With the new year coming up, losing weight or trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle are among the top new year resolutions. It may seem like investing in a new fad diet is a great idea, they’re easy and seem to work right? Well it may be time to reconsider placing your trust in fad diets.
Mail Order Fad Diets
For busy people this may seem like the best option. Who wouldn’t want to just eat a pre-made meal 3 times a day and lose weight? No struggle, no counting, just weight loss right? Not always. These types of diets ONLY work if you don’t ever stray from the meal plan, exercise alongside the diet, and if you stick with it for life.
These plans are really expensive for results that heavily vary and don’t always build good habits. If you want to lose weight, you’ll want to keep it off too. When you don’t take the time to learn how to take care of your body through preparing meals and getting the gym, you don’t always gain a healthy lifestyle.
We get it though, you’re busy and having someone else cook your meals could really help! So, instead consider replacing just a few meals each week with LOCAL, WHOLE foods, like those meals offered by Elite’s own Fit Food MKE. The ingredients are fresh (never frozen), free from preservatives, and these meals are basic staples that you could easily learn to make on your own—Fit Food MKE owner and head chef, Michael Ruch even offers cooking workshops to help you learn! (Plus, it’s super convenient with pick-up at three of the Elite Sports Clubs locations each week!)
Diet Pills
These are scary. While taking a daily supplement is fine, be extremely careful when it comes to a diet supplement. Things like laxatives, appetite suppressants, and metabolism boosters usually don’t have dramatically positive results and come with some serious side effects. Not to mention, most diet pills don’t have lots of research to back them up. The FDA also doesn’t have to approve everything you can find online or on a shelf.
The goal is to maintain a healthy weight loss, and while some of these pills may help you shed a couple of pounds…they can also really hurt you. Don’t spend the money on a supplement when you can find lots of ingredients to boost metabolism in foods or boosting energy through sleep and exercise.
The 5 Bite Diet – Or any fad diets that involve skipping meals
Yep this is a real thing. You skip breakfast, and only take 5 bites of lunch and 5 bites of dinner. That’s it. You can have whatever you want for lunch and dinner, but you only get 5 bites. They say that you can mix in a healthy snack somewhere in there, but it’s not recommended.
Again, this diet is going to make you lose weight yes…but from starving yourself! Which is not healthy, doesn’t teach you how to properly take care of yourself, and can lead to binge eating or just giving up completely. So stay away from diets that make you skip meals or not eat when you need to.
Diets That Tell You To Eat Only One Thing
When fad diets tell you to eat only raw food, only juice, or only things that aren’t dairy, wheat, carbs, or meat can be really bad for you. Depriving your body of a wide variety of nutrients can lead to deficiencies which can cause serious medical issues.
Once again, limiting what you’re eating to just one specific thing is not good. And drinking only juice for a week at a time? Who needs that? Gross.
What you should do…
Get to the gym. Meet with a nutritionist. Make a plan. When you learn to prepare meals, get some exercise in, and get good sleep, after a while it becomes habit and pounds and stress will stay away. Not to mention, you won’t bleed your bank account dry from frozen diet meals or pills. So make your weight loss New Year’s resolution into habit, so next year your new year’s resolution can be a fun trip, a new car, or picking up a new hobby.
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