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Cons of Fad Diets

Fad diets can easily be recognized because they sound too good to be true. Often celebrities endorse these diets on television, making you believe that it's easy to lose weight. Fad diets promise quick weight loss with minimal effort and distinguish "good" foods from "bad foods." They may help you lose weight, but you may also suffer many negative consequences as a result.

  1. Cost of Fat Diets

    • When a fad diet is advertised there is no emphasis put on how much you will have to pay to start and maintain the diet. Diets like Atkins, South Beach and The Zone conveniently have bars, shakes and ready-to-eat meals available to you in the grocery store and on their websites. These fad diets claim that using these products as snacks and meal replacements will help you lose weight. You may end up losing weight, but meanwhile, your wallet will also be thinner.

    Short Term

    • Instead of adjusting your lifestyle for the long run, you can only keep up fad diets for a short amount of time because they are very extreme. Fad diets require you to eat certain foods and give up others, which can get boring. The Cabbage Soup Diet for instance, promises 10 pounds of weight loss in seven days, providing dieters stick to set foods that are allowed. This diet encourages you to eat at home because restaurants don't serve the foods that are allowed on the diet.

    Side Effects and Diseases

    • To maintain your health, you need to eat a large variety of foods. Advertisements for fad diets neglect to tell you about the possible side effects and health risks of the diet. Restricting calories, certain foods and entire food groups can lead to nutritional deficiencies in iron and potassium. Many fad diets require you to drastically reduce your carbohydrate intake. Carbs are used by your body for energy. Since carbs are not available, your body will get energy from muscle tissue to keep your brain functioning. This may lead to liver or kidney failure, a stroke or heart attack.

    Weight Gain

    • Fad diets only work when you are on them and stay on them. As soon as you stop dieting and start eating normal, you gain all the weight back. This is because quick weight loss is not weight loss from fat, but from water and muscle tissue. Gaining the weight back can trigger you to start dieting to lose it all again. Eventually you may end up in a yo-yo dieting cycle that can possibly lead to eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia nervosa.

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