Diet Don'ts

Crash diets

There are 3-day diets, 5-day diets, diets that promise you'll drop a pound a day for 2 weeks. These are very appealing for people who want to lose weight for a special occasion. And they are the leading cause of yo-yo dieting.

Remember: If it's fast, it won't last.

As soon as you go back to eating the way you always have, the pounds will come back. And chances are, they'll come back with a vengeance since the deprivation of the quick diet will have slowed your metabolism, requiring fewer calories and causing your body to store the excess as fat.

These diets claim to "jump start" your weight loss, but in fact they do just the opposite. Going on a quickie diet implies going off it. You haven't changed your eating habits. You haven't incorporated more activity into your day. All you've done is temporarily forced your metabolism into starvation mode.

Other nutritionally unbalanced diets

Diets that prescribe a single category of food are just plain unhealthy. It doesn't matter if it's only grains or only greens or only meat. To review:

A balanced diet for an adult should derive 55 to 60 percent of its calories from carbohydrates, most of them complex carbohydrates.

The average adult needs about half a gram of protein for every pound of body weight.

Even fat is essential, but it should make up no more than 30 percent of your daily caloric intake, and most of it should be unsaturated.

Duck these diet dangers

"Quack, Quack!" That's the sound of weight-loss fraud. It comes out of health food stores and the Internet. It blasts from the front pages of supermarket tabloids. If you're like me, your e-mailbox is filled with it. Everywhere you turn today, someone is trying to sell you an easy weight-loss dream.

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