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It can be useful to be aware of misleading weight loss claims that can lead you to waste your time and your money and even risk your health. A fad diet is the kind of plan where you eat a very restrictive diet with a few foods or an unusual combination of foods for a short period of time and often lose weight very quickly. However, most people then get fed-up, start over-eating and choose less healthy foods and pile the pounds back on.

So how can you tell the dieting fact from the fiction? Stay away from diets that:

• Promise a magic bullet to solve your weight problem without having to change your lifestyle in any way
• Promise rapid weight loss of more than 4kg a week
• Recommend magical fat-burning effects of foods (such as the grapefruit diet) or hidden ingredients in foods (the coffee diet)
• Promote the avoidance or severe limitation of a whole food group, such as dairy products or a staple food such as wheat (and suggests substituting them for expensive doses of vitamin and mineral supplements)
• Promote eating mainly one type of food (e.g. cabbage soup, chocolate or eggs) or avoiding all cooked foods (the raw food diet)
• Recommend eating foods only in particular combinations based on your blood group
• Suggest being overweight is related to a food allergy or a yeast infection and recommend ‘detoxing’ or avoiding foods in certain combinations such as fruit with meals
• Offer no supporting evidence apart from a celebrity with personal success story to tell
• Are based on claims that we can survive without food or having liquid meals only
• Focus only on your appearance rather than on health benefits
• Are selling you products or supplements
• Recommendations based on a single study
• The same diet recommended for everyone without accounting for specific needs
• Based on a ‘secret’ that doctors are yet to discover

Remember, if it sounds too good to be true – it probably is! Registered Dietitians have recognized qualifications, are regulated and will be able to guide you through the maze of dietary information that surrounds us and give you safe, unbiased, evidence-based advice.

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