Four Celebrity Diets You Should Avoid At All Costs

When you see those amazing Instagram pics, and learn how quickly your favorite celebrity got results, you may think that you can achieve the same thing by following the advice they may well be doling out. The truth is, as anyone who's been there before knows, rather a bit more complocated.

Most people get so miserable on diets like this, that as soon as the set time period is over, they reward themselves with a huge eating binge, then quickly sink back into old dietary habits, and put back on all the weight they’ve lost. Or even more. Even if you don’t do this, and do in fact manage to adopt a sensible, balanced diet once your celebrity diet period has ended, you can still cause damage to your body.

One of the main issues with all the fad diets that focus on eating only one type of food or on immense calorie restrictions, is the severe lack of calories. The cabbage soup, maple syrup and baby food diets all contain well under 1000 calories per day, even if you decide to follow more relaxed versions of the plans. Considering the average woman should consume at the very least 1200 calories per day, and can in fact lose weight eating even more than this, such low calorie diets can leave you feeling nauseous, dizzy and fatigued.

The possible exception to this is the raw foods diet. Provided you eat plenty of nuts and seeds, which are higher in essential fats, and eat some animal products, such as yoghurt, cheese, and perhaps some meat or fish if you can stomach it, you can have a relatively normal calorie intake.

There’s also the issue of micronutrients – the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that your body needs. Where all these diets are so one dimensional, and place their focus on a very limited range of foods, your body doesn’t get all the nutrients it needs. This again means you can often feel unwell, suffer from a lack of energy, and even if you can still manage to exercise on such a low number of calories, you won’t be able to fully recover between sessions.

Instead of deciding to follow your favorite celebrity and copy their diet to the minute detail, you should focus on constructing a healthy, calorie controlled diet, alongside an exercise regime. Here are a few pointers that might be useful:

• Use an online calorie calculator to track how many calories you burn per day. Subtract 500 from this number, and aim to consume this many calories each day. This should ensure a steady loss of one to two pounds of fat per week — meaning sustainable weight loss achieved in a healthy way.

• Base your diet around nutrient-dense whole foods.

• Ensure a good mix of proteins from meat, fish, eggs and dairy products, carbohydrates from fruits, vegetables, pulses and wholegrains, and fats from nuts, seeds, oils, oily fish, avocados and coconut. You'll need this for your health, but also to stay full for long periods of time, which will prevent you from binge eating.

• Train and work out three times per week. Do a mixture of resistance training, using free-weights or your own bodyweight, and cardiovascular training, such as swimming, jogging, playing sports or circuits.