Paleo diet = grapefruit diet? Give me a break!

Our Stupid Article for the Day has been found!

(I thought about doing a Stupid Article Saturday every week, but, honestly, I find stupid diet articles several times a week.  And why wait?  Why delay gratification for snark?!  Let's get at it ...)

WebMD's Worst Diets Ever - diets that don't work.

Uh-huh. Grab your tinfoil hats, folks!  Let's see what Kathleen Zelman, MPH, RD, LD has to say!

First paragraph she jumps right on us primal types with this snotty little snippet:

"You've heard of them, maybe even tried them: miraculous-sounding diets that claim to melt off pounds with minimal effort. There are hundreds of these quick-fix diets out there, from the grapefruit diet to the detox diet to the "caveman" diet."

Ohh, burn!  Put us in quotes like the Paleolithic / Primal Way of Eating is a freaky fresh diet some new-age hippie in Cali just pulled out of his homeopathically cleansed arse.  Nope, honey. Been around way longer than every other. Try 2 million years.

Wow, and Ms Dawn Jackson-Blatner (Say that out loud. I guarantee you'll laugh. Sorry ... unnessessary snark. I'm OK now. ... *snort*) is so far off the farkin' mark I can barely see her from here:

"One reason's it's so hard to tell the difference is that even the worst diets will likely result in weight loss, at least initially. But it does little good to lose weight, experts say, if it comes right back.

"Don't be fooled into thinking it is because of some magical food, pill or potion. What causes weight loss is eating fewer calories than you burn," says Dawn Jackson-Blatner, RD, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association (ADA).

WTF? Are real professional people STILL clinging to this insane, untrue and fully disproved notion?!  It is NOT that simple, people. Fat metabolism is a complex, dynamic process. It's NOT just "calories in, calories out".

Brace yourself, there's more from ol' Jackson-Blatner:

"Crazy, unbalanced diets cause weight loss because they are basically low-calorie diets."

Golly bob howdy!  Really?  I my own self have, to date, lost 140lbs on a "crazy unbalanced diet" and am currently losing on 2500-3000 calories a day.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Do I have special DNA altered by space aliens?  Cool!

On to the worst diets. Diet number one is us paleo / primal people (ohh, should I have put that in quotes?)

"1. Diets that focus on only a few foods or food groups (like the cabbage soup diet, grapefruit diet, strict vegan diets, raw food diets, and many low-carb diets). Beware of any diet that rules out entire food groups. People need to eat from a variety of food groups to get all the nutrients they need, says ADA spokeswoman Andrea Giancoli, MPH, RD."

Another little nugget of wisdom from the faux science sector. *rolls eyes*

People.  The 'balanced diet' concept is a fallacy.  Seriously.  We do NOT need grains or legumes or starchy tubers. Our bodies do not require bread, crackers, cookies, cake, corn, rice, oatmeal, potatoes, beans, or peanuts. We ran, hunted, bred, gathered, slept, and raised babies for 2 million years without any of these foods. 
That's a hella long time.  We get every vitamin and mineral, every nutrient our bodies need, from meat and veg.  If we "need a balanced diet" to survive then why aren't we extinct?

o hai, perhaps we are going to be soon!  According to these guys we all just lack willpower:

Yale University's David Katz, MD, author of The Flavor Point Diet, says that while restrictive diets do work initially, they fail over the long haul. You can lose weight on diets that focus on single foods (like cabbage soup), but how much cabbage soup can a person eat? Before long, you grow weary of eating the same foods every day, and cravings for favorite foods lead you back to your former eating behavior.
Keep in mind that all foods can fit into a healthy lifestyle in moderation -- even things like bacon, super-premium ice cream, and chips. And when diets forbid certain foods and dieters envision a life without their favorite treats, those diets usually fail. "Any time you restrict a certain food, it triggers cravings for the forbidden fruit and sets up a restriction-binge cycle," says Blatner. "

Yeah, yeah ... right. Poor us. We all have no control over ourselves whatsoever. *sniffle* and are entirely incapable of saying "Holy cow!  I'm the size of a cow!  If I don't stop this crap, I won't be alive to see my grandchildren!" 

We're all gonna fail without the sage advice and comforting wisdom of the misinformed nutrition industry!  Show me the food pyramid!  Show it to me! *weeps* If you need me I'll be running around, screaming, with my hands in the air!

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Right. Did we get that out of our systems?

Let's look at the truth, shall we?

Thanks to the FDA and the nutrition industry we, as a people, have been nomming more and more carbs and sugar during the last 40 years and correspondingly growing more and more obese whilst opting in for such fun extras as diabetes and heart disease. (If fat is so bad for you, howcome heart disease is skyrocketing when everyone is obsessively watching his fat intake, hmm?)

Many of us are insulin resistant, almost all of us are bombarded with creamy, gooey, flakey, crispy, carby, sugary CRAP all day every day. No wonder we can't stick to any diets. We have become addicted to soda and crisps, to pizza and candy bars.  50 years ago, a delicious treat, eaten AT MOST, once a day, after supper, was a fresh apple pie made from butter, flour, sugar, spices, and tart apples.  Just plain food with the minimum sugar cuz it was expensive.  And it was a special treat.  Things like candy and ice cream was a rare indulgence when you went into town.  You drank water or cider or tea and ate meat and veg the rest of the day.

Nowdays our feet hit the floor and we start sucking down the carbs/sugars. We eat nasty breakfast cereals with scoops of sugar, toaster pastries, jellies on our 2 slices of toast.  We snack all day on crisps and candy and cookies; we suck down sodas and sports drinks and flavoured waters. Even V-8 is loaded with carbs and sugar!  We have dessert after both dinner and supper - we snack in between. We gorge on fast food and worry about the fat. Have you looked at the carb and sugar content of that chinese take-away?!

We are a nation conditioned to eat and stimulated to do so by the carb/sugars we consume. They raise our blood sugar, then crash it, insulin floods in, and we eat. Rinse and repeat, over and over.  All day.  Every day.

You have to break this cycle.

I'm NOT trying to flog the Paleo Way of Eating.  It's not right for many, but it does work.  The truth and the real science is that you can lose weight and keep it off if you quit listening to the nutrition and diet industries.  Stop eating processed foods, cut out most of the carbs and sugars, eat more vegetables (NO, corn and potatoes are not vegetables!), move your body more, get outside in the sunshine without your SPF15.

No, it's not easy to start and there will be some rough patches. There is no magic pill. Like a marriage or like raising a kid, changing the way you eat permanently is tough. You have to have the determination to do it.

But all those things are worth it, doncha think?


Thoughts? Brickbats?  Have you lost weight and kept it off on anything the industry would call a fad diet?  I'd LOVE to hear about it!