In a world without teeth, the smoothie would be king.
But save for babies and a few unfortunate people in retirement homes, we don’t live in such a world.
Before you jump on the smoothie diet bandwagon to “slurp your way to slim”, spend a few minutes thinking about your body and how it’s put together.
You have teeth for a reason
Smoothies are made up of pure, natural fruit or vegetables and they contain loads of vitamins – so yes, they have something going for them. But unfortunately that’s where the goodness ends.
Firstly, no healthy diet should eliminate major food groups. To stay healthy, your body needs protein, carbohydrates and essential fats. You need to eat these every day and – in the right combinations – with each and every meal. Following a smoothie diet based primarily on pulped fruit and vegetables means that you will not get these essential macro nutrients in sufficient quantities or in the right proportions.
Second, a smoothie’s velvety, liquid magic is also its greatest weakness, because the blending process ensures that most of the healthy, essential fibre gets removed. Your body needs these raw fibres to stay healthy, and it has been designed to process them – starting with your teeth!
Third, a typical smoothie contains three or for different fruits, and you just aren’t designed to eat that many in one sitting. Have you ever experienced tummy cramps and a certain gassy feeling after you’ve had a smoothie? That’s your body telling you that you’ve just fed it an unbalanced meal.
But hold on, aren’t others losing weight with the smoothie diet?
It’s true that people lose weight sticking to the smoothie diet, and you will probably experience weight loss too, but as soon as you start eating “real” food it is very easy to put the weight back on – and in some cases people put on much more than they initially lost.
Of course there is a time and a place for everything and if you were recovering from an operation, struggled to eat and needed to ensure that you don’t lose muscle mass, you could combine protein powder with a liquid drink, but this is a short-term solution only.
Embarking on crash diets messes with your metabolism, they don’t address underlying problems and they don’t teach you how to eat healthy, balanced meals for the rest of your life.
So every time someone tells you about their amazing liquid diet which helped them lose 15 pounds in just 3 weeks, go to the mirror and check out your teeth, remembering that they are there for a reason!
Managing your weight isn’t easy, but it can be done with hard work and with the right kind of advice. Check out these success stories to see how people just like you have reached their target weight through changing their eating habits the natural, sustainable way – for life.
