10 Dangerous Diet Trends To Avoid

Fad diets are downright dangerous to both your mind and body, all that change in the way you eat for a slight flinch of the needle on the scale. And you end up feeling defeated because it’s not working for you.

What you eat in your diet contributes largely to how you feel about yourself, and since we’ve all packed on a few pounds, no thanks to the lockdown, they’re becoming popular again. Many of us are persuaded off food groups thanks to evidence and video proof of these diets actually working.

If it worked for that person, then it should work for me, but we end up buying into a craze that sometimes does more harm than good. Here are the top ten dangerous diet trends to avoid.

1. Keto Diet

You’ve probably seen a multitude of success stories, probably heard your friends doing it, and seeing restaurants becoming Keto-friendly. Still, this diet is meant for people who have certain medical conditions like metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

It’s not a sustainable diet, and restricting the entire carb food group, can be challenging to maintain. Along with most of the carbs being cut out, you also get rid of most fruits and vegetables.

As you can imagine struggling to produce energy from the little food you are allowed can be taxing on your body. Not to mention with a high fat intake increases your risk for developing heart diseases like atherosclerosis.

2. Carb Cycling

This trend is all about juggling your carb intake on certain days, depending on your exercise schedule. It’s supposed to help you bulk up on muscle and lose weight.

It’s essentially a yo-yo diet that makes you juggle your carbs in the hopes of losing weight. This is incredibly taxing on a woman’s body because carb cycling can lead to irregular hormone fluctuations.

3. Intermittent Fasting

It can be done in a healthy and sustainable way, but most of the time, people push their bodies too far, and it becomes unhealthy. It’s a very restrictive diet that makes it dangerous for people with a history of eating disorders like binge eating.

It’s the most unadaptable diet because there are no exceptions, so it can never work for traveling. During periods of fasting, your body adjusts its metabolism because of the lack of food, and most of the weight loss tends to be water weight.

4. Cleanses

The worst thing the diet world has convinced us of is that we need to cleanse our system of all the toxins from our fatty diets. Encouraging us to supplement actual food for juices in hopes of losing weight, it’s just ineffective, especially in the long run.

There is no science-based evidence that any of the cleanses are effective. Your body can adapt and sustain itself under different conditions, so you most definitely do not need cleanses to boost your immune system!

5. Cabbage Soup Diet

A popular diet trend that’s stuck around from the ’50s restricting your diet to a bunch of veggies and variations of soup. The diet might sound appealing because there are no restrictions on quantity.

Without consuming solid foods, this diet must have been difficult to stick to something that has such strict rules to follow, leading to yo-yo dieting. Besides, it can get bland eating soup for every meal without a break.

6. The Prayer or Sleeping Beauty Diets

They’re exactly what they sound like, replacing every meal with prayer or sleep. It’s not very different from what some of us have done during lockdown to avoid meals.

While saving on money, you could be putting your body under severe pressure to make up for the nutrients it’s not getting from food, making you exhausted and even leading you to sleep for 20-hours a day!

7. The Snake Diet

This takes fasting to the extreme, only allowing you to eat for as little as two hours a day. This diet’s creator gives out incorrect information about fats and promises people weight loss by following this extreme diet. Following this diet can lead to serious health consequences.

8. Gluten-Free Unnecessarily

9. Diets That Are Too Good To Be True

It would be best if you were suspicious of diets that promise fast weight loss, especially those that rely on you consuming a secret ingredient in their products. Most of the time it’s a pyramid scheme to make you buy into the products without any results.

10. The Grapefruit Diet

It’s a common misconception that ballerinas get their slim figures from eating just half a grapefruit; the concept catapulted this diet to its current popularity. This diet restricts you to coffee and grapefruit.

In recent years exceptions have been made in the diet for an occasional salad, some toast, or an egg. This diet can cause severe eating disorders and may even result in extreme fatigue and dizziness from the lack of nutrients.