Health Watch: Diets to Avoid this New Year
By Laura Donovan
Two and a half years ago, I returned from my Paris summer study abroad program 15 pounds heavier than I’d been at the beginning of the trip. Do the math and you’ll calculate that I gained 2.5 pounds a week. Though I couldn’t resist Nutella crepes or my host family’s creamy cappuccinos every morning, packing on that kind of weight in less than two months was damaging to my health, appearance, and wallet (I had to buy a new wardrobe!).
As soon as I arrived home, I went on several tearful treadmill binges and ruled out all carbs. The eight mile runs tired me out and organic meals kept my cravings in check, but I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t back to my pre-France weight within two weeks of being in the States.
There’s a good reason for that: There’s no healthy, sustainable way to shed tons of weight in a small window of time, even if you begin a hardcore exercise regimen. The weight may come off before you know it, but the pounds typically return in no time. Just like you don’t put on noticeable amounts of weight overnight, you cannot lose it overnight. If one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to slim down and improve your diet, here are some diets to pass on, as they only bring temporary results and could ultimately hurt your health:
The juice cleansing diet
It’s easy to look at an tiny celebrity on the cover of Us Weekly and suspect she knows the quickest route to Skinny City. Perhaps she does, but her method is likely unsustainable and unattainable for those who don’t spend eight hours a day with a personal trainer.
In 2006, singer Beyonce went on a “Master Cleanse” fasting diet to drop 20 pounds for her “Dreamgirls” role. Research claims the diet will cleanse and detoxify the body while also stimulating healthy tissue growth. According to Yahoo! News, the food-free diet is “a concoction of fresh lime or lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper mixed with water” accompanied by an “herbal laxative tea.” The diet may wipe your stomach of all its contents and flush out excess matter in your digestive tract, but you can’t survive off liquids forever. Beyonce said she had vegetables during the process, which usually lasts a little more than a week, but reported feeling cranky, especially when people around her enjoyed donuts.
Beyonce also put back on the weight soon after the diet ended, so while it got her in shape for the movie, the Master Cleanse did not hold up.
“As soon as it was over, I gained the weight back,” Beyonce said.
Rather than go for something that will only give you short-lived exceptional results, write up a long-term diet and work-out plan to remain physically active and health conscious for a substantial time period.
Starvation or no-carbs diets
Emily Blunt delivers a memorable but disturbing line in “The Devil Wears Prada,” the 2006 film in which she portrays a stuck-up fashion magazine assistant who will do anything to break into the industry. Though she hates that she has come down with a cold during a big event, Blunt’s character is flattered to hear she looks thin in her ensemble.
“I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight!”
If any of you have ever had the stomach flu, you know it’s just about the most unpleasant mechanism in the world to thin out. It’s also very bad for you, and the same goes for purposely eating as little as possible.
Cutting down on consumption seems like an obvious trick to dieting, but eating less can actually confuse your body into thinking it is starving, which subsequently slows your metabolism. To regain their svelte teenage figure, some people skip meals and deprive themselves of tasty carbs such as cheese, bread, pasta, and dessert, and while your body could use more greens and fruits in place of fatty foods, it also needs something to keep it going.
This New Year, don’t limit your meals or pride yourself on only munching on things only your great-grandmother would recognize. Instead, go by the standard three-meal-per-day plan and always remember to have breakfast.
“Often when it comes down to sleeping 10 minutes more or eating we choose sleep,” wrote Nadia Krasner, a PhD candidate and Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute trainee in Medical Nutrition at Boston University, in October. “Stop doing that! Eating breakfast is the number one best thing you can do for your day. It starts your metabolism, revs up your energy and puts you on pace for a good day.”
“The mystery isn’t why people are fat. It’s why they are still hungry after eating enough calories to sustain them,”’ Krasner said (and even that, in our fast-food world, isn’t a huge mystery— it’s very difficult for your body to estimate the energy density of highly processed foods). “Everyone that’s overweight has plain and simple eaten the calories to get there, what could be genetic or changed over a period of overeating is the satiety reflex and when the person feels full. An extra 10 calories a day translates to about a pound a year. If an apple is 50-100 calories, one extra a day calories worth of apple is 5-10lbs a year.”
To hold yourself accountable and track of your eating habits, it’s wise to keep a food diary with calorie counts, Krasner said. There’s also the obvious weight loss strategy, which is to hold off on fatty foods and carbs.
“Some simple advice: drop fats and simple carbohydrates, don’t drink your calories (i.e. juice, anything but non-fat milk, alcohol, and sodas) and increase high fiber vegetables, because they keep you fuller for longer,” Krasner said. “I would recommend the DASH diet for everyone, and I would recommend phases of integration of it depending on the health status of the person looking to lose weight.”
Acai pills
You don’t have to be a cynic to question some of the acai berry ads on television and the radio. Two years ago, the Center for Science in the Public Interest cautioned potential customers against falling into traps of companies offering free trials of acai berry diet pills.
Acai, a Brazilian fruit that comes in man forms (liquid, a pill, powder, juice) has been marketed as an antioxidant, antibacterial, and anti-inflammatory and is said to have Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids. Though acai seems to contain good stuff, CSPI wrote in a statement that weight loss claims were unfounded.
“There’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that acai pills will help shed pounds, flatten tummies, cleanse colon, enhance sexual desire, or perform any of the other commonly advertised functions,” the organization said in a press release.
David Grotto, author of “101 Foods That Could Save Your Life,” told WebMD that there is more to weight loss than consuming acai products.
“There is not any single food, including the super-healthy acai berry, that can provide the solution to weight loss,” Grotto said. “To lose weight, you need to control calories with a healthy lifestyle approach that includes plenty of physical activity, nutritious foods, and adequate rest.”
Crash diets
Wouldn’t it be nice to flatten your belly and shrink excess arm fat in a week’s time? A crash diet, which entails eating less than 1,200 calories a day, could help you get there, but not necessarily in the safest manner. According to Health magazine, crash diets have the ability to weaken your immune system and increase your chances of becoming dehydrated, experiencing heart palpitations, and going into cardiac stress.
“A crash diet once won’t hurt your heart,” said cardiologist Isadore Rosenfeld. “But crash dieting repeatedly increases the risk of heart attacks.”
Take care of your heart and body by eating a proper amount of calories every day. The average woman must have 2,000 a day, but if you’re a frequent exerciser, you can probably afford more calories than a sedentary individual. You’ll want to have good calories as well, as the healthy foods will energize and nourish you. When presented with a 460-calorie scone and plate of eggs, sourdough bread, and blueberries, I opt for the breakfast packed with protein and antioxidants, even though fluffy scones taxi me straight to Cloud Nine. Select the foods that will get you through the day rather than make you feel too full to do anything productive.
The keg diet
Back in college, some of my female hallmates came up with what they described as a “genius” way to fend off the freshman 15: to only consume beer, a provider of carbs. Even if you’re a proud beer-drinking girl, as I am, the all-beer diet is a terrible means to prevent weight gain (not to mention that it’s awful for your health). You’re not only depriving your body of the nutrients it needs, but poisoning it. So don’t believe that consuming beer and nothing else will lead you to a state of skinny, perpetually inebriated euphoria.
There’s a reason why all of these diets are out there: it’s because when you have a handle on your health and your weight, you feel better physically and you feel more in control of your life. And quick-e diets, crash diets, liquid diets— they’re all some marketer’s idea of how to prey on your desire to live a more satisfying life. But there’s no substitute for the real thing: better diet and more exercise. Unless you have a thyroid problem— there are medications for that. Go to the doctor.
Until next time, happy eating and exercising, and happy New Year!
