Nowadays, people will do anything to lose weight, and a never ending stream of fad diets take turns to be all the rage, with celebrities and magazines endorsing them, before giving way to another. Losing weight can be hard, but trust me, the cookie diet is not the answer. As a nutrition student, these diets got me feeling some type of way:
1. The cookie diet
If you could eat cookies all day and still lose weight, would you? Sounds almost too good to be true. Dr. Sanford Siegel created this diet in 2007 — the idea is that you eat a 60-calorie “specialized-formulated cookie” every two hours, and then a 500-700 calorie meal so you’ll never feel hungry and get to eat dessert. This diet works for some people because you are eating a calorie-restricted diet, but you’re missing out on all the important nutrients food has to offer.
2. The baby food diet
Want to feel like a kid again? With this diet, you literally can eat like a baby by replacing all of your meals except for dinner with baby food. Yeah, people lose weight, but that’s usually because the baby food tastes so awful they don’t want to eat it. You do deserve to enjoy your meals, so don’t punish yourself needlessly.
3. The vision diet
For this diet, you have to wear blue glasses to make your food look unappealing so you won’t want to eat it. Although these blue glasses are quite stylish, that’s about it, as far as the benefits go: this diet did not prove to be successful and just sounds completely ridiculous.
4. The fruitarian diet
Yup, you guessed it! With this diet, you only eat fruit. Sounds healthy right? Even though fruit is packed with nutrients, you can have too much of a good thing. Ashton Kutcher actually tried this diet before a movie and ended up in the hospital, so we recommend you stay far away from this one.
5. Gluten-free/low-carb
If you are allergic to gluten or if you have Celiac disease, then yes, you should not eat gluten. However, there’s nothing in gluten that will make you gain weight. Gluten is actually protein!
Low carbohydrate diets do help you lose weight, but in the long run, they slow down your metabolism. For each gram of glycogen stored, 3-4 grams of water is stored. Therefore, the weight you initially lose is water weight. After a little while, though, your body starts to go into starvation mode, and starts to adjust to under-consuming carbohydrates and will rely on less of them. This, in turn, slows down your metabolism, which you don’t want.
