Because of the high value most societies place on physical beauty, many are willing to do just about anything to get their body there, including fad dieting. Fad diets are sometimes quirky, but effective. Their promise of quick weight loss is just too tempting for many of you to pass up. Even though they may deliver on their promise, their is a price to pay.

Because many of them have you drastically cut your calories to levels as low as 800, as is the case of the Cabbage Diet, they reek havoc on your metabolism or your metabolic rate. Your basal metabolic rate is a measure of how many calories you would need if you were at rest all day. Whenever your intake of calories is severely low as is the case in most fad diets, your body goes into starvation mode. This is a state where you body slows down in order to conserve energy.

If you can put up with the diet long enough to reach your weight loss goal, you first of course revel in your accomplishment. However, because it’s not realistic to expect to continue to eat such a low amount of calories the rest of your life, you eventually start eating more. Because your metabolism has slowed down, that excess food is stored on your body as fat. When your metabolism catches up with your new eating habits, you’ve found that you have regained all of your weight back and in many cases, more. Undeterred, you say to yourself, “I did it before, I can do it again.” Hopefully the word “yo-yo” is popping into your head, because as long as you participate in this type of fad dieting, you’re going to go back and forth with your results.

So What should you look for in a diet that avoids these pitfalls? There are, at a minimum, just two. First, ask yourself does the diet require you to consume low calories as described above, If they do, run. They are not a long-term solution and are unhealthy to boot. You don’t need to victimize your body to get the look you want.

Second, ask yourself if this diet is something that you could see yourself doing the rest of your life? The reason that you became overweight in the first place was because of a lifetime of poor eating habits. Fad diets do not address this. They just help you lose weight quickly without seriously taking into consideration how to maintain it. A good weight loss program not only helps you to lose weight, but it also helps you to lead a healthier lifestyle. As such, it encourages a lifestyle change, not a quick fix of quickly losing a few pounds.

In closing, because of the sometimes dramatic results, using fad diets for weight loss is tempting. However, if you want to not only lose the weight, but keep it off, go for what’s best for your body long term. Is it slower? Yes. But sometimes it’s worth being the tortoise if it means beating the hare.

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