Straight off Hollywood award season, the biggest buzz wasn’t the couture gowns or designer jewelry flaunting the runway, but the latest Hollywood diet the celebrities completed in preparation for the big day. These extreme diets and cleanses are as much a part of an award show regimen as makeup and hair styling. Made famous by A-list actresses, diets such as the Cabbage Soup Diet, Baby Food Diet, and the Master Cleanse all promise the loss of 10 pounds or more by the end of the program. Together, with Dr. Rothman’s insight, we can help clarify the effectiveness of extreme dieting and cleanses and the relative merits and disadvantages these diets can have on your overall state of health.
Truth About the Cabbage Soup Diet
This 7 day plan is based on a large consumption of a cabbage soup recipe filled with a variety of vegetables including cabbage, peppers, onions, celery, and tomatoes. In addition to the soup, this diet encourages eating varied servings of fruits and vegetables and even allows beef in the later days. If you participate in this diet, you may lose the promised 10 pounds, but you should be conscientious of the results as most of this loss is water weight, easily lost fat, and lean muscle. Upon reviewing this diet, Dr. Rothman immediately points out that this plan is deficient in protein and the essential, amino acids and fatty acids necessary to supply your body with these vital nutrients. Without these necessary nutrients, your body cannot properly function, and you will start to cannibalize your own muscles to make up for the deficiencies. Your blood sugar may become unstable and you may experience symptoms related to fluctuating blood sugar levels such as anxiety, brain fog, fatigue and other symptoms as well. Consuming an incomplete meal, such one indicated by The Cabbage Soup Diet, will be stressful on your body’s nervous system, immune system, and hormonal system. You may be able to tolerate this diet for the 7 days if you are relatively healthy. But if you are unhealthy or in a weakened state, this extreme diet could cause you to end up in your local emergency room dehydrated and feeling rotten.
Warning: Do Not Overdose on Cabbage Soup
The cabbage soup recipe has high levels of MSG and sodium in the soup bouillon and it is toxic to your health and weight loss plan. MSG (short for mono-sodium- glutamate) is a common food additive in Chinese food, soups, and other processed foods. MSG stimulates certain nerve receptors in your brain, which in the long term can be quite damaging, perhaps eventually leading to some kind of neurodegenerative disease state like Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s. However, even short term ingestion can cause nasty symptoms like headaches of allergy type symptoms. Perhaps, the worst thing about MSG is that this calorie free, toxic substance can actually make you gain weight by affecting the weight control centers in a part of your brain know as your hypothalamus.
Diet Like an Adult, Eat Like a Baby
Thanks to mega celebrities, you may be contemplating replacing your adult meals with 2 jars of baby food per serving. This so called Baby Food Diet has been praised for its vitamin content and lack of additives. The baby food limitation creates an extreme caloric deficit in which upon completion, you may notice some degree of weight loss. However, this weight loss, (much like that experienced with The Cabbage Soup Diet) may be at the expense of lean muscle, water weight, and normal otherwise easily lost fat. Whenever you follow such low calorie, restrictive diets, you may indeed initially lose the “as advertised” several pounds, but your body will quickly go into “hibernation mode” and your weight loss will stop. Upon resumption of a more normal diet you will most likely gain back all of the weight you lost, plus a few extra pounds. All of these “lose 10 pounds in a week” fad diets suffer from this same flaw. These “too good to be true”, quick fix diets are just that, a quick fix that allows you to shed pounds quickly, but the effect is almost always temporary. Your body, specifically your aforementioned hypothalamus (which controls your weight) will attempt to halt and reverse your rapid weight loss. This weight gain effect occurs because you have been designed not to starve, and your hypothalamus will quickly shift your body chemistry (hormones, nervous system, and immune system) to replace this lost weight in a brief amount of time.
The Master Cleanse
This regimen, also known as, Lemonade Diet and Maple Syrup Diet, has been in circulation for decades, but recently became popular due to heavy use by celebrities. This severe plan is a fasting plan spanning a minimum of 10 days, where you would drink a Lemonade recipe only. This “miracle” elixir is made up of water, lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. The morning ritual starts off with salt water flush, where you drink a quart of sea salt mixed water. During the day, only the Lemonade can be consumed, and at night, you end your day by drinking a laxative tea. Advocates of this diet claim that it will detoxify your body and help you lose excess body fat.
What are you Cleansing?
Now days, the general public is under the notion that they need to rid their body of toxins. The term “toxins” has been loosely interjected into daily conversations and you are led to believe that a generic cleanse can help you eliminate toxic substances from your body. It’s true that some people are suffering from reactions to toxins circulating within their body. Mycotoxins, for example, are a poisonous group of chemicals produced by fungi and mold in the environment. After a consultation with Dr. Rothman, you would understand that if you have high levels of Mycotoxin, you would need to ingest some sort of toxin binding agent. On the contrary, a salt water flush may be hazardous to your health. Salt has been used for eons as a medicinal agent and can kill viruses, fungus, and bacteria. However, blindly using a salt water flush can also reduce the beneficial bacteria from your body, known as your Bowel Flora. Your Bowel Flora is responsible for producing vitamins and other beneficial substances into your system and you would be doing yourself a disservice destroying and distorting these symbiotic organisms with a “cleanse”.
Fasting
Dr. Rothman explains that fasting can have benefits, when short term. So many Americans eat a diet of processed and unhealthy foods that are filled with artificial chemicals, toxic residues of insecticides and pesticides, high fructose corn syrup, inflammation producing vegetable oils and the list goes on and on. When you ingest these ubiquitous, hidden, poisonous substances, you will cause damage to your cells and tissues. Eating these unhealthy foods can lead to premature aging, diabetes, nerve damage, heart disease and essentially the deterioration of all of your cells, tissues and organs. Fasting, allows your body to be free from these fatal substances you may be unknowingly be eating every day. However, beware that by fasting unsupervised, you can become malnourished fairly quickly. Dr. Rothman advocates that you should be under some sort of medical supervision to monitor your health status when fasting or doing any sort of extreme diet.
The Bottom Line
If you want to drop a quick 10 pounds for a special event, like a wedding, you may achieve your goal with one of these extreme and fashionable diets. This is what the Hollywood stars are doing to get themselves ready for the red carpet and the paparazzi. However, if you think that these “quick fix” programs are healthy, sustainable, or will “jump start” your long term weight loss objectives, you are in for a rude awakening. Each of these ill-advised programs center around a very low calorie diet that can help you shed weight quickly, but that weight is not necessarily the hard to burn fat that you are really trying to target. Instead, you will be losing water weight, lean muscle mass, and some normal fat.
There are methods available to help you lose weight quickly and safely. However, these methods need to be individualized to your own personal needs. Being overweight is a symptom of imbalanced eating, lifestyle habits, hormones levels, and other metabolic influences. Only by addressing these underlying imbalances can long term health and proper weight be achieved. Dr. Rothman suggests that you make an appointment to address your weight loss and wellness concerns. Together, you can devise a strategy composed of eating wholesome foods paired with metabolically directed nutritional approach that holistically enhances your body chemistry, your overall wellness, and your body weight.
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