Once upon a time, fad diets were all the rage. Born out of the rapidly diversifying commercial food market, health companies preyed on the ignorance of consumers by getting totally unqualified ‘gurus’ to endorse one extreme way of eating to achieve ‘maximum physical health’, whatever that means.
We’ve lambasted these diets cults before but new evidence has come out to support the claims that if you’re a sane human person, to avoid these lifestyles like you would any other cult. Also, 98% of people who diet using these methods in order to lose wreight gain it back within five years… just saying.
The medical journal The Lancet have come out with some solid evidence that diets like Palaeolithic and Atkins are just a plain waste of time. Why is this important? Well, because most of the time, fad diets sustain because people don’t like to be told what to do. The majority of people that dismiss fad diets are non-scientist types like myself.
Using data from there American College of Nutrition, this journal showed how diets like low carb or low fat can have immediate changes but not always for the better. Class, direct your attention to the sexy graph below.
Image credit: The Lancet
Look at the truth, LOOK AT IT. This graph shows how low fat and low carb diets shows an initial decline in body weight (because you’re depriving your body of stuff it needs) and then a gain in weight because your body knows what’s good for you and figures out a way to get you eating more food.
It also shows that the difference between these two particular diets is minimal. In short, if you cut any nutrient out of your body, it will start to degrade. You might call it ‘slimming down’, we’ll keep calling it ‘malnourishment’. Zing.
Anyway, time for another sexy, sexy graph.
Image credit: The Lancet
Look at those curves, ooh. Anyway, this graph is the slam-dunk into a dumpster-fire that fad diets have had coming for a long while. This is a slightly more confusing graph but don’t fear, here’s the gist.
The big curve shows how our dramatic starts to these diets eventually normalise and within nine months we’re only 100-200 calories different to where we started. The dotted lines show how, basically, people lie about how well they’re doing on their diets.
At 12 months in, the dieters said that they were intaking 600 calories less than when they started, in fact, they overstated by a factor of six. Naughty, naughty.
Go for a bloody run every now and then, choke down a salad and live your life. For goodness sakes.
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