Fad Diets Drowning In Their Cabbage Soup

How long do you plan to stick with your next weight loss regime? In 2004, an eDiets study of 12,000 people found that just 30 per cent of those making New Year's weight loss resolutions expected to keep them until February. More recently, a study by PurHealth, a private medical insurer in the U.K., found that the average Brit who intended to begin dieting on January 1, 2008 expected to stay on track for 78 days -- until March 17.

The difference is substantial, and PruHealth points to it as evidence that the popularity of short-term, fad diets is beginning to wane.

More dieters planning long-term regimes

"It's encouraging to see a common move towards a long-term healthy start to 2008, rather than people opting for more short-term fixes," said PruHealth's marketing director Katie Roswell.

In total, 62 per cent of the 3,000 respondents in the PruHealth study said they were planning to embark on a weight loss program at the start of the year. Of this group, 35 per cent said they would implement permanent lifestyle changes as part of their weight loss efforts, rather than simply engage in tactical post-Christmas fat dumps.

Fad diets received a boost over the last few years from celebrities such as Beyoncé Knowles, who claims she dropped 20 pounds on the so-called maple syrup diet (maple syrup, lemon juice, water and cayenne pepper). The cabbage soup diet, another fad weight loss strategy, involves eating nothing but cabbage soup for seven days. The promised result is weight loss of 10 to 15 pounds. To these, one must add the various low-carb diets, which peaked in popularity part-way through 2004.

Starvation dieters unpleasant to be around

If you care about your health, you'll give these kinds of diet programs wide berth. They'll cause loss of muscle tissue, leave you feeling weak and doubtless make you unpleasant to be around. And when you go off them, you're likely to head straight for the buffet table and put the weight right back on.

While the PruHealth study unearthed relatively strong support for healthy dieting strategies, the study unfortunately does not make a case for a trend in this direction. It's interesting that the respondents in the British study took a longer-term view towards weight loss than the respondents in the American study did a few years earlier. But the studies focused on respondents living in two different countries, and without knowing the specifics of the research, one cannot conclude that public attitudes towards fad diets are changing.

That said, the recent flare-up of hype around fad diets probably peaked in 2006 with the release of the Beyoncé flick Dreamgirls. So it's reasonable to expect that interest in these diets could be waning.

Permanent lifestyle change is key

Traditional health experts consistently offer the same message when it comes to weight loss. A good diet program mixes calorie reduction with regular exercise and stresses permanent lifestyle changes to ensure the weight stays off.

Fad diets do none of these things. Instead, they hype outsized results that lure the uninformed and the desperate. People are gradually becoming more aware of the importance of sounding dieting and weight loss approaches, but it sure would be nice to have the celebrities on the right side of the message instead of the wrong side.

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