These Old Trends Won’t Do You Any Favors
Whether it’s the current obsession with keto or juicing, or old trends like SlimFast and Weight Watchers, some diets just aren’t good for your physical and mental health. But with so many always trending on social media, it can be hard to avoid all that buzz. Instead, we recommend learning healthy eating and exercising habits that will be easier to maintain long term. To give you an idea of what to avoid, here’s a list of 20 diets that are terrible for your body.
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1. Obsessing Over Counting Calories
Though you’d think this is a healthy way to diet, counting calories encourages an unhealthy obsession with food. This diet requires constant vigilance and attention to how many calories are in each food item. These anxieties can cause serious mental health conditions if left unchecked.
2. Using Diuretics and Laxatives
By leaching water from the body, these drugs only contribute to weight loss by helping you lose water weight in the short term. These pills also stop the body from properly absorbing nutrients which could lead to significant health problems.
3. Grapefruit Diet
A grapefruit a day keeps the doctor away, or so thought people in the 1930s. Using the belief that an enzyme in this fruit can help increase metabolic function, people theorized that a daily grapefruit would be good for weight loss. But those consuming only grapefruits each day suffered serious nutrient deficiencies.
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4. Ephedra
This is just one of many weight loss pills out there. Ephedra is a combination of ephedrine and caffeine used to suppress appetite. After consistent heart-related issues, the drug was ultimately removed from the market in the 1990s.
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5. SlimFast
The idea behind SlimFast is that it provides all the necessary nutrients in an easy ready-made drink. However, adopting a healthy lifestyle is half of the work. Because people don’t bother making these changes, they usually regain the weight anyway. There’s also concern for heart-related problems with consistent heavy use.
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6. Atkins
This is a carb-free diet where people avoid complex starches and eat protein-heavy meals. However, excessive animal fats can increase the risk of heart disease and cancer. It’s also another diet where the weight is easily regained.
7. Juicing
Juicing involves consuming only fruit and vegetable juices to reduce calories, all without navigating complicated dietary rules. Sadly, these diets lack fiber which can cause spikes in blood sugars and lead to sugar crashes.
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8. Charcoal Cleanse
This trend adds activated charcoal to a juicing diet. The idea is that it passes through your system untouched and clings to toxins in your body. The thing is, charcoal only passes through the intestines and tends to suck out nutrients. If you want to avoid toxins, cut out processed foods instead.
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9. Macrobiotic Diet
A strict vegan, whole-grain diet such as this has many issues. First, it lacks nutrients and many of the food options are high in salt. Next is the stress associated with maintaining such a strict diet—people often slip up with this much demand.
10. The Baby Food Diet
If it’s good enough for our kids, surely baby food must be the way to go, right? The answer is no. As adults, we need more than sixteen jars of baby food each day. Such an extreme nutrient deficiency fosters unhealthy relationships with food and weight loss.
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11. Cotton Ball Diet
Dip five cotton balls in either orange juice, lemonade, or a smoothie and eat them as a means to curb hunger. It’s as bad for your health as it is crazy. Associated risks include bowel obstructions and malnutrition (among other things).
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12. Paleo Diet
Revisiting the caveman days, this diet includes foods like naturally raised meat, vegetables, and fruit grown without pesticides. However, it’s unbalanced and leads to vitamin and mineral deficiencies particularly harmful to bone health. Excessive meat eating can also increase your risk of kidney and heart disease.
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13. Ketogenic Diet
One of the more recent trends, the keto diet involves high fat, protein, and extremely low carbohydrate intake. The nutrient deficiencies associated with keto can be linked to an increased risk of heart disease, low blood pressure, and more. Regardless of how good it sounds, we can’t recommend it.
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14. Whole30 Diet
This diet seems manageable—it’s a 30-day promise to avoid sugars, dairy, alcohol, grains, and heavily processed foods. However, these restrictions often worsen food cravings and create unhealthy relationships with food. Add to that side effects like digestive problems and reduced nutrient intake, and it’s no wonder this diet made our list.
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15. Intermittent Fasting
There are many variations of intermittent fasting, but we’re focusing on eating normally within an eight-hour timeframe each day. Those limitations have many negative side effects, ranging from worsened hunger, headaches, digestive issues, mood swings, and even sleep disturbances.
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16. Weight Watchers
Weight Watchers’ SmartPoints system promotes a freestyle meal plan, allocating a budget of SmartPoints to use throughout the day. While this isn’t exactly calorie counting, it is still obsessive food tracking, which could lead to unhealthy eating habits. It also encourages nutrient-deficient choices.
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17. HCG Diet
Combining daily injections of HCG and only 500 calories a day, this diet reports quick and significant weight loss. However, risks associated with rapid weight loss include heart failure, kidney failure, and more. There’s no benefit worth that kind of risk.
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18. Apple Cider Vinegar Diet
This trend involves taking apple cider vinegar before each meal to help curb your appetite. While not as harmful as others, it can still cause throat irritations and affect the efficacy of certain diuretics and insulin. This terrible diet just isn’t worth it.
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19. Cigarette Diet
It’s an old trend, but still worth mentioning. The cigarette diet was a marketing scheme of the 1920s that advertised the appetite-suppressing benefits of tobacco. By now, the issues with this diet are well-known around the globe. Smoking causes issues with vascular, respiratory, and fertility systems. It’s also one of the leading causes of cancer, and not worth any potential weight loss.
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20. Tapeworm Diet
Did you know that tapeworms can live in your body for up to thirty years? That hasn’t stopped some people from willingly eating live tapeworms to help lose weight. We don’t have to spell out the danger—cysts and infections associated with tapeworms are life-threatening.
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