The most ridiculous diet idea yet?
The Military Diet promises to help you lose up to 4.5kg in just three days of dieting.
It involves a three-day meal plan of appetising dishes such as raw tuna on crackers and hard-boiled eggs with cottage cheese. For those three days, you consume between 1100 and 1400 calories a day – well below recommended intake levels.
The three-day plan is then followed by a further four days of healthy eating.
If you don’t lose the promised weight in the prescribed time, advocates of the diet claim you just keep going until you do. (huh?)
Even if this diet were true, is losing such a huge amount of weight in such a short time a good idea?
Sports dietitian Chloe McLeod says so long as you can cope with headaches, nausea, constipation and fatigue, then anyone eating so little, of course, will end up losing weight – but it won’t last.
“Losing this amount of weight in such a small time is not fat loss,” she told bodyandsoul.com.au.
“The person is losing water from their glycogen stores, and due to the fibre restriction, there will also be much less fibre in the bowel as well, so less weight from this.
If you were to be crazy enough to try such a diet, it should “be done under the supervision of your health care provider (such as a GP or dietitian) to ensure nutrition remains as balanced as possible and risk of damage (both physiologically and psychologically) is limited during calorie restriction,” says Ms McLeod.
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Sounds similar to the 5:2 diet which involves eating normally for five days per week, then restricting your calorie intake to 600 calories on the other two days with at least one non-fasting day in between them.