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Health & Fitness

And the 2013 Award for Most Ridiculous Diet Goes To...

New spins on basic principles of dieting must always be created to promote new fad diets, but this latest one deserves an award for pure ABSURDITY. Plus, the key to Diet Success!!

Intermittent Fasting!!! (please - NO APPLAUSE) 

Just when you thought you've heard it all, along comes a diet that is so profoundly ill-conceived and flawed it hurts to simply recount it. This diet is the brainchild of the Caveman/Paleo diet practitioners - a great diet based on eating whole natural, unprocessed food, but absolutely no dairy(even though Europeans & Middle Easterners have been consuming dairy for THOUSANDS of years - did it just become bad for us???).  The Paleo Diet purports to mimic our historical evolutionary diet. That sounds great. So excusing the profound role that dairy has played in our evolution, the diet pretty much lives up to the bill.

But enter the Intermittent Fasting component. It recommends that you go 12 - 18 hours(or more) without eating, every other day. Why? Because our ancestors were hunter gatherers(and apparently not very good ones, based on this diet's suppositions), and were forced to go long periods without sustenance. For the sake of argument, let's accept this premise.  

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Here's why IF is 'IF-fy':

1.) Unless your ancestors came from the jungle or were nomadic tribesman wandering some desert, chances are you aren't related to any remotely recent hunter gatherers without going back over a thousand years, anyway. Bottom line - your relevant antecedents have been eating regular meals for a looooong time 

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2.) What happens when you starve yourself for an extended period? You break fast with a sensible meal, right? You use the 'rule of fist' and consume a predetermined amount of food like you would any other meal, right? Wrong!!! You stuff yourself - or at least eat more than you would have at that particular meal. For many, there is a sympathetic counterreaction to being robbed of calories resulting in sweet cravings - especially later at night. And gorging, if you don't know, results in substantially heightened levels of  insulin release which is a precursor to fat retention.

There is sound reasoning to the popular notion that 5-6 small meals a day is best for a lean, healthy physique. Splitting the same amount of food over smaller more frequent meals vs larger, fewer meals results in LESS insulin production. Any Type 1 Diabetic can attest to veracity of this assertion.

So in short, if you go on the Intermittent Fasting Diet for two weeks, all you'll likely lose is just that - two weeks. Don't do it!:D 

Yours in Health- 

Derek Unnasch

Looking to be in PEAK Physical Condition this summer? Call Glen Ellyn's fitness expert and premier trainer, Derek Unnasch, of EliteXTraining and fast-track your results! Visit 'Elite X Training' on Facebook or go to EliteXTraining.vpweb.com 

 

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