Toss These Harmful Diet Culture Ideas
Weight loss fads and toxic diet culture have been around for a long time and many people have fallen for the terrible ideas they teach over the years. No group is seemingly immune from the grasp of fad diets and diet culture, regardless of ethnicity, sex, and regardless of someone being rich or poor. Even William the Conqueror (an English king way back in the early 1000s) fell victim to diet culture, using a liquid-based diet to try and lose weight.
If any of these fad diets worked, there would be no need for new ones to pop up.
Fad diets are garbage wrapped in good marketing. They prey on our insecurities and insinuate that by following this diet, you’ll achieve your ideal body, but none of these diets are sustainable.
While fad diets may work for a short period of time, you need a sustainable diet if you want to keep living your life to its fullest.
Keep reading to find out more about some of the fad diets and toxic culture ideas you should ditch.
Ditch the Detox Tea
Detox tea can be seen everywhere on the internet and even in some supermarkets. Detox teas are simply laxatives in different packaging. The idea of the tea is to use the discomfort and cramping to curb cravings and your appetite, while you “detox” the toxins and chemicals from your body.
What really happens and why they are so harmful is because detox teas reduce how much you eat. This restricts food intake and starves your body of necessary nutrition. Detox teas are incredibly harmful as the caffeine and laxative ingredients in them, in addition to the lack of nutrient intake, can put major stress on your digestive system.
You might lose some weight, but it’ll mostly be water weight and your body will be worse off from it.
Plus, the weight loss you experience from detox teas isn’t maintainable. Most people who try them out have to go back on them in cycles throughout the year in vain attempts to maintain their ‘losses.’
Surprisingly, even in Hollywood, a place known for promoting terribly unhealthy lifestyles, there are some people who know they don’t work. Actress Jameela Jamil once called out Khloé Kardashian for promoting detox tea to her many followers.
Stay Away From Overly Restrictive Diets
Diets like the cabbage soup diet, banting, military diet, etc., limit the foods you are allowed to eat to the extreme. These diets don’t want you to simply limit the types of food you eat; they cut out huge chunks of food from your diet.
Even Keto, a diet known for helping people lose a ton of weight, is almost never done correctly with most adherents never actually in ketosis. Plus, once people lose the weight and go back to eating carbohydrates they inevitably gain the weight back, plus some.
All these diets really accomplish is to make you afraid of food. They make you afraid of eating too much or of the wrong thing while being nearly impossible to maintain. So when you inevitably eat the “wrong” thing, you feel like a failure.
Generally, anyone adhering to these diets never actually fix the root problem they have: Eating properly.
The food we eat already has such a big impact on our mental health; by adding these ridiculous restrictions, you’re simply setting yourself up to fail. You’ll end up not keeping the weight off and you’ll be left with mental scars from the toxic diet culture.
Ditch the Toxic Diet Culture Today
Toxic diet culture is around every corner and often masquerades as healthy lifestyle changes. Wanting to lose some weight and eat healthier isn’t a bad thing, but once you succumb to a toxic diet, it can be difficult to find your way back to a healthy lifestyle. So go ahead and start living your best life by ditching diet culture.
Instead, focus your diet on whole foods and work to eat intuitively. If your goal is to lose weight, stay on a slight calorie deficit. If you want to gain weight, stay on a slight calorie surplus.
Whatever you do, avoid diet culture like the plague. If you or anyone you know have been trying (unsuccessfully) to make the progress you want or are struggling with diet culture, send me a message or join one of my programs. Let me help. Usually it is just a case of education on how to eat more than what to eat.
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