Beware Of These Fad Diets Masquerading As “Healthy Lifestyle Changes”

They’re far more prevalent than you might think

If you were born before the year 2000, it’s extremely likely you grew up in a rich fad diet culture.

Atkins, Weight Watchers, Low Fat, Paleo, The Grapefruit Diet, and South Beach Diet are just a few of the popularised fad diets that took over the second half of the 1900s.

But it appears we have turned the tide and wholly reject diet culture…or have we?

While many influencers are making tons of money selling “healthy lifestyles,” most of them are actually just the other side of the diet coin. They mask their restrictive eating ideals as healthy lifestyle tips.

This obsession with healthy eating has given birth to a relatively new eating disorder called orthorexia.

So, how can you tell if the healthy lifestyle your favourite influencer is promoting is really just a fad diet?

· Eight healthy eating ideologies that are really fad diets
  ∘ 1. Calorie counting and tracking
  ∘ 2. One size fits all recipes
  ∘ 3. Obsession with macros
  ∘ 4. Food is “not emotional.”
  ∘ 5. Restricted eating time windows
  ∘ 6. Foods labelled as good and bad
  ∘ 7. Food groups being cut out
  ∘ 8. Fear of weight gain
· Final thoughts

Eight healthy eating ideologies that are really fad diets

1. Calorie counting and tracking

Ok, so we’re not buying into the dangerous 1200 calories nonsense anymore, but that doesn’t make calorie counting a good idea. Many modern eating plans will encourage you to set calorie goals and track them — usually based on your BMI and activity level.

But there are quite a few substantial issues with this way of thinking.

Firstly, BMI is both racist and sexist as the key research used to create it was carried out on white males, and the results have never been successfully extrapolated to fit a standard measurement for people outside of this demographic. So using the BMI is pointless for most people.

Secondly, for women, in particular, calorie-burning fluctuates daily depending on where they are in their cycle, and this effect is worsened for those with hormonal or thyroid disorders. So choosing a baseline calorie amount to focus on is almost impossible.

Finally, calorie counting can become an obsession, leading some people to feel bad about themselves if they go over, even by just a few calories (which has negligible effects, by the way!).

It’s fine to want to know how many calories are in different foods as a baseline, so you’re not consuming 10,000 calories a day by accident, especially if you weren’t taught about portion sizes as a child, but monitoring your every morsel of food isn’t healthy.

2. One size fits all recipes

I’m going to say this as clearly as I can, don’t trust a recipe that tells you:

You should only eat x amount of each portion for it to be a healthy meal

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the amount of food a sedentary person that weighs 140 lb needs to survive is much different to that of a 250 lb bodybuilder.

So it should make sense that a meal that works for one person won’t work for another. And even then, two people who weigh the same amount can have completely different body compositions with very different dietary needs.

And if a recipe is not enough food for you, you’re probably going to feel guilty for feeling hungry afterwards — which is not healthy.

Instead, we need to learn to tap back into our body’s internal hunger cues and understand them again, using them to dictate how much we need to eat.

3. Obsession with macros

Macros refer to the three macronutrients everyone needs in their diet to survive: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.

Together, they form the building blocks of our bodies.

Making sure you get a good blend of the three is not inherently bad — in fact, it can be helpful for your health.

The problem comes when a “healthy lifestyle” includes becoming hyper-aware of the grams and percentages of each macro and being rigid about what that must look like.

4. Food is “not emotional.”

This is a big one I often see in the health and wellness community. Particularly in influencers and health advocates focused on weight loss, there is a strong message that food is solely for nutrition and not an emotional tool.

Not only is this factually incorrect, but it also spits in the face of any person who has ever suffered from an eating disorder.

While the messaging is likely to be intended as “food isn’t meant to be used as a coping mechanism to deal with negative thoughts,” this isn’t how it usually comes across.

And if you fall into that category of emotional eating, someone telling you not to is really going to have the opposite effect.

