The fad diet. It seems like the term has been around as long as the diet industry itself. If you queried most American’s, you would likely find that vast majority would associate that term with a negative experience. Yet, many American’s enthusiastically participate in fad diets every year? Why do we continue to explore every new diet trend, from the reasonable to the absurd, in our efforts to slim down? Perhaps, more critically, why are fad diets bad to begin with?
So, why are fad diets popular even though we likely know in our heart of hearts that results will be fleeting if we get any results at all. We aren’t psychologists here at TMP, but we do know the diet industry and how it markets itself. Losing weight isn’t easy, so overweight folks are on a seemingly constant look out for ways to make dieting less difficult. Fad diets pray on this and they market themselves in ways that are appealing to people who have failed at other diets, who are desperate to lose weight quickly, and who don’t have the will power to go about losing weight in proven, long-term solutions.
Desperation is a powerful force, and it is the core driver behind the fad diet industry. The need to fit into a dress for a wedding in two weeks can drive a perfectly sane and practical woman to abandon all logic and only eat blueberry’s for 12 days straight. A competitive middle aged dad might scorn bread and pasta for months after getting crushed by his 11 year old boy in a backyard game of hoops. We all have our motivations, and in general we don’t have a lot of patience. We expect results and we expect them now. Even though we didn’t gain our extra 25 lbs in one month, we want to get rid of it all in that time frame.
And thus, we get to the crux of the problem. Why fad diets are bad. Fad diets might not be inherently bad if used properly, but they aren’t marketed as a long-term solution. They are marketed to get our attention, with promises of massive weight loss that is easy as drinking a glass of water a couple of times a day. They take a premise such as reducing the amount of carbs you consume and take it to an extreme…go ahead and eat all the burgers you want, just skip the bun and you will shed pounds and look like you did when you were 18.
The biggest problem with fad diets is they set you up for failure from day one. You go into the diet with unrealistic expectations. You partake in extreme dieting behavior that is unsustainable long-term. You might see pleasing results in as little as a week, but that pleasure will flag soon thereafter as you tire of your odd ball and restrictive eating regime. Do the Atkins folks really expect you to never eat carbs again for the rest of your days?
The past 60 years are littered with fad diets that were ‘the solution’ at one time or another. Yet, America continues to get more and more obese. Ayds didn’t work in the 60’s, why do people think the acai diet will in 2010?