Alice Vol. 2 No. 1

HEALTH & FOOD
Temporary diets
vs.
A healthy lifestyle
By Analiese Gerald
“Lose 10 pounds
in seven days!”
“Try our miracle
weight loss plan!”
“Get skinny fast
with this diet!”
Do phrases like these sound familiar?
Today’s culture is one of weight loss,
dieting and slogans advertising “the
next big diet.” These things surround
girls everywhere they turn. From online
health blogs and websites, to popular
apps such as Pinterest and Tumblr,
articles love to promise a quick fix for
the freshman 15 or provide tips to
achieve a perfectly flat tummy.
The problem is, fad diets rarely
yield the advertised results and when
extreme can have negative health
implications. The real key to attaining,
and then maintaining, your healthy
weight is a consistent and nutritious
diet, one treated as a lifestyle instead of
a temporary solution.
TEMPORARY DIETS DON’T WORK
Not only do you want to choose a
weight loss plan that is safe and healthy,
you want one that works.
Sheena Gregg, a registered dietician
and assistant director of Health
[70] Alice November 2016
Promotion and Wellness at The
University of Alabama, doesn’t believe
temporary diets are effective.
“Typically when you see quick drops
of weight it’s not necessarily fat that
they’re losing, but it’s water weight
we’re seeing drop on the scale,” Gregg
said. She clarified that this loss of water
weight is not permanent and can come
back very quickly.
Morgan Fields, a UA senior,
experienced this when she tried the
Cabbage Soup Diet, a restrictive weeklong
plan that drastically reduces calorie
intake and limits eating to mostly only
fruits and vegetables.
“It says you’re supposed to lose 10
pounds – I probably only lost three,” she
said, adding that she gained the weight
back after the diet.
“What’s tempting is that it’s a quick
fix,” Fields said, explaining why girls
try diets like the Cabbage Soup Diet.
“A bunch of girls look to it for like ‘Oh
I have to put a bathing suit on this
weekend, so I’m going to do this seven
day diet and lose 10 pounds.’ And that’s
not how it is.”
In addition to losing the wrong type
of weight, and not maintaining it,
fad diets are often too restrictive to
be realistic. An extreme diet leads to
unhappiness and cheating, often in the
form of binging, which is detrimental to
losing weight.
“A healthy diet includes recognizing
what we do eat as a priority for
nourishing our body, but there’s also
occasions where we eat for celebrating,”
Gregg said. “ I think it can be dangerous
when people are solely eating just based
on the quality of food and never let
themselves have any kind of fun food.”
CHOOSING A SAFE
WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY
Fad diets don’t always produce the
advertised results, but a more concerning
issue is when they have negative
health effects on the body. If
extreme dieting measures are taken,
they can result in reduced energy, not
receiving enough nutrients or protein,
and eventually even eating disorders,
such as anorexia, bulimia and
binge-eating.
Exercising, another important aspect
of a healthy lifestyle can become harmful
while paired with a drastic diet.
Gregg says diets “can make exercise
more dangerous to your body because
you go through low blood sugar levels,
and you may be become more dizzy and
dehydrated quickly because you’re not
getting adequate nutrition.”
LIFESTYLE VS. FAD
So if dieting isn’t the answer for
losing and keeping off weight, what is?
According to many nutritionists and
health professionals, maintaining a
healthy, consistent lifestyle diet is the