The Beverly Hills Diet

Fad diets have become part of a billion dollar industry encouraging men and women of all ages that you really can lose 20 pounds in 2 weeks. But what is a fad diet? Just as the name states, it’s only a fad, while it might help you lose weight, that weight loss is only temporary because much of what you lose is water weight from your muscles. Once you finish the diet and go back to normal eating you have less muscle tissue but the same amount of fat. These diets generally use the idea of eliminating specific foods generally labeled as harmful, and put an emphasis on one specific food group. Many people believe that by making these dietary adjustments, they will lose drastic amounts of weight within a short period of time. To this end, people across the country will spend any amount of money for that quick and easy fix.

The diet featured in this podcast is the Beverly Hills diet. This diet was the first of many diets named after cities famous for the celebrity inhabitants, and claims you will lose 15 pounds in 35 days. It is based on the idea of conscious-combining, meaning while on this diet you combine foods based on what it will do for your body. For example, papaya softens fat, pineapple burns it off, and watermelon flushes it out of your body. By eating these foods together you are told you can lose a significant amount of weight. As you can already tell, the main food group for this diet is fruit, and you are told to never eat fruit with proteins because it will negatively affect digestion. For the first 10 days you are only permitted to eat fruit, on day 11, you can eat carbohydrates, eventually, on day 19, you can eat protein. We can see this is not a healthy diet already because we know protein is a very important nutrient our body needs. It helps the body with growth, maintenance, and repairs. Additionally, there are amino acids found in protein our body needs, but can’t make on its own.

You can see how unhealthy this diet is by looking at a typical meal plan for the day. It includes: 8 oz. of prunes for breakfast, unlimited strawberries for lunch, a baked potato for dinner, and water, coffee, or tea to drink. For a normal person, food for one day on this diet, could be food for one meal. How could someone live on this diet for over a month eating so little? The Beverly Hills diet prides itself on being an 800 calorie per day diet, yet for me, at seventeen years of age and 5 foot, 100 pounds, I am supposed to eat 1900 calories per day. Beyond it being unhealthy it seems this diet could even be quite dangerous. This diet is also very low in nutrients the body needs to stay healthy, I believe one could lose 15 pounds in 35 days yet those who advocate the diet do not factor in the health risks that come along with such a low-calorie, low-nutrient diet. It seems anyone on this diet is basically starving themselves and eliminating many of the basic food groups. By doing this you aren’t giving your body what it wants or needs to function properly. You are essentially depriving yourself of the things you really want to eat, just to lose a few pounds. Don’t be fooled by the glamorous name, or believe you can look like the famous celebrities in Beverly Hills, because this is the ultimate bad fad diet.

You might be wondering, what you should look for in a good diet. Balance, variety and moderation are the key ingredients to success when choosing a diet that is right for you. You want a balance of different foods from each food group, a variety of different kinds of food in each group, and to avoid over consuming one food from any specific group. As you can see the Beverly Hills Diet is not very balanced because you are only eating fruit, also reducing the amount of variety in the diet. Eating in moderation is not what this diet is about, as it tells you to eat as much fruit as you want, while also telling you not to eat anything else. By seeing this diet does not pass these 3 requirements we can tell it is not a very efficient or healthy diet.