The Truth about Lemon Detox and Fad Diets

Fad Diets are diets that come into fashion as quickly as they go out. These diets exclude large food groups, limiting the dieter to consuming only fruits, vegetables, meats, liquid meals or even just one particular food per day. The diets come with a successful marketing campaign that can be convincing to the unwary dieter. It is important that every diet should be sustainable. The food choices should contain everything that is essential to health. This enables the diet to be a lifestyle change that can exist for years to come. Fad Diets will not teach the dieter any long term principles instead they leave the dieter discouraged when the diet is eventually stopped.

So what are some fad diets and what do they claim

Lemon Detox Diet

Grapefruit Diet

Raw food Diet

Meal Replacement Diets

Cabbage Soup Diet

The Lemon Detox Diet

The Lemon Detox Diet is one of the most popular of these fad diets. On their website homepage the Lemon Detox Diet makes some amazing claims from glowing skin, to increased vitality all of which cannot be proven true or false. Along with these subjective claims the Detox Diet is said to provide a person with 3-6kg weight loss in 10 days. That point alone is enough to have most dieters buying into the diet in an instant.

Is it possible to lose 3-6kg in 10days?

Yes, but it won’t be fat loss.

The trick with detox and crash diets is the initial false weight loss. This weight loss convinces the dieter that they are onto a winner, but in actual fact much of their weight loss is not due to fat loss.

Fat is a stored energy source in the body. Early research has calculated 1kg of fat to contain approximately 32500kj’s.

The average female with moderate to low activity levels requires around 7500kj’s to sustain energy balance. This means their body consumes 7500kj’s of energy per day. If the person in question eats nothing, other than drinking lemon juice it will take 4 days and 8 hours to burn 1kg of fat. This is 2.3kg’s of fat loss in 10 day’s provided there is zero food intake.

Fat though cannot meet all the body’s energy requirements therefore a portion of this daily 7500kj’s is produced via proteins and carbohydrates.

–“As a result for a female the maximal fat loss that can be achieved on the 10 day lemon detox is closer to 1.5kg’s of weight”-.

Knowing this, how is it possible to produce the claimed 3-6kg reductions.

Not all weight loss is fat loss

Weight loss can result from several factors. A loss of glycogen (stored carbohydrates), muscle tissue and water can all result in large reductions in body weight.

Diets containing minimal to no carbohydrates deplete liver and muscle tissue stores of glycogen. It is estimated that muscle tissue can store 400 grams of glycogen whilst the liver stores 100 grams. Calculations from research paper thought indicate this number may be much higher. Even so, this glycogen is stored with 3-4 parts water content (1). An extremely low or no carbohydrate diet can produce an immediate 2.5kg weight loss by depleting the 500 grams of available glycogen and the subsequent water stored with it.

Muscle tissue is the second source of false weight loss. In a time of energy restriction muscle tissue is used to provide energy and glucose in a process called gluconeogenesis. This is where by stored proteins are converted to glucose for use by the brain. This can result in a simultaneous loss of muscle tissue along with fat tissue. Muscle protein of mammals contains around 20% protein and 3% fat, this will yield around 4500kj’s per kg. Therefore if muscle tissue were to provide 100% of the bodies energy intake during dieting a loss of 1.66kg’s of muscle could occur per day. The body though ensures muscle tissue would never provide a value near 100% of the bodies needed energy. As a result such large losses in muscle do not occur. Despite this a portion of a severe dieter weight loss will be muscle tissue

A well designed study looked at the 10 day weight loss of participants on 3 different diets. One diet contained no food or energy intake, the second diet contained 3200kj’s of energy of which no carbohydrates were consumed and the third 3200kj’s of energy sourced from mixed food and carbohydrates. The findings were that the no food group lost 7.5kg’s in 10 day. 2.4kg of this was fat loss. 61% of this weight loss was water loss due to muscle and glycogen depletion. The no carbohydrates group lost 4.7kg whilst the carbohydrate group lost 2.8kg. Both of these groups lost 1.7kg’s of fat, the difference though was a 61% water loss of the no carbohydrates group, due to the muscle and glycogen breakdown (2).

To summarize

- Muscle Glycogen and the associated water can result in short term weight losses of up to 5kg’s in 10 days (2,3).

- Muscle tissue provides an approximate 4500kj’s of energy per kg compared to the 32500kj’s of fat tissue

- If exercise remains low to moderate the maximum fat loss that can be achieved by the average female on a 10 day food absence is approximately 1.5-2kg’s.

This demonstrates on a largely restricted detox or fad diet fat losses may entail only 1.5-2kg’s of the claimed 3-6kg weight losses. After the initial glycogen depletion stage weight loss will slow. The subsequent losses will be achieved through a loss of muscle tissue and fat stores

When embarking on a diet, exclude detox diets, and severe energy restriction diets. These diets will cause lethargy and an initial rapid weight loss that will disappear when eating is resumed. Instead the range of weight loss should be .5-1kg per week. The larger the individual the higher the sustainable weight loss can be. For this reason those who are 5kg’s overweight should aim for .5kg’s per week and those 20kg’s or greater over weight should aim for 1kg per week.

A 1kg per week reduction in fat equates to an approximate 2400kj reduction in daily food intake. This is 1.5 average size meals or 1 quarter to a third of a reduction in the average daily food intake.

To achieve this, a third to a quarter reduction in plate meal size can be used. Alternatively remove snacks or known treats and deserts from your usually diet

References

(1)Variation in Total Body Water with Muscle Glycogen Changes in Man

Karl-Erik Olsson, Bengt Saltin, Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, Volume 80, Issue 1, pages 11–18, September 1970

(2) Composition of weight lost during short-term weight reduction. Metabolic responses of obese subjects to starvation and low-calorie ketogenic and nonketogenic diets.

M U Yang and T B Van Itallie

J Clin Invest. 1976 September; 58(3): 722–730.

(3)Glycogen storage: illusions of easy weight loss, excessive weight regain, and distortions in estimates of body composition. S N Kreitzman, A Y Coxon, and K F Szaz

Am J Clin NutrJuly 1992vol. 56 no. 1 292S-293S

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The Truth about Lemon Detox and Fad Diets

The Lemon Detox Diet

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