If a healthy diet and exercise bores you, you’ll want to find something easier that delivers fast, noticeable results. You’ll want to find a diet that quickly sheds unwanted pounds, doesn’t take much work, easy to follow and easy to manage. You don’t want lectures over healthy foods and why you need regular exercise — that’s too hard to follow. So you open your Firefox or your Internet Explorer, looking for diets that promise huge weight loss and easy instructions…you’ll click on articles about grapefruit diets, chocolate diets, about every diet imaginable until, heaven forbid, you come across The Diet.
What is The Diet?
The Diet is everything you need. 10lbs in a week! Be a size 2 in a month! You won’t starve with this diet! This diet promises everything and the moon, and you read on, thinking this is your miracle cure.
Did you notice some odd phrases as you scroll down? Along with diet, weight loss, and skinny jeans, you might read ana, mia, pro-ana…what does that mean?
Do you realize you’re on a pro-anorexia site?
Some are frightened; they click the back button. Some desperate individuals won’t click back, however. They actually try the diet. Little do they know the harm it causes them: body, mind, and spirit. They do the diet regardless, as they see the pounds magically drop off.
If you’re thinking of doing a diet on a Pro-Anorexia website, think again. If Pro-Anorexia doesn’t alarm you, this will. Listen up, people: the Sacred Heart Diet is on here! So is the Master Cleanse Diet (the diet that Beyonce did), a.k.a. the “poop-all-day” diet. These are all dangerous diets that impact you negatively, with the worst effects on people at risk for eating disorders. Run from these “sacred” diets while you can.
The Sacred Heart Diet
Also known as the cabbage diet, the Sacred Heart Diet is supposedly a diet developed by medical professionals at the Sacred Heart Hospital in Montreal, Canada. The Sacred Heart Hospital denies any involvement with producing this diet. The Sacred Heart Diet claims this was made for overweight heart patients, but the actual hospital doesn’t back up these claims.
With that said, this is what the Sacred Heart Diet is:
– You’re supposed to do it only for a week.
– It’s a diet, mostly soup-based. You make a huge vat of vegetable soup to eat, made from low-calorie vegetables.
– You eat as much soup as you want. Fill up!
– You are allowed certain foods to eat on certain days. It’s too lengthy to list all of it, but here’s an explanation.
– Your drinks are restricted. Basically anything that’s low-calorie.
The Sacred Heart Diet claims that this sacred soup is fat-burning, that the ingredients magically shed pounds. Look up the ingredients and the calories: 50 calories per cup. If you eat all the soup you want, you aren’t even going to break 500 calories. Add that with food and you won’t even make 1200 calories, the recommended amount needed for a diet to work. 1000 is starvation; 750 is Anorexia.
You will shed weight at first. Everyone does. This is called water weight, and people hold 2-5lbs of water weight at a time (Mrs. Olson here holds 10 or so, but her body just hates her). If you weigh yourself and see the huge weight difference, it’s not the magic of the Sacred Heart Diet: it’s the magic of your pee this morning, which is how it was ‘flushed out’. It comes back once you eat regularly.
Secondly, the Sacred Heart Diet is extremely dangerous because of the calories. If you follow this plan, you’ll eat as many calories qualified to be an Anorexic. You’ll get heart palpitations, dizziness, fatigue — Sacred Heart Diet followers say this is from ‘detoxification’, which is code word for “you’re not getting enough calories and your body can’t function!.
Also know that when you stop this diet, the weight will reappear.
Case in point: the Sacred Heart Diet is an extremely unsafe diet. It’s on Pro-Anorexia sites for a reason. Avoid it.
The Master Cleanse Diet
Get ready not to eat with this diet! You’ll be doing a “master cleanse”, which is code word for “fasting and pooping a lot”.
Here’s how you do the Master Cleanse:
– You need to make your master cleansing drink. This involves freshly squeezed lemon juice, organic grade-B syrup, cayenne pepper, and spring water. Yes, you mix it together and drink it. In fact, you drink it 6 times a day!
– You also can drink all the water you want.
– You’ll need to drink a herbal laxative tea every evening.
– Every morning you do a salt water flush, which is code word for drinking sea salt and pooping a lot.
– You can’t eat. You can only have the water and the Master Cleanse juice.
The Master Cleanse Diet also claims this:
– It detoxifies your body as it ‘leaves your body’.
– This diet aims to also flush out other parasites, mucus, waste, and leftover stuff from your colon. Community members on various message boards like to take pictures of the ‘results.
– You’ll feel great afterwards! Sicknesses, facial problems go away quickly because you’re detoxified.
Again, like the Sacred Heart Diet, you lose water weight from this. Some actual weight also, depending on the length, but the actual weight comes back once you eat again.
The biggest reason the Master Cleanse works: you poop a lot. Cayenne pepper does not do well on an empty stomach. Neither does drinking laxative tea. And the saltwater flush does just that — it flushes out lots of fecal matter. If you’re pooping numerous times a day not eating anything, the scale will register weight loss. Unfortunately, it won’t work that way once you stop this diet.
To sum it up: it just makes you poop a lot. This diet is extremely dangerous because you’re taking in minimal calories, you aren’t even eating, and worsens heart conditions. You don’t need to fast to lose weight, period.
Some Real Tips
Do you want some tips for losing weight with a quick diet? You can’t — at least not healthfully. The key to lifelong, substantial weight loss is to eat right, exercise, and drink plenty of water. It won’t be quick, it might bore you, but it’s a lot safe than risking your health. These diets — The Sacred Heart Diet and The Master Cleanse — shed major pounds but come back once you eat normally. It’s not substantial for life. All you get from this is fake weight, so skip it while you can.
