My Beef with Meat by Rip Esselstyn

Author:Rip Esselstyn [ESSELSTYN, RIP]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781455544554
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

35

Be Done with Dumb Diets

The dieting world is full of magic bullets. The reality is they are all piggies wearing different-colored lipstick: low-carb, no carb, all carb, dark carb, net carb, blood type, caveman, Paleo, primal, cookie, warrior, monk, and a dictionary full of other made-up names to go with made-up claims.

What do these diets have in common? They don’t tend to work. The reason is simple: Most fad diets are based on calorie restriction (aka starving yourself). They dress it up in a lot of colorful costumes, but it usually boils down to the same strategy: Eat fewer calories than your daily requirement, and you will lose weight.

This is more or less true—as long as you don’t read the fine print stating that you will gain all your weight back when you start eating normally again. One of the most comprehensive analyses of dieting ever done found that almost everyone who followed leading fad diets eventually gained back whatever weight they had lost within six months (other studies have found the weight comes back within two years).

In fact, in some of the studies, being on a diet almost guaranteed that over time, a person would actually gain more weight than they had lost!

The real problem with fad diets (well, outside of the fact that they don’t work) is that they aren’t designed to be healthy. They are designed to make you lose weight. But you can’t keep the weight off unless you are eating healthily.

See where this is going?

Like a good soldier you follow the diet for a while, but eventually you break rank and return to overeating. Dieticians call this process “restriction-binge” cycles, and they lead to yo-yo dieting, or losing weight and gaining it back again… and again and again. This kind of weight loss has been linked to a weakened immune system, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes.

The worst types of diets, such as crash diets, are starvation marathons with a bit of liquid allowed to fool your body into thinking it isn’t cannibalizing itself. Although you initially lose weight, in the long term you don’t because your body responds to starving by slowing your metabolism while eating into your muscles. Even when you start eating normally again, your metabolism remains depressed, causing you to gain more weight from less food. On top of that, these diets deprive you of vitamins and minerals, dehydrate you, and even weaken your heart.

Doing one once probably won’t hurt you, but doing it multiple times (essentially yo-yo dieting) has been linked to an increased risk of heart attacks. One of the original liquid diets, the “Last Chance Diet,” allowed for just 300 calories a day and was linked to sixty deaths from heart disease. As for the “cleansing” properties that these diets claim—well, hooey. That’s what you have a liver and kidneys for.

Fad diets that often limit or nix healthy foods are almost always based on gaga theories demonizing one specific nutrient in order to convince you that cutting it out of your diet is all you need to lose weight.

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