Sixty billion dollars. That’s how much money is spent on dieting and trying to lose weight in America every year. The diet plans most people are interested in and buy are called fad diets. Fad diets are the majority of the diets that you see all around you in today’s world. They promise you they will help you lose weight fast. What they don’t tell you is what kind of weight you’ll be losing. That is the most important part but they omit that piece of information for many reasons. They don’t tell you that you will end up mainly losing water weight and lean body mass, which is actually good for you. You lose the wrong kind of weight because of the way fad diets are set up. While fad diets normally have you cut out a whole food group, traditional diets don’t. A traditional diet makes sure they incorporate every food group in your daily diet. An example of a traditional diet is the Food Pyramid. The food pyramid is taught to children at a young age to educate them on how to eat healthier in order to lead to a healthy life style. Just like fad diets there are many different traditional diets. These diets vary in every country due to the diverse cultures and food supply around the world. Traditional diets are healthier than fad diets due to fad diets short-lived success, the dangerous effects on the body, and how fad diets can lead to eating disorders. 

The Atkins diet, Paleo diet, Weight Watchers, and the Grapefruit diet are all examples of popular fad diets (Cloe, 1). They are advertised to help you lose weight fast. While they do normally deliver on that promise, the weight you lose isn’t normally long term considering that most of the diets are only for a few weeks. Traditional diets are for a life time. You can always spot a fad diet if they don’t include any exercise, restrict food selection, are nutritionally unbalanced, or fail to explain how to keep the weight off after the diet program is complete (Wener W.K.Hoeger, 171). One of the most popular diets is The Atkins Diet.  The Atkins Diet encourages the participate to lower their caloric intake to about 1,500 calories per day and decrease the amount of carbohydrates while increasing the fat and protein intake. Not having carbs in your diet can lead to neglecting the grains portion of a healthy meal. The Atkins Diet does help you lose weight initially although many people cannot stick to this diet for very long, therefore, the weight comes back as soon as they go back to eating regularly. Low calorie, high fat consumption, and neglecting a major food group applies to many fad diets. In traditional diets that is not the case. Traditional diets make sure to give you a balanced nutritional diet and do not take out any vital food groups. My Plate is a chart that shows the five main food groups needed for a healthy, balanced diet. This chart is used for many traditional diets along with the food pyramid. My Plate and the food pyramid suggest that you have fruits, vegetables, grains, protein, and dairy in every meal. While consuming fats only a few times a week (Wener W. K. Hoeger, 123). One of the biggest differences in these diets is how long the results truly last. In fad diets the participant has to cut out foods and not eat as much as their body might need. A person can only physically do a fad diet for a few months at the most. The moment they stop, the average person will go back to eating how they use to or at least more than they were eating on the diet. This is what contributes majorly to the short-lived success of fad diets. If these diets included all the nutrients and food groups they needed to they would be able to be done for more than just a few months. This is why traditional diets and exercise are the best way to lose weight. 

Another popular fad diet is the paleo diet where you are required to cut out even more of the main food groups. While on the paleo diet, they encourage you to cut out all cereal grains, legumes (beans), vegetable oils, added sugars, and dairy other than possibly full-fat dairy just because your body requires some form of dairy to live. This means not having two main food groups of a traditional healthy diet, grains and dairy. This diet is meant to be high in fat and protein and low in carbohydrates. Also, calorie counting and portion control is not encouraged for this diet. Restricting your caloric intake is okay as long as you are still getting at least 1500 calories a day (Wener W.K.Hoeger, 180). The way to lose weight is working out and losing more calories than you gained that day (Wener W.K.Hoeger, 180). Another key factor to this diet is the high amount of saturated fats. However, saturated fats are not good for you. They actually raise a person’s blood cholesterol level and for the best health results there should be only limited amounts in your daily diet (Wener W.K.Hoeger, 86-87). While protein can be very healthy before a workout or to keep your stomach feeling full, too much of it is not beneficial either. Especially when eating the fatty cuts of the meat as suggested. The dangers of cutting out these foods are high. By cutting out main food groups it can actually cause you to have nutritional deficiencies, lose hair and muscle, alter your metabolism, and even gain weight. Nutritional deficiencies can come from not taking in enough carbohydrates. You can become so fatigued that you won’t even be able to function properly considering carbs are a major source of energy for the body (Wener W.K.Hoeger , 83).  Due to the nutritional deficiencies, it is possible you can lose your hair and muscle mass. Protein is reduced or even sometimes cut out of many fad diets. Protein is the main nutrient needed for hair growth and muscle development. Without protein in your diet, your hair can become brittle and break very easily and your muscles cannot build up or maintained as well (DC, 639). On top of that, your metabolism has the possibility to change considering the average person would go from eating a bigger or average portion size to an extremely small portion size.  Your body sends signals when you are full so that it can help control your portions and not listening to these signals can slow down your metabolism and have negative effects for a long time after finishing the diet (DC, 639). Finally, fad diets can also contribute to weight gain. Nutritionists stress traditional, healthy balanced diets mainly because they are able to be done long term. Adapting to a lifelong healthy diet is always going to be the most effective. When trying a fad diet the participant is only on it for a short amount of time and actually ends up only really losing water weight. Often people will gain the weight right back with some added weight too. 

