Pros & Cons of Popular Diets

The article below is from http://www.bodyrecomposition.com

The Pros and Cons of Popular Diets Although it’s common to criticize or dismiss all commercial approaches to dieting, the reality is that they have their pros and cons. On the one hand, diets with relatively simple rules about food intake often generate better adherence and work as well as more complicated approaches, especially in the early stages of behavior change. The relatively simple rules (typically in terms of what can or cannot be eaten) remove the need to make constant food choices which can ultimately cause a great degree of psychological stress.

This assumes that the dietary approach itself meets certain nutritional requirements. Many commonly made nutritional recommendations that are made, both in terms of overall diet structure and food choices can drastically impact on a woman’s overall health along with her menstrual cycle (if it’s present). Any dietary approach should at least meet the guidelines I’m going to present in the next chapters in at least a general sense and especially in terms of overall nutrient intake and food choices. Many diets that are often held up as healthy frequently are not; in the worst case they may be actively detrimental to a woman’s health. Recall for example that vegetarian dietary patterns may be associated with menstrual cycle dysfunction in their own right under certain conditions.

Perhaps a bigger issue is that many dietary approaches that exist are nothing more than short-term diets that do little more than cycle water weight off the body with no attention to actually changing body composition or making any sort of long-term behavior change that can possibly be maintained in the long-term. These are the classic “fad” diets and there are endless versions of them. Juice fasts, all soup diets, only eating a single food every day, a popular fad diet decades ago was based around grapefruit and coffee. There are no shortages of this and any minor finding in obesity research that might be beneficial will rapidly be turned into a quick-fix diet of one sort or another.

Endless versions of these can be found in the types of magazines found at the grocery store checkout counter. Claims that eating some specific food will ramp up thyroid hormone metabolism and melt the fat off, anyone reading this book has seen it before. They all make absurd promises that never work and have no chance of generating results or being sustainable in the long-term. The same types of media frequently provide equally poor advice about exercise. The types of dietary or health advice given by celebrity trainers and television shows is usually just as awful. With no exception I’ve ever found, this advice should be ignored on every level. It hasn’t ever worked, it can’t work, it won’t work.

Which isn’t to say that all commercial or popular diet and exercise advice is inherently terrible. Just most of it. Other approaches and sources of information do exist that, at least sometimes, provides a decent approach to weight and fat loss and I want to look at a few of them. Once again I’d primarily suggest that any reader considering one of the following approaches compare it at least generally to my recommendations in the next chapters; so long as it is close to my recommendations, it should be sufficient.

Having been told that calories don’t count, people fall into the trap of thinking that these foods can be eaten without limit. Quite in fact, people frequently justify eating more of the diet approved foods. In the 80’s, for example, it was found that dieters allowed themselves to eat more of a yogurt that they thought was non-fat compared to the higher-fat version. Low-carb dieters now will use enormous amounts of fat on their foods and paleo dieters eat handful after handful of high-calorie nuts. And these three factors end up derailing the diet and the results it was generating. Calorie intake is increasing as energy expenditure is decreasing and eventually the person comes back into energy balance and hits a plateau.

And this is where the single largest problem with these types of dietary approaches shows up. Having been sold from the outset that calories don’t matter or don’t have to be controlled or restricted so long as the diet’s simple rules are followed, dieters refuse to accept that their calorie intake is now too high. Or that it will have to be reduced or even monitored. You can go to any online diet support forum and find people casting about for every possible reason that they are no longer losing weight while refusing to accept the only one that matters: their calories are no longer low enough to generate fat loss and a plateau occurs.