My wife wants me to try the General Motors Weight Loss Diet Program. Now, the first thing I pointed out to her is that there is no corroborating evidence that GM ever actually endorsed a shitty diet plan like this. The plan itself is simple, if crap.
Now hopefully none of the Teeming Millions are taken in by this crappy diet (which claims links to GM and John Hopkins in the preamble). Unfortunately, Snopes has yet to take a crack at this so I am asking for your help. Note that I avoided GQ, so don’t feel you have to post GQ worthy answers, although I won’t mind those either.
Losing anything close to 2 pounds a day is dangerous and completely unhealthy. That alone indicates that nothing in this can be trusted. The pat of butter on day two is completely absurd-if you’re trying to lose weight like this, you want to minimize fat consumption. Also, the gorging on day 6 would largely, if not completely, negate weight loss.
I’m sure someone knowledgeable will be along shortly.
For one thing, that’s weight loss at an insane rate. Even if she takes it off that rapidly, she’ll just gain it right back, and those pounds will bring their buddies. For another thing, any diet that has you eating only one food is usually a really bad idea. In fact diets in general are bad. If she eats normal food but in healthy portions, and gets good exercise, she can lose .5 to 2 pounds per week and keep it off.
I have an exercise program that has a plan to lose up to 10 pounds in 10 days. It’s fairly instense and focuses more on execise than on eating. But it is in agreement that alcohol and some other beverages are strictly off limits during that period.
It looks like this diet is just shuffling the list to different days, instead of allowing you to eat some of each food type each day. That and it’s very low on grains.
Nothing beats a well balanced approach to meals, limited snacking, and moderate exercise. Everything else is a fad, not a lifetime approach to weight control.
Thanks. Basically, even before I looked at the diet details, I was saying the same thing (too much weight too fast - it’s fake). Then she said that it starts by removing ‘toxins’ on the fruit day. Let’s just say that my laugh of derision didn’t go over well (you’d think I would learn after all this time, but I guess we all have our shortcomings). Looks like I’ll be getting the cold shoulder, because there is no way I’m trying this diet if she insists on trying it…besides, I’m lactose-intolerant. The milk and banana day would kill me!
shrug. If you’ve told her you think it’s BS and she still wants to try it, if I were you, I’d just let the issue drop and let her try it without starting any disagreements over it.
The odds are she won’t stick with it very long, because of how restrictive it is, so what’s the harm?
At least it seems more balanced than that Cabbage Soup Diet that used to be pretty popular.
Voodoo bullshit. The stupid is so profound that the mind literally boggles attempting to unravel it. It’s like they generated it with a random number generator and then randomly plundered alternative medicine texts to justify the results.
Just to give some perspective, to sustain a 10 lb per week weight loss would take a total deficit of roughly 35,000 kcal. This is a 5,000 kcal per day deficit. At my current body weight of 175-180 pounds, I have a maintenance level of roughly 2500 kcal per day–if I eat more than that I gain; if I eat less I lose. I would have to eat 0 calories and then burn another 2500 from exercise (say, from running a marathon at a reasonable clip) to get a 5,000 kcal deficit. And that’s every day for 7 days straight.
Now you can cheat a bit by losing a bunch of water weight, but you can get that effect by using less insane diet techniques…and that water weight will just come right back after you go off the diet. A lot of these fad diets use this effect to make people think that they’re getting remarkable results.
Before teh internets, this diet proliferated in the form of speckled seventh-generation photo copies of a typewritten sheet of paper. It has also been shared under many, many different names. (I’ve never heard it called the GM diet, though.)
You’d think if it were truly the miracle diet it claims to be, GM would have long-since copyrighted it and used it to get themselves out of financial trouble.
And what everyone else said about unrealistic & unhealthy rate of weight loss, etc., etc.
I think the point is that if you eat things in the right order, you’ll trick your metabolism into doing cartwheels or something.
And I’ve recently heard from a reliable source that potatoes are one of the worst things you can eat. Sweet potatoes are OK, but white potatoes convert to sugar really fast, cause a severe blood sugar spike, and cause you to be hungry again really soon.
If your wife’s body is functioning normally, it already has a mechanism for cleansing itself of “toxins” and “impurities.”
And even if she does have undesirable things in her body, giving herself diarrhea (days 1-3) is not the answer. It will only make her dehydrated. That’s the reason for the 10 glasses of water, which is an insane amount, especially since she’ll be eating so much fruits and vegetables, which themselves contain a lot of water.
Even the USDA is not an unbiased source, since basically they are a farmer’s guild. Even so, that’s a pretty decent list. The meat and beans look like a bit much, though.
I once lost 22 pounds in 2 weeks. Here’s what you do: become violently ill with something that also gives you a persistent fever and a horrendous cough, so you are hot (burning calories), throwing up (fewer calories), have diarrhea (even fewer calories), and coughing (coughing for hours on end as if you’re going to cough up a lung burns *lots * of calories). You’ll be so miserable you won’t even want to eat, you’ll look and feel like living death, and it will take months to recover, but hey, you lost weight, and that’s what’s important, right?
It looks like this diet wants to re-create this to a certain extent, but you’ll still need an emetic, something to induce a fever, and something to make you cough up to 16 hours a day. Have fun!
