4 Health Fads To Avoid
Though particularly prevalent around the new year each year, health fads seem to be omnipotent. Everywhere you look there’s a new cleanse or detox plan that promises to give you the body of your dreams – just like the last one did.
Unlike doing something that could really improve your health – like getting a disabled parking permit – these fads can be at best, useless and at worst, seriously dangerous. Though there are plenty of health fads you’d be better steering clear of, here’s some that we find particularly risky.
The Blood Type Diet
The blood type diet is a particularly controversial one as it is draped from head to toe in medical assumptions. Developed by naturopathic physician Dr. Peter d’Adamo in the 1990s, the premise behind the blood type diet is that the person undertaking it only eats foods that react well with their blood type.
Let’s break this down – here’s what each blood type should be eating according to Dr. d’Adamo. People with blood type A should follow a predominantly vegetarian diet with very little, if any, meat. Though some meats, especially red meat, can be potentially dangerous if they’re consumed too much, it’s not advisable to cut it out altogether, unless you want to. People with blood type B should avoid things like corn, lentils, and chicken – anything that could affect the metabolic process of the body. Lastly, people with blood type O should avoid grains and dairy and stick with meat. This is probably the most dangerous suggestion within the diet, as dairy and grains are vital for maintaining a healthy heart and strong bones. As many people using a disabled parking permit are heart-health-conscious, partaking in this diet could be very foolish indeed – avoid at all costs!
Detox Tea
It’s impossible to go onto Instagram without seeing yet another blogger try to shill detox teas, or ‘teatoxes’ as they’re sometimes known. Like many other entries on our list, these teas will not help you lose weight. The teas nearly all contain diuretics, which will make you pee all the time, and laxatives, which will make you…. Well, you know!
Any weight lost via ‘teatox’ health fads will just be water weight, meaning that it’ll pile back on as soon as you stop drinking the tea. You can see why people are addicted to them! At best, these teas could do absolutely nothing to you, but at worse they can cause digestive problems, liver issues, and in some cases, even heart problems. They’re not healthy or useful, so are best avoided.
5:2 Diet
As one of the more popular health fads of recent times, the 5:2 diet sure isn’t short on publicity. With plenty of celebrity endorsers behind it, it can’t be that bad right? Wrong! Before we get into why the diet is so bad, firstly we should go through the basics. When you’re practicing the 5:2 diet you get to eat normally for five days of the week. I hear what you’re thinking – not too bad, huh?! The problem comes about in the other two days of the week, where you have to limit yourself to eating just 500 calories per day – that’s a quarter of the daily recommended allowance.
500 calories is under no circumstances enough to maintain everything that goes on in the human body. This restrictive intake of calories makes your metabolism slow down significantly so that when you go back to eating normally, you’ll find you gain weight much quicker, and keep the weight on for longer.
The Master Cleanse
Though the master cleanse may seem like one diet, it is actually three combined in one big, ineffective process. It’s hard to know where to begin with the issues with ‘master cleanse’ health fads, but bear with us. Firstly, this fad is an entirely liquid diet – something that is rarely advisable unless you’re one of the handicap parking permit users who are on strict instructions from your doctor to do so.
Over a five- to ten-day period, users of this diet endure three ‘phases’ of misery with the mystical promise of losing weight, and detoxification. While you may well lose weight, you will not detox with the help of this fad; your liver does that for you anyway!
The first phase of the master cleanse is the ‘ease in’, whereby you get your body ready for the wholly unhealthy experience that you’re about to undertake. In this phase you only eat/drink liquid foodstuffs like soup, juices, and broths. When you’ve completed this, you’ll enter the ‘lemonade phase’. In the lemonade phase you will consume NOTHING except for the master cleanse lemon juice, which consists of lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, and water. You can have this six to twelve times a day. By the time you’ve entered the ‘ease out’ phase of the diet, your body will be seriously lacking in vital vitamins and nutrients. During this phase you’ll start to drink water, then orange juice, then finally back to soups and broths.
Though this fad may well help you to lose some water weight, as soon as you start eating normal foods again, it will pile back on. You won’t get nearly enough calories on this diet, meaning you’ll be constantly tired, hungry, and sick.
It’s clear to see why handicap parking permit users and non-users alike should avoid any of the above health fads like the plague. If you’re interested in doing something that will really help your overall health and happiness, get in touch with us today and we’ll help you get a handicap parking permit for use within your state.