Fruit and Vegetable Diets—Don’t Waste Your Time
Deep down everyone knows that there is no miracle weight loss. Technology and innovation are zipping life through all kinds of rapid changes. But the saying “easy to put it on, hard to take it off” is as true today as it has ever been. There are still no fast and healthy options for losing weight. Fruit and vegetable diets are not an exception to this reality.
The Grapefruit Diet and the Cabbage Soup Diet are prime examples of alleged fruit and vegetable cures for extra weight. These diets proclaim that if you restrict yourself to a few healthy and natural foods, you will lose a lot of weight in a short period of time. Because the foods involved are those that we have been taught to recognize as good foods, you may be tempted to follow the path of many others who believe that these are ideal diets.
Restrictive fruit and vegetable diets are not ideal. They are not natural. And they most certainly are not healthy. Any diet that restricts you to one particular food or food group is a fad and a waste of time.
Fad diets take you for a ride that gets you nowhere. The results are never sustainable. People torture themselves to lose weight quick. They enjoy an emotional moment of accomplishment. Then, just as quickly, the unwanted weight returns.
The Cabbage Soup Diet and others like it con people by exploiting two factors—water weight and calorie restriction.
65% of the body is composed of water. Therefore, a body that is dehydrated will weigh less. But water weight loss only changes the number on the scale, not your appearance.
People can be fooled into thinking that because they are taking in lots of liquid, dehydration is not a possibility. In reality, it takes more than consuming liquids to keep the body properly hydrated.
The Grapefruit Diet is one that attracts people on the premise that grapefruits burn fat. The truth is that grapefruits are insufficient nutrition that starve people. The FDA stresses that there is absolutely no food or combination of foods on Earth that are capable of burning fat.
There are about 80 calories in a grapefruit. The average daily calorie requirement is about 2000 calories for women and 2500 for men. A woman would need to eat 25 grapefruits per day to meet her requirements. If she manages, she will have showered her body with sufficient calories and a lot of Vitamin C but starved it of other necessary nutrients such as calcium, zinc and protein.
In most cases however, people on fruit and vegetable diets do not manage to take in sufficient calories. Normally, your body stores extra calories as fat. When you take in less than enough calories, your body burns stored fat for energy. This results in weight loss.
There reason that such weight loss cannot be sustained is because one day you will go back to eating normal amounts and varieties of food. And you cannot live in a permanent state of dehydration. As soon as you return to any semblance of normal eating you will begin to gain weight again.
Healthy diets require a balanced diet. And there is nothing balanced about cabbage soup for a week. Food is not a toy or a luxury. Food is a necessity. Your body is fueled by what you eat.
The real purpose of a diet is not to lose weight fast. Rather, you want to lose weight that you can keep off. To do this, a diet must entail reasonable modified eating behavior and exercise, not an intense fling with fruit and vegetables.