10 Extremely Unhealthy Diets You Should Stay Away From
A growing number of weight loss expedients are crowding our TV screens and perpetuating unhealthy eating habits. Some of these diets are obviously harmful. Others succeed in beguiling ill informed Americans. Unfortunately, the current age of convenience collides with a healthy lifestyle. If a diet seems too good to be true, it probably is. Realize that nothing is as rewarding as actively pursuing health. No pill is going to do the work for you. Without further ado, let’s get into the ten extremely unhealthy diets you should stay away from. Links are down below.
1. The Sleeping Beauty Diet
This diet requires you to sleep for long periods of time to eschew eating. Needles to say, the sleeping beauty diet deprives you of your everyday nutrients and can lead to severe malnutrition. In no circumstance is it effective. Additionally, starving your body ironically wrecks your metabolism. So although you believe you’re losing weight, your body is actually regressing in its ability to maintain that weight. Thus, you’ll be damaging your body on multiple ends.
2. Ascetic Practice
Various religions preach ascetic practices, which can sometimes entail starving yourself for long periods of time. While it is not my business to impose my beliefs onto these religions, harming your body to grasp spiritual enlightenment is counterproductive. Control over your body and denunciation of the material world can be achieved in other ways. Jeopardizing your health in search of meaning will only do harm to your body. The Buddha himself believed that intense ascetic practice was not advisable and that there was a middle way between complete renunciation and overt decadence. Don’t listen to me. Listen to the Buddha!
3. The Atkins Diet
The Atkins diet recommends cutting out carbs almost completely in favor of a diet rich in protein. Of the three macronutrients, your diet should mainly consist of carbohydrates. In fact, nutritionist are now positing that your diet should consist of sixty percent carbs. The lowest percentage should be from protein. Carbohydrate deprivation leads to irritability. It is unnecessarily restrictive and deprives you of healthy, complex carbs.
4. The Tapeworm Diet
I had to add at least one egregiously unhealthy and potentially life threatening diet to remind the average person of the lengths that one will go to avoid healthy diets. This diet seems primitive now, but it did have a moment of fleeting popularity in the early twentieth century. The diet involves consuming tapeworm cyst pills and allowing a tapeworm to mature inside your intestines. The tapeworm will eventually mature and eat the digested food inside your body. The tapeworm is then removed from your body with anti-tapeworm pill. Obviously, this diet leads to adverse effects, including diarrhea, vomiting, and headaches. So why did I add such an obsolete diet to the list? Because it’s illustrative of the human condition. Most of this article focuses on modern fads that are a product of the age of convenience. But unhealthy diets have existed throughout the centuries. They’re just oddly rifer amidst a growing knowledge of diet and exercise.
5. The Chicken Soup Diet
This diet allows you one breakfast of your choosing each day. What constitutes the rest of your day? You guessed it. Chicken noodle soup. A lack of variety in your diet conduces to nutritional deficits. A diet mainly consisting of grains and chicken leaves little in the way of fat. Fat should make up to thirty percent of your diet. Moreover, there are around 160 calories in the average can of chicken noodle soup. That’s hardly sufficient for an entire meal. So don’t unhealthy diets deprive your body. There are a myriad of better options.
6. Cookie Diets
The Hollywood Cookie Diet, Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet, and the Smart for Life Cookie Diet guarantee dramatic amounts of weight loss from eating delicious cookies. However, these diets are extremely low in calories. They require you to eat low calorie cookies for both breakfast, lunch, and snacks throughout the day. Only during dinner can you eat a meal of your choosing for for a whopping 1000 calories a day. This trio of unhealthy diets will lead to irritability and rapid weight loss.
7. The Five Bite Diet
Dr. Alwin Lewis of Burbank California created this shockingly unhealthy diet. Even from an uninformed perspective, the Five Bite Diet is clearly geared toward people at risk of an eating disorder. The diet entails skipping breakfast and eating only five bites of food for both lunch and dinner. It goes without saying that it does not meet any recommended caloric intake– regardless of weight– and is not felicitous for ANY individual. What’s more, it doesn’t even urge the individual to eat healthy foods, making it the most vague, poorly outlined diet on this list.
8. The Baby Food Diet
Out of all the unhealthy diets on this list, this has to be the most laughable one. As the name suggests, the Baby Food Diet requires you to consume baby food. Needless to say, the nutritional requirements of babies are different than that of adults. The baby food diet has a dearth of fiber and calories. One jar of baby food contains only twenty to one hundred calories, which is far from the recommended amount of calories for an adult.
9. The Cigarette Diet
With the many unhealthy diets on this list, the cigarette diet is only second to the tapeworm diet. This diet involves lighting up in lieu of eating. Similar to most of the diets on this list, the cigarette diet effectively sheds off the pounds. However, if your goals are superficial, I would first advise you to get your priorities straight. Second of all, habitual smoking and malnutrition invariably results in a sickly, gaunt appearance. You certainly won’t want to show off your body at the beach. And, as you probably already know, the cigarette diet more importantly can lead to heart disease. Therefore, you’ll look and feel like hell.
10. Diet Pills
As I alluded to in the introduction of this article, diet pills inundate your TV and computer screens everyday. And they can be especially pernicious. Don’t think that their prevalence is an indication of their quality. Diet pills aren’t regulated by the FDA, thus, the stimulants and adverse side effects associated with them goes overlooked. Moreover, they can be highly addictive, with many containing amphetamines. To sum up, just stay away from diet pills altogether.
