As the media presence increases and self acceptance decreases, people want to lose weight and they want to do it now. According to The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, 91% of women on a college campus have tried controlling weight through dieting. Senior Lauren Gorny says, “I’ve tried plenty of diets, I feel like most girls have.” As a result, fad diets have become the new “it” thing. These diets promise drastic weight loss in an extremely short amount of time. These diets may seem legitimate but most do not work, work for a short amount of time or are dangerous for your health in the long run.

One of the more “doable” diets is the five-bite diet. This entails taking five bites out of any food you want for lunch and dinner. They recommend drinking plenty of water and supplementing your diet with multi-vitamin pills. This diet will cause a rapid decline in weight but with this comes unwanted side effects. Dramatic weight loss causes malnutrition, hair loss, and headaches. Your body will then go into survival mode by slowing down your metabolism and giving you little energy to do anything.

Liquid diets have also become a new trend. One such plan is the lemonade diet. This entails drinking lemonade-like drinks, salt-water and herbal laxative tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This diet will help you lose weight but, like the five-bite diet, you are starving your body. No solid foods are allowed and after 10 days, you slowly introduce food back into your diet. As soon as you go back to eating normal food, all of the weight will come right back. Detox diets are unnecessary if they are harmful to your health, the liver generally takes care of detoxifying your body on a daily basis.

Lastly, is the baby food diet. This involves eating up to 14 jars of baby food throughout the day then having real food for dinner. These jars range from 20 to 100 calories each. This is typically done to keep off weight that was already lost. This diet causes a nutritional imbalance that starves your body of things it needs. Your body cannot survive on this diet long term and will eventually shut down.

Please remember that fad diets are not worth their cost to your health. If you are looking to lose weight, the best way is a balanced diet and exercise. For more tips on healthy eating visit http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/healthy_eating/.

Resources:

Lemonade: http://www.webmd.com/diet/lemonade-master-cleanse-diet

Baby Food: http://www.webmd.com/diet/baby-food-diet#

Five-Bite: http://www.smashyourscale.com/blog/the-five-bite-diet-is-an-eating-disorder-diet/

http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/