When youre trying to lose weight, there are bookshelves, websites and TV shows full of people trying to sell you a dream. They say that you can lose weight quickly and easily, without any hard work, because of their new discovery. If a few people try it and it works for them, the press report it, and before anyones had time to investigate the health implications or the long-term effects, weve got a fad diet on our hands.
Fad diets, basically, are diets that attempt to help you lose weight by making drastic changes to what you eat or some other element of your lifestyle, often telling you to only eat one thing or to avoid certain kinds of food completely. Now, Im not saying that they cant help you lose weight, as many of them can people on Atkins-like diets, for example, really do lose weight very quickly. But what people dont think about is the long-term.
So youve lost all those pounds on a fad diet, great. What next? You have a choice: either go back to your normal diet, or keep eating in a completely crazy way. If you dont want to keep on eating lettuce (or whatever) for the rest of your life, then youre stuck, and youll just have to go back to your bad old...