The Lures of Failure-Oriented Diets for Losing Weight

How can you tell if a diet is the wrong one? Many lure you with false claims, or emotional bait. They make promises you want to believe, but shouldn't. And because you want to believe there's a magic formula or trick to successful weight loss, they hook you again and again. The following hooks are very common lures to failure-oriented diets:

Diet Hook 1: You can eat all you want

These diets only add to your problems by playing on your fear of being deprived of foods you love. They sell you bad eating habits and usually use a pill or formula that's supposed to speed up your metabolism by some mysterious process. They let you think you can overeat and the trouble is, you usually do, and you gain weight.

Diet Hook 2: Lose weight fast! It's easy!

Diets that promise you super-fast results, and make it sound easy to do, are selling you water losses and muscle losses, not fat loss. They are hooking you with the "image" of thinness at any price, even at the cost of your health. They can accomplish super fast results with gimmicks, pills, or appetite suppressants that keep you losing water and muscle, while you are trying to exist on a starvation level of calories, eating little "real" food. These sudden losses in body fluids and lean muscle protein can lead to dehydration, weakness, and dizziness, so common to diets that don't care what kind of weight you lose.

Diet Hook 3: Lose weight without moving a muscle

This is the lazy man's diet, and it's like driving your car in circles. You can spend a lot of money and energy, but you won't get anywhere. Exercise must be combined with a diet to preserve your lean muscle protein, the vital body tissue that keeps you burning fat. In addition, exercise increases your oxygen uptake, which helps burn fat, it acts as a natural stress reliever, a natural appetite suppressant, and it charges up your metabolism, all vital to healthy weight loss and lifestyle change.

Diet Hook 4: Magic (secret) formula that rids you of your fat

These are the secret formula diets that rid you of your money, and leave your fat intact. They tout secret ingredients that are found on exotic islands, in exotic fruits, or come from an unknown laboratory that isn't in the phone book. They often use chemical names that can't be found in chemistry books, or might be named by chemical symbols that add up to nothing but water, oxygen and acidic compounds. Or they might be downright dangerous.

There is a simple rule to deal with "secret" formula diets - if you don't know what it means, don't believe it. If they won't tell you the ingredients or how they work, they probably don't know, because their formulas are unresearched and not clinically proven. Often, they'll claim, that the mysterious formula is too complicated to explain in an ad, or to an average person This is an insult to your intelligence. If they can't discuss it, why would you trust it? Even the great escape artist Houdini knew how his own tricks worked.

Diet Hook 5: Magic food burns fat

These are diets that focus on one food, or a combination of foods as a miracle formula for weight loss. "All fruit, all vegetables, all protein," or a combination of foods eaten regularly to achieve metabolic hocus pocus. They all have one thing in common - they are imbalanced diets that only succeed in starving your body of the nutrients it needs for daily energy. Eventually, your body will send out starvation signals that will cause you to break the "magic food" fast, or you could become ill. When you eat an imbalanced diet, your system turns to its stored nutrients for satisfaction, and as your stores are depleted, your health begins to decline. In addition, magic food diets teach you unhealthy eating habits, since the continuous intake of one or two foods can make you "hate" foods you previously enjoyed. Food becomes your enemy, a dangerous practice, since food is the fuel you need for daily energy.

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