A fad diet may be a healthy diet that's simply popular or one that can harm your health if followed over a long period. Simply calling a diet a fad diet, however, has connotations of the diet lacking nutrition and created for the rapid loss of weight. Just like any type of fad, it comes into popularity rapidly and then just as rapidly, loses its luster and the public replaces it by another one just as quickly.
Atkins Diet
Probably one of the best known fad diets was the Atkins Diet. Dr. Atkins wrote his first book, Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution in 1972, followed by several other books. Atkins' approach to dieting was a low carbohydrate approach. The theory was that by consuming lower amounts of carbohydrates, the body had no immediate source of energy other than burning fat, which he hypothesized, took more calories. He called the consumption of a low carb diet a metabolic advantage. Just as many fads do, the diet faded in the sunset but recently reemerged in popularity.
Green Tea Diet and Acai Berry Diet
The Green Tea Diet and the Acai Berry Diet both received acclaim as superfoods that can jump start your metabolism. While both are good for the body, no magical food makes you lose weight instantly, no matter how healthy it is. You'll often find both green tea and acai berry in the same pills to take with your meals. According to some websites, the pills help you lose weight faster when used in conjunction with dieting and exercising, than you would without the pills.
While Acai is a very healthy food, it doesn't have a direct relationship to weight loss, unless you consider the fact that healthier people are often more active. However, green tea contains compounds that increase the body's thermogenesis, the ability to produce heat when you're doing nothing. Producing more heat means burning more calories and is a method of increasing weight loss.
South Beach Diet
The South Beach diet was the combined effort of dietician Marie Almon and cardiologist Arthur Agatston. It's based on a "good carbohydrate and fat versus the bad carbohydrate and fat." While the diet does allow the dieter to consume some carbohydrates, it specifies strict attention to the glycemic index and those carbohydrates that are complex and high in fiber.
The 1 Day, 2 Day, 3 Day Diets
The one day, two day, three day diets are also fads but they don't require you to eat a specific type of food. Most of these diets are the ones that you follow for a certain number of days each week and on the rest of the days, you eat as you normally would eat without the diet. This type of diet is more of a mind set than a diet and affects the feeling of deprivation that occurs when a person begins a long term diet on a daily basis.
Cabbage Soup Diet
There are many other types of fad diets from the cabbage soup diet to the lemonade diet. These types tend to focus on one type of food to the exclusion of others. The lemonade diet is a form of fasting rather than dieting. As with all these unbalanced types of diets, you cannot use them for long periods.
More Fad Diets Pros and Cons
Many of the fad diets focus on one type of food exclusively, such as the lemonade diet. These types of diets are extremely unhealthy over a prolonged period. They are often not nutritionally sound. Even diets such as the South Beach diet or Atkins diet, low fat or low carbohydrate, may cause some problems if followed to extreme measures.
In addition to health consequences, they are difficult to follow more than a few days. The healthier diets such as the low carbohydrate diets and low fat diets are often too strict for many people to maintain, regardless of how healthy they are.
Finally, with the exception of popular fad diets that focus on a healthy style of eating, fad diets do nothing to retrain you how to eat to maintain the results. The cabbage diet or lemonade diet simply allow you to shed a few pounds immediately, only to gain them back quickly once the diet ends.
