The problems with liquid diets.

There are real problems with liquid diets.  We all desire the quick fix – Blab, Be Gone!!  But embarking on a liquid diet, which does indeed lead to rapid weight loss, has a high price to pay in both health and the side stepping of the issues.  Here are 10 points to bear in mind.

1. Liquid diets feed into fear of food.  Commonly, when we notice unacceptable layers of blubber surrounding our svelte frame, the immediate reaction is to stop eating.  All food becomes fattening.  Meals are skipped and great efforts are made to survive on 3 lettuce leaves a day.  By only consuming replacement drinks all normal food is avoided and remains, to our mind, fattening.
2. A food replacement diet does not teach someone how to eat to lose weight.  After the diet is finished, the ex-dieter is told how to re-introduce food with the idea of learning how to eat and not gain weight.  And at first this can meet with success.  But since the siren call of cake or crisps has not been addressed, merely avoided, in the end the ex-liquid dieter succumbs and often ends up fatter than they were before they first went on the liquid diet.
3. The protein provided in the replacement food is usually milk protein and milk protein presents digestive difficulties since it is a large molecule.  Also eating the same thing everyday leads to intolerance developing – intolerance to beef would happen if we ate chicken everyday.  So consuming milk protein as a staple part of our daily diet ravages the guts and will lead to digestive problems further down the line.  Do we really want to fart our way through old age?   Also people love to tell me they get all the nutrition they need from their food.  Well.  If that is so, we do need to digest it to access that nutrition.  Ravaged guts do not digest food properly.  They can’t.
4. The additional ‘nutrients’ provided in the shake are of very poor quality, such as magnesium hydroxide, so do not replace the nutrients found in real food.  So a few months on a liquid diet has a heavy price to pay in a lack of nutrition during that time.
5. Because the nutrition provided by a replacement food diet is so very poor, afterwards the dieter can pay a heavy price in subsequent health problems.  These include hair loss, problems with the teeth and gums.
6. There is a lack of fibre in these diets which leads to congestion in the colons and a build up of toxins.  For good health, we do need to do a good healthy dump every day.  Yes, professionals argue about how much fibre we actually need on a daily basis, but they all agree we need some.
7. Very rapid weight loss leads to an increased concentration of toxins in the fat cells – same number of fat cells, but they are considerably smaller.  To overcome this requires a first rate diet (which is not the diet recommended by health professionals), a healing of the digestive tract, first rate supplementation, a detoxification diet that supports full and proper liver detoxification – living on vegetables and juice for a week will aggravate toxicity, not help it.
8. The very low calories lead to a loss of muscle mass.  In the first instance this means the metabolic rate drops, so after the diet, to maintain the same body weight needs less food intake per day than before the diet.  The body has become thriftier in how it uses its food.  Another thing to bear in mind is that the heart is a muscle, so a prolonged very low calorie diet could weaken the heart.
9. Here is a link to a page with research into liquid diets.  It shows the positives and the negatives.  Vanderbuilt research
10. There is no way around it; for long term weight loss,  health and vitality, we have to look at why we got fat in the first place and address those causes.  Avoiding them just prolongs the agony.  And don’t forget, as we get older, our metabolism slows, making weight loss harder and harder.  To lose weight successfully and keep it off, we have to be able to look a Chocolate Digestive Biscuit in the eye and say, from the bottom of our heart, ‘No thank you.   Bleurggh.’  Losing weight on a liquid diet cannot achieve this goal.