Can A Liquid Diet Or Juice