I betcha never heard someone say that so bluntly.
It’s true though. We all know it’s true. You’ve probably tried several fad diets. Almost all of them worked for the first week; right?
If you eat all meat for a week, you’ll probably lose weight. If you eat all lettuce for a week, you’ll probably lose weight. In fact, if you eat chocolate cake and nothing else for an entire week, you’ll probably lose weight! You’ll probably feel awful, but you’ll probably lose weight even on a chocolate cake diet.
But then the next week comes around. What happens? You don’t feel so good about your diet anymore. You feel dull and listless. You don’t have the energy you would like to have. That new and exciting diet plan now looks like “more of the same” and doesn’t excite you at all.
Have you been there? Have you been all excited about the Atkins diet because you could eat all of the eggs, bacon and steak you ever wanted? How long did that last? How did you feel during week #2 or week #3? Did you crave a simple piece of toast or a bagel to go along with that omelette and greasy bacon? I sure did.
Those observations are obvious to everyone. Everyone has gone on a fad diet and seen that it absolutely works. Some of those fad diets work too good. You can end up losing more weight in a single week than is even healthy. You can lose more weight than you could by even fasting!
But then a day comes that you are just fed up with feeling lousy and you just know that you can’t go for the rest of your life without ever having ______ again. That blank is different for every fad diet, but it always exists. You simply can’t have an eating plan that allows for weight loss without giving up something. That’s what makes it an eating plan or a diet. You don’t eat something.
What happens when you get fed up? You binge… or maybe you just quit dieting and eat whatever that something was. Regardless, you gain weight just as rapidly as you lost it. The yo yo.
What’s the solution? The solution I found is to switch diets every week. It’s a proven system that has been successfully used by dieters for ages. How do the movie stars stay slim on fad diets? You hear about the hollywood diet or the cabbage soup diet or the negative calorie diet or any of a number of other fad diets often from hollywood. You tried them. They worked for a week. Then they stopped working and you gave up. How the heck do they work for those hollywood stars when they didn’t work for you?
It’s because those hollywood stars are constantly switching between fad diets!
It’s that simple. Switch your diet or eating plan weekly and you won’t get tired of the fad diet you are on. You will also continue to lose weight and won’t experience plateaus. Those plateaus are your body learning about your new eating plan and compensating to keep you from starving. If you constantly change diets, your body has no opportunity to learn how to stop the weight loss process.
It’s that simple.
Now, of course there are other considerations. Your health is a huge one!
Of course, switching eating plans weekly is very healthy. It gives you a wide variety of nutrition.
However, diet selection can cause health problems. Remember when I said that eating chocolate cake and only chocolate cake for a week would probably result in weight loss? That’s probably true. However, you will feel awful because you will be torturing your body. That’s not healthy at all!
There are fad diets that are healthy (for a week at a time) and there are fad diets that are not healthy. Switching diets alone will cause weight loss, but if you want to remain healthy, you will still choose diets that are low in processed sugar, free of insecticides, fresh, and full of nutrition.
But there are still a ton of fad diets to choose from. Look through the past blog entries to see what I have tried. Some may be unhealthy if used for longer than a week (such as eating all meat… or fasting… or a juice fast), but if you use them for only a week… your body will still get it’s wide variety of nutrition spread throughout the month.
The fact is that fad diets do work. You know that from experience. You’ve tried them and they worked… and worked very well… for a week or two.
Put that experience to work. Don’t do a fad diet for longer than a week or two. When you are finished though, switch to a new fad diet and enjoy that weight loss for a week or two!
-James D. Brausch
9 Comments
I agree James fad diets do work! You’re absolutely right. But what we do after the initial 10-14 day period is key. I have lost lots of weight on fad diets but never seemed to keep it off. That’s because after losing those first 10 pounds, I felt great and wanted to celebrate and reward myself with an extra large pepperoni pizza and 6 pack of beer. I gained back all the weight and a bad attitude towards food and dieting altogether. However, these days I’m finding that after the initial weight loss I’m continuing to choose foods that keep me energized and in a good mood. Most of the time this works. Thanks for the new info.
Haha haha…. I love your contraversial chocolate cake diet! I really doubt if that one would work unless it was low calorie cake.
Surely you agree that if you eat more calories than you burn that you will get fat
Anyway I think most of us would be sick of chocolate cake by the end of the week!
James, i am kinda surprised that you haven’t come out with any weight loss products here yet?
Or is it that you don’t consider yourself an authority yet as you still have 40lbs to go?
John
Hi John,
No; I surely do not agree with your ridiculous claim that if you eat more calories than you burn that you will get fat.
I understand that has been taught, but it is ridiculous on the face of it. It assumes that you will metabolize 100% of calories that you take in… which is a rather bizarre assumption and has been proven wrong many, many times.
There are a ton of other factors at play as well. None of the best working “fad” diets play on the “low calorie” angle. Everyone knows that doesn’t work. In fact, most people have already figured out that you must take in more calories if you wish to lose weight.
Try a simple three day experiment if you are still brainwashed.
1. Eat nothing but fat for one day. Eat exactly ___ grams. Use foods that are almost 100% fat with no protein or carbohydrate content such as oil or cream cheese.
2. Eat nothing but protein for one day. Eat exactly ___ grams (same as the fat grams). Use whey isolate or casein isolate shakes mixed with water to control it at 100% protein with no fat or carbs.
3. Eat nothing but sugar the next day. Eat eaxtly ___ grams (same as the fat and protein days).
Fat has 9 calories per gram. Carbs and protein has 5 calories per gram.
How do you explain your weight loss on the fat day? You had more calories than the other two days.
How do you explain your weight gain on the carb day? You had less calories that day!
How do you explain the weight gain or neutral weight on the protein day? What do you think happened if you actually measure your body fat percentage? How did muscle go up and fat go down? It was the exact same number of calories as the sugar day and less calories than the fat day!
It’s just a very bizarre theory. It’s hard to believe that anyone accepts that the body is so simplistic anymore… especially after having literally millions act on that theory and having it instantly disproven when they diet plan fails because it was based on that theory.
So no… I surely don’t believe that nonsense!
-James D. Brausch
Thank you for submitting your post to Carnival Of Tips!
You may want to pick up the February issue of Glamour. It has an interesting article on celebrity fad diets and the lengths people go to to lose weight.
Hey James,
I agree that the body is a bit more complex than people give credit for.
Whilst you may not get fat by consuming more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. So you can increase your muscle mass and not put on body fat. I just thought the distinction between the 2 deserves merit.
Generally, I agree that low calorie diets are a poor way to get lean, but at the same token I don’t want people to erroneously think that they can stuff there faces and lose weight.
I always tell people to focus on boosting the calories out (increasing metabolic rate) rather than trying to reduce calories. I wrote about it in this article:
When my hubby was a lot younger he did an almost all ice cream diet for awhile and he did lose - but it’s definitely not a long term or recommended solution.
I think switching diet plans once in awhile or even weekly though is very sound advice (as long as the food eaten is the healthy variety) - that way your body doesn’t get used to a certain pattern and amount of calories. Alternating the amount calories every other day or a couple days a week can also be a good way to keep your metabolism revved up.
I agree, of course Fad diets work. If you want to quickly shed a few pounds then fad diets are the way to go. Mainting a healthy lifestyle however is a different matter.
Reminds me of the Snicker’s Bar diet that we tried in high school. You lose weight all right and you are so sick of Snicker’s after about three days of it!
You’re kidding, right?
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