot of health problems. One such diet is the Cabbage Soup Diet. This so-called fat-burning soup is eaten mostly with fruits and vegetables. People supposedly lost 10-17 pounds in only a week, eating mostly cabbage soup. Even if the weight loss claim were true, all the damage due to a lack of a host of important nutrients would far outweigh (pun intended) the benefits of losing the weight. There are no magic beans, or magic cabbages, or miracle foods for weight loss and good nutrition. Moderation and consuming all the major food groups is the best bet.

These crazy diets also violate a second important principle of good nutrition which is that eating should be enjoyable.. These diets are so monotonous and bland that it’s almost impossible to stay on them for long periods. Consider a week on the Cabbage Soup Diet. By Wednesday you’d dread meal time, and by Friday you’d never again want to smell a cabbage much less eat the soup. They’d carry you away in a straight jacket on Sunday.

Boredom isn’t the only reason fad diets aren’t good ones. Most don’t talk about exercise, such as aerobics for 30 minutes a day every day. Physical activity helps maintain weight loss, while physical inactivity is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke. When a diet includes no need for a workout, run the other way.

Quick weight loss sounds great. It is possible. But if a program sounds too good to be true, it is.

For a diabetic a diabetic diet is very important to managing their condition, and in some cases even working towards reversing it. If you’re a diabetic then it’s wise to cut the amount of fats and carbohydrates you consume.

Both types of diabetes can benefit from the diabetic diet. Type I, called juvenile diabetes, is often diagnosed in children while type II usually starts in adulthood and is more common. With type I diabetes the body produces overly low levels of insulin, while with type II the problem is with cells that don’t absorb insulin. A diabetic diet addresses both types, but type II can actually be avoided or reversed with the proper diet.

In general the diabetic diet is geared towards attaining ideal body weight for controlling and managing diabetes. It’s easy to calculate ideal body weight for men or women. In women add five pounds to 100 for every inch above five feet, and subtract five pounds from 100 for every inch under five feet. At 5′6″ a woman’s ideal body weight is 130. Men add 6 pounds to 106 for every inch over 5 feet tall. At 5′6″ a man’s ideal weight is 142 pounds.

The ideal formula for a diabetic diet varies, but there are some common basics. For a person with type I diabetes diet should be approximately 35 calories per kilogram of body weight per day, that’s 16 calories per pound of body weight per day. That means a 160 pound man should eat about 2500 calories per day. Type II people should lose weight by eating as little as 1500 calories daily, then refer to the type I formula to maintain ideal weight.

In a general a diabetic diet carbohydrate intake should be about 50% of the daily caloric intake. Some argue that less carbohydrates are better, but there are advantages to cutting down the fat. Sometimes this can be offset by substituting mono unsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats in the place of saturated fats.

In the world of fad diets almost nothing can be more absurd than the cookie diet. The diet relies on eating cookies to control hunger and thus help people lose weight.

Fad diets are short term diets in which people are to lose a lot of weight, and are popular because of their claims of great weight loss. Fad diets generally include some super food, like the cookie in the cookie diet, with miraculous weight loss properties. In this sense they are something like the old traveling medicine shows, in which a slick talking salesman would expound on the virtues of some magical formula created by a Guru of some type.

The cookie diet was created by a physician named Sanford Siegel in 1975 while he was researching a book on the effect of natural foods on hunger. To maintain the cookie diet people would eat six cookies a day, plus a regular dinner. People on the diet ate only 800 calories a day. People went wild over the cookie diet to the extent that 14 clinics opened in Florida. In the middle 1980s over 200 doctors were prescribing Dr. Siegel’s cookie diet in their own practices. The diet was quickly expanded to miracle soups and shakes that also contained the amino acids.

There is another version of the cookie diet referred to as the Hollywood cookie diet because it became popular with many Hollywood stars. Stars and starlets made their use of the diet well known, which helped vault it to public attention. Like the original cookie diet this Hollywood version replaced breakfast and lunch with cookies, then allowed a reasonable dinner. These cookies each contain 150 calories and fiber, protein and minerals.

If you’re thinking of the cookie diet take Donnie Brasco’s advice – forget about it. If you want to lose weight, or maintain a healthy eating lifestyle, simply lower the amount of calories you eat from everyday foods and add some exercise. In general this is a much healthier way to lose or maintain weight than relying on some fly by night miracle food, even if it is endorsed by someone you recognize from a movie.