Every year, from what seems to be a place of nowhere, there is a list of trending diets for the new year. These diets promise the same thing every year, that you are going to lose tons of weight if you stick to their program and feel great about yourself.
Yeah, we’re not buying it anymore.
Why? Trendy diets are created for the masses, not the individual, so they don’t work.
First let’s look at the top ten trendy diets for 2015:
- Superfoods – Nuts, kale, Greek yogurt, coconut and avocado oil are all things that are good for you, so eat more of them to lose weight! Add these things to all your meals and you’ll watch the pounds melt off
- Green Tea – It’s good for you with lots of fancy scientific words that promise weight loss, duh!
- Paleo is out! – Red meat is bad for you; actually it’s so bad you should cut it out of your diet! If you do this and eat more chicken, eggs, seafood, nuts (yup again) you will lose weight!
- Gluten-Free Forever – Even though there is pretty much no evidence that supports removing gluten from your diet as a weight loss benefit, consumers will still cut it out of their diets. Why? Supposedly it makes you healthier and thinner.
- Ancient Grains – Contradicting the gluten free diet, this diet focuses on quinoa, spelt, freekah, amaranth, and other grains that we haven’t eaten in years probably because we can’t pronounce them. Hey try it though, you’ll probably lose weight.
There are 10 more trendy diets for this year and they are all as ridiculous and illogical. By cutting out one food group you may lose weight for a while, but in the long run you are going to deprive your body of essential nutrients that it may need and you are going to fall off the wagon and gain the weight back.
Yup, if you aren’t incorporating exercise into your diet plan forget seeing results long term. Dr. Mark Esienberg and his colleagues reviewed trendy diets and found that after a 12 month period; almost all consumers gained their weight back if not more. For those that exercised and ate a balanced diet, also known as giving your body everything and not depriving it of anything, they lost on average 13 pounds and kept it off.
Unfortunately with obesity at a record high in the United States, Canada, and other places in the world, consumers literally feed into marketing schemes. If you look at the trending diets for this year it’s easy to recognize none of them will work, but marketing will tell us they do. However, if you took all the trendy diets and incorporated them you may find a balanced diet. Grains and meat are important, you need them in your diet but a limited amount. Nuts are fatty, there’s zero scientific proof that coconut oil is ‘good for you’, and Greek yogurt has a lot of sugar when you get it with fruit however if you snack on nuts once a week, use a cleaner oil to cook with once a week, and eat plain low fat greek yogurt for breakfast than there’s nothing wrong with that. Sounds like common sense.
Hopefully for 2016 the trendy diet will be a balanced diet with fitness that is fun for each person.
By: Gabriella Leone, BabblingInk.com Author