Fad diets are popular because they all promise that they have the answer to your weight loss problems. Although some diets offer nutrition tips, most do not teach you how to eat right. Instead, you need to follow specific guidelines and believe their claim that only their form of eating is good for you. Most fad diets are not sustainable in the long run.
Fad vs. Crash Diets
Crash diets are diets that contain a very low amount of calories. They are meant to produce fast weight loss and are rarely longer than a few days. Many crash diets are promoted under the name of "cleansing diets," and many focus on a single food. Examples of crash diets include the cabbage soup diet and the grapefruit diet. Fad diets, on the other hand, are not necessarily very low in calories. Some do not address calorie counting at all. The Atkins diet is a fad diet that allows you to eat as much as you want, as long as you control your carb intake. Fad diets account for three meals a day and often allow you to snack, while crash diets might reduce your food intake to one or two meals per day.
Claims
One common characteristic to most fad diets is the claim that they can cure disease, improve your health, help you lose weight and control your appetite. All without you having to give up your favorite foods. Some claims are more outrageous than others. The Atkins diet claims that carbs are to blame for obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The Blood Type diet claims that you should choose your foods based on your blood type to ensure health and weight loss.
Extreme Beliefs
Most fad diets believe one specific food or eating rule to be the perfect answer to all your weight problems. Low-carb diets believe carbs are the enemy while the Gerson therapy diet believes the answer is in drinking massive amounts of fruit juice and eating little protein. Paleolithic raw diets believe raw meat is the key to health and energy. An easy way to identify a fad diet is to look at its core belief. If you find a claim that a specific group of food is bad while another group is almost magical, you're likely looking at a fad diet.
Dangers
The danger of a fad diet depends on how unbalanced it is. Some, like Atkins, might leave you feeling tired and weak because of the lack of carbs, but it can also lead to high cholesterol, depending on your food choices. Fad diets are also unlikely to cause permanent weight loss. Because they're so restrictive, chances are you will eventually return to your previous eating habits, causing you to regain weight.
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