While fad diets are known to have temporary results, and have dangerous effects on your body, it can also lead to eating disorders in some cases. Fad diets teach you to cut out certain foods in your everyday diet. While doing a study on adolescents, they counted the teenagers doing fad diets as being “unhealthy dieters” (Grigg, 2). In this same study they found that fad diets contributed to about fourteen percent of the eating disorders of teenage girls (Grigg, 3). Although that study was just about girls, it doesn’t only affect women, it affects men too. The way social media encourages and portrays fad diets leads to an increase in these obsessive disorders also. Fad diets are portrayed on social media or advertisements to be very beneficial so that people will try it. When they do, they see results but they do not always recognize that it is unhealthy results. Once a person sees that it gave them results they may try to keep going so they can lose even more weight and this is when the eating disorder may come into play (Diss, 1). When thinking of one of the most common eating disorders, anorexia nervosa, you think of someone who doesn’t eat that much food and most definitely doesn’t get all of the daily nutrients their body needs. That is the base of the majority of fad diets. You are starving yourself and not letting your body get the nutrients it needs.  

Even though fad diets are short-lived, dangerous for your body, and can lead to eating disorders, some people still believe they are helpful. Maybe they can be helpful in some ways. The main goal of fad diets is to help you lose weight fast and they definitely do their job when it comes to that. If you want to lose weight right before a trip to the lake, then this kind of diet could work for you. Another positive to fad diets is that they can help a person figure out what alternatives are out there for different food groups. For instance, grains have a healthier option of whole grains that some fad diets do tell you to eat. They can also teach you about portion control. As mentioned earlier, many of the fad diets do have participants cut down on their portion sizes for every meal. Although, there is a difference between healthy portion control and unhealthy portion control. Another reason fad diets can be helpful is how many fruits and vegetables are contained in them. Most fad diets do include a decent amount of fruits and vegetables which are packed with vitamins, antioxidants, and minerals that the body needs (Cespedes, 1). Another healthy quality of fad diets includes the emotional health and confidence they give people. The feeling you get when you look in the mirror and you see a difference or when you step on the scale and the number has gone down or just the feeling of feeling light makes your confidence go up. When a person’s confidence goes up and they feel good about themselves their whole mood changes and their day is generally happier. Fad diets can help you lose weight and losing weight helps get rid of emotional issues (Storz, 16). 

Ask yourself, would you like to lose weight only temporarily or for your lifetime? The average person would answer for a lifetime, as would I. Therefore, traditional diets are the way to go. They lead to a healthy lifestyle and a healthy lifestyle leads to a healthy you. Yes, fad diets can help you lose weight, but it is never the weight you want to lose and it is very hard to keep off for a lifetime. In traditional diets, you are able to keep the weight off forever by eating a little bit of every food group daily and by portion control. In fad diets you may learn how to portion control but they teach you to “portion control” to an extreme. Also, while trying to get the person to portion control they cut out so many main foods needed in a healthy diet but let you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. Vegetables and fruit are great for you but they can still be very good for you with other foods from different food groups too. Eating just two of the five main food groups is not healthy. Fad diets will help you lose weight which will help you gain confidence but that confidence will only be temporary. While with traditional, nutritionally balanced diets you can stay feeling light and healthy for your whole life. If someone is actually serious about losing weight long term and wanting to have an all around healthy life style they will stick to the traditional diets and do healthy portion control. A healthy lifestyle doesn’t only have to do with dieting. They say 80% of weight loss is contributed to dieting so yes, it is the main part of living healthy but not all of it. The other 20% is contributed to exercise and sleep. With that being said, exercise and the proper amount of sleep would not be as helpful for someone not on a healthy diet or that is partaking in a fad diet. The best way to obtain the health you want whether it’s because you have to in able to stay alive or just to look and feel better, traditional diets with exercise and at least 7-8 hours of sleep is the most commonly recommended.

America is obsessed with finding new ways to lose weight all the time, normally lazy ways that don’t take much effort. This is what leads to the unhealthy eating habits of Americans and the 60 billion dollars spent in the weight loss market every year. People being lazy and trying to take the easy way out is why they do fad diets. About 70% of fad diets fail to achieve the weight loss people want yet they are still commonly tried (Health, 1). Out of the 30% that may truly be successful 65% of the people end up to gain the weight right back after completing the diet. After that, more than 95% of those people will relapse and start eating very unhealthy and actually gaining more weight after five years or less (Health, 1). Yet the average American adult tries to do a fad diet about four times a year.

Traditional diets are healthier than fad diets due to fad diets’ short-lived success, the dangerous effects it has on the body, and how fad diets can lead to eating disorders. Fad diets do not contribute to good health nor to a healthy lifestyle. They only last for the few weeks or months that you do them for and then all of your hard work of avoiding the unhealthy foods you love was for nothing. Instead you just hurt your body by not giving it the daily nutrients your body needs to function properly and by introducing the lifestyle of eating disorders into your diet.  Choose to be healthy and choose the traditional way instead of the lazy way. 
