Fad Diets

I found a new blog I want to share with you, Not Your Mama’s Diet. I have been taken aback at times when reading this blog, I find myself thinking, I could have written this post.

As I was cruising through my Reader, I found a post by the Queen B on the topic of the fad diets she has given ‘the college try’. A large part of my diet history has been the diet plans I have given ‘the college try’.

Like the Queen, I am strangely drawn to shows on cable that profile people with enormous amounts of weight to lose, and the surgeries they endure in their transformation. The more gruesome the show, the more likely I am to watch; Discovery Health and Discovery Times offer the best. They run profiles on the 38,000 Calorie Diet, The 600 lb. Woman, 150 lbs of Skin, and so on. Each of them show some grotesquely obese person filmed to maximize the repulsing factor. Generally most of these shows talk about how the subject had rode the roller-coaster of fad diets. Such as the ones listed on their blog…

• Liquid diet
• Atkins
• South Beach
• Suzanne Somers
• Weight Watchers
• Jenny Craig
• Medical Weight Loss
• Metabolife
• Detox
• Colonics
• Juicing
• Raw foods
• Maple Syrup Diet
• Astrology Diet
• Blood Type Diet
• Cookie Diet (I’d be interested in this one. Especially if it involves Oatmeal Raisin)
• Tapeworm (I’ve wished that I had one on more than one occasion)
• Medi-fast
• Phen-Fen
• Prism
• Cabbage Soup
• … and so on

I have put the ones that I have tried in bold, and like those unfortunate souls on the shows I mentioned above, I gained more weight back than I lost. Even the one that I am currently following and having success with, can be a fad diet. It is for those people that jammed into meetings right after the New Year to make 2008 the year to finally lose the weight. The ones that jammed into the gym right after the new year, to make 2008 the year they turn their lives around. The ones that have already given up because it isn’t as easy as they let on to be from the cover of People Magazine or in the latest best seller.

To really make them work, they can’t be a ‘diet’ as we understand it in popular culture, it must be a diet in the true sense of the word. A diet is what you eat as a part of your lifestyle. If eating moderate servings, sanely accommodating ‘eating events’, and burning more calories than you take in (or taking in just what you need for energy, once you are where you want to be); that’s not a diet, that is a healthy lifestyle.

What are some of the crazy things you have done to lose a few pounds?