Consequence

In order to lose weight, there is no getting around the fact that you need to burn more calories than you take in through your diet. However, the very low calorie diet is the absolute worst type of diet you can ever take on. Firstly the low calories will make your body think you are starving and will instruct your hormones to conserve every last bit of energy it comes across. This is usually by storing fat (the exact opposite of what you want!)

Secondly, because the body is not receiving sufficient energy from food for it to survive, it turns on itself for energy. Whilst this sounds good in principle, it is not because the body wants to store fat and therefore it turns to muscles to provide the energy to live, rather than burn off fat. This results in wasted muscles and retained fat which makes you look flabby rather than toned.

Furthermore, as muscles need more energy to maintain themselves than fat, your metabolism will decrease so if you go back to normal amounts of food (which is inevitable), you’ll actually be more likely to replace any weight lost with additional fat.

Extremely low calorie diets are also very hard to stick to as the body simply isn’t supposed to work based on such a low amount of energy and so it craves food and your appetite actually increases. This leads to lapses in willpower and the inevitable cheating and, potentially, binge eating which ruins all your good work.

Consequence

Many women make the mistake of cutting out all the fat from their diet in an attempt to lose fat. Whilst reducing saturated fat is a good idea for most diets, there are issues in cutting out all fats from the diets.

Firstly, the body’s natural response to a reduction in fats is to store as much of it as possible, clearly going against the aim of the diet.

Secondly, most low fat foods are high in sugar and salt to replace the taste lost from removing all traces of fat in the food. Food can therefore be classed as low fat but be extremely damaging to your fat loss diet as it contains extremely high levels of sugar which is either used immediately by the body for energy or, more likely, stored as fat.

In addition, some fats are essential for health and can actually promote fat loss and improve the muscle tone of your body. These essential fats include Omega 3 and 6 which is found in oily fish and also CLA which is proven to aid fat loss. It has also been proven that ‘good’ fats stop your stomach from emptying quickly so they can help you feel fuller for longer.

Consequence

Skipping meals sounds like a good idea if you want to lose weight as it presents fewer opportunities for you to consume calories. However, this has been proven in clinical studies to be incorrect.

Skipping meals goes against your body’s natural cycle and the body reacts accordingly. Firstly, the body reduces its metabolism and can even enter ‘starvation mode’ in the period between meals, which can have the same negative results as a very low calorie diet described above. This is particularly true when you skip breakfast as you are effectively asking your body to survive without food from dinner the night before to lunchtime the next day, a period of up to 16 hours or more. And then you have to fit all your calorie consumption into the eight hours between lunch and dinner. This is totally at odds with how your body works and how you use energy naturally.

Secondly, the usual response to skipping meals is that you end up starving at some point after your skipped meal, leading to ineffective and unhealthy snacking or overeating when you do eventually eat.

In fact, studies show that people who eat 4 to 6 times a day, including a healthy breakfast, tend to weigh noticeably less than people who skip meals and eat only once or twice during the day.

Consequence

The zero carbohydrate diet was popularised in the early 2000s, amongst claims you could eat as much protein and fat as you liked as long as you cut out all carbohydrates.

Whilst the benefits of managing your carbohydrate intake are well known and are scientifically proven to help aid fat loss,] cutting out all carbohydrates has been proven to be detrimental to health and also very hard to sustain. The flawed logic of the Zero Carb diet is emphasised most acutely when you consider that vegetables and fruits are actually carbohydrates. How can any diet where you don’t get any nutrients from fruit and vegetables possibly be good for you?

In addition, the Zero Carb diet allowed the dieter to eat as much protein and fats as the liked. The simple fact is that there is no diet in the world where you will lose weight regardless of how much you eat.

In addition, the Zero Carb diet also has been proven to create increased risk from certain health complaints such as raised cholesterol, heart issues and a lack of nutrition that is provided by carbohydrates.

Consequence

The Low GI diet is based on the principle of replacing high GI carbohydrates (starchy or refined carbohydrates) with low GI alternatives (fibrous vegetables, brown rice and beans).

The glycemic index for carbohydrates is a measure of the rapidity which the carbohydrate is broken down into glucose which is used for energy by the body or stored as fat.

Low GI carbohydrates are definitely better for you when trying to lose fat and regulate your blood sugar levels than higher GI foods as they are converted into glucose more slowly and hence the body has more chance to use the energy rather than store it as fat.

However, simply replacing high GI foods with low GI foods, on its own, is unlikely to be enough to transform your diet into a sustainable fat loss plan. This is because there is no guidance on when to eat, how much to eat and how to ensure that you balance your calorie intake to maximise your metabolism and create a fat loss cycle. Plus, low GI foods may still be high in saturated (bad) fats and other non-glucose sugars.

Consequence

Unfortunately, there are no magic weight loss foods or supplements that will allow you to eat what you like and yet still lose weight.

Any number of ‘fat strippers’ have been promoted by certain companies alongside dramatic before and after pictures. These products, on their own, do not work and there have been numerous cases where the before and after photos have been doctored or the weight loss has been created by alternative means.

However, there are some herbal products which have been linked with increasing metabolism and helping maintain weight as part of a healthy, balanced diet. These include green tea extract, caffeine, cayenne pepper, hoodia, CLA and other essential fats such as Omega 3. However, on their own, they are not sufficient to make you lose weight regardless of what else you eat.

Consequence

Points system diets can work for you and can be a good way for you to manage your weight. They often work on the same fundamentals as the benuu fat loss system (high protein, reduced carbohydrates) and as such you could combine the two diet methodologies if you wanted.

However, the points system does have its difficulties, in that it can be manipulated by you so that it is unhealthy and unlikely to yield good results whilst fooling you to believe you are following a strict diet. For example, any diet system that allows you to eat a Mars bar for lunch within your allowance is not a diet that will succeed!

In addition, any diet where you need to consult a book to know whether you can have a food is going to be difficult to maintain or incredibly boring to stick to. We believe it is therefore better for you to learn how to eat foods based on their core characteristics than by how many points there are worth - How to use benuu.