So if a healthy lifestyle rejects the connection between emotion and food and gaslights you into believing it’s terrible to have emotion around eating — it’s a diet!

5. Restricted eating time windows

Ahh, intermittent fasting. Arguably one of the biggest eating trends to come out of the past decade.

Advocates of this healthy lifestyle report improved energy, better digestion, and better weight loss.

And these effects are undoubtedly true for some people.

However, research is conflicted on whether eating in a reduced window of time has substantial health benefits, and it’s certainly not a good option for everyone.

For many people, intermittent fasting is not sustainable — which should be the key goal of any healthy lifestyle. And for others, it can cause worsened cravings and complications with blood sugar levels.

6. Foods labelled as good and bad

This is probably the BIGGEST red flag in food culture.

From an extremely young age, we’ve been told some foods are good, and some are bad. And this is an extremely common trait of most “healthy eating” lifestyles.

It’s so ingrained that it’s extremely hard to see it as problematic.

After all, we all know that too much sugar or junk food can lead to health problems, right?

So why is it so dangerous to label foods as good or bad?

Simple. It creates a sense of morality surrounding food. This leads to feelings of guilt about eating foods that are “bad” — even if you’re only eating them in moderation.

And for anyone who has dealt with bulimia, emotional eating, binge eating disorder (BED) or similar EDs, you’ll recognise the role of guilt surrounding food as a major driver of eating disorders.

Even for some more progressive healthy lifestyle advocates who express that all food is ok in moderation and we shouldn’t label foods as bad, they can still fall into this trap. That’s because they still label “healthy” foods as good or, indeed, healthy.

And while that sounds logical, it’s important to remember that if foods can be good and healthy, then whether you name them or not, they can be bad and unhealthy too.

A great example of this is the traffic light system incorporated by the psychology-led weight loss app, Noom. They place foods in categories of:

Green — you can have as much as you want

Amber — eat in moderation

Red — avoid or extremely limit consumption

This is a strong exercise in moralising food.

Instead, healthy lifestyles should focus on finding the foods that make you feel healthy, energetic, and happy, encouraging people to have more of that rather than moralising individual foods.

7. Food groups being cut out

Another popular trend in “healthy living” is that these programs encourage people to cut out whole food types like gluten, dairy, meat, soy, sugar, etc.

The issue here is that cutting out entire food groups can lead to malnutrition in some cases.

The only time you should be cutting out food groups is if you have a medical reason why (e.g. Celiac, lactose intolerance, etc.) or an ethical/moral justification why.

And before you do so, it’s best to talk to a licensed nutritionist or dietician to make sure you’re replacing the lost nutrients correctly.

8. Fear of weight gain

We’ve come a long way since the fatphobic culture of the 90s and early 00s, but it hasn’t entirely disappeared. It’s just less obvious.

And while body positivity and body neutrality have garnered a lot of support, there are still plenty of weight loss healthy lifestyle changes being sold out there because the link between weight and health is still strongly assumed.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight — every person is entitled to their own body goals, and weight loss is an entirely acceptable goal for you.

The problem comes when healthy lifestyles fearmonger that it’s unhealthy to gain weight and that gaining weight is a big problem or “no-no.”

So, unless you’re specifically looking for a diet to lose weight, any healthy lifestyle that focuses on weight is likely to be a fad diet in disguise.

Final thoughts

Living a healthy lifestyle is a brilliant goal, but diet culture still lies insidiously in the cracks of a well-meaning movement.

It’s time to put an end to diet culture. Let’s work together to create a society that celebrates health at every size, where people are free from the shame and guilt of not fitting into a specific mould.

Living a healthy lifestyle is so much more than just following someone else’s rules or guidelines- it should be something that makes you feel good, both physically and mentally.

So, next time you are looking for a healthy lifestyle change to implement into your life, make sure you research it and verify that it doesn’t have its roots in diet culture.

What’s a healthy lifestyle change you tried that turned out to be a fad diet?