Caution: Celebrity Endorsed Diets
A celebrity endorsement of a diet is not a good enough reason to begin following that diet. Many of us want to believe that our favorite actors, athletes and musicians would never attach their names to diets or products that are unhealthy, or that just don’t work, and thereby encourage fans to follow them, but unfortunately this happens more often than you might suspect.
Celebrities are under an extraordinary amount of pressure to keep themselves in the limelight or risk being forgotten and the work and money to fund their lifestyles no longer being offered to them. This does not mean that every celebrity who endorses a diet is only doing it for the sake of publicity and the opportunity to keep themselves in the spotlight, but some celebrities do find that attaching themselves to diets is lucrative for publicity and added income. Not to mention the extravagant gift incentives that diet and weight loss companies thrust before celebrities to entice an endorsement out of them. If we were in their shoes we might find it hard to pass up some of these things too.
There are those celebrities, who just like the rest of us, do not understand what a healthy diet is all about. It is a fact that the majority of us do not truly understand how to make healthy food choices and how to eat healthy on a consistent basis. This is why obesity is rampant in this country. The diet and weight loss industry relies on our ignorance to continue fueling the market for even more questionable diet plans to be made available to the uninformed consumer. They are also cued into the marketing potential from the influence that celebrities carry because of our fascination with them, as well as our desire to share things in common with them. Using paid celebrities to make scripted testimonials about diets and weight loss products has netted record breaking sales and profits for the diet companies.
Despite the litany of diet plans and weight loss products that are sold each year, we as a society keep getting fatter and our health keeps getting worse. Why is this? Because a celebrity endorsement of a diet is not a good enough reason to begin following that diet or using its weight loss products. We cannot however lay all of the blame at the feet of the celebrity who endorses a certain diet or weight loss product. Neither can we look to the diet and weight loss industry to provide us with a lot of useful information about what a healthy diet consists of. That would kill what is a very lucrative market for them. We have to take responsibility for our own health and the choices we make that can seriously harm or help us. We need to stop being blind followers and instead become informed decision makers.
There are reputable resources where you can find information about healthy eating and ways to lose weight safely without putting your health at risk. Armed with this information you will be able to spot diets that offer questionable dieting advice and suggest using questionable products quickly and avoid them. You will find that the real science behind losing weight and keeping it off is more about eating foods that have a high density of nutrients in them rather than controlling food portions, counting calories and fat, or even eliminating certain foods from your daily diet.
Eating high density nutrient foods do more than help you to slim down to a healthy weight and keep from gaining that unhealthy weight back, foods with a high density of nutrients in them keep the body supplied with the nutrients it needs to fuel its systems and to keep you at your healthiest.
Diet plans that advocate eating nutrient rich foods and that do not support the severe restriction of calories, or suggest other unhealthy activities are fine to follow. That is given that you are choosing to do so as an informed consumer and not because you hear a paid celebrity say they do and you should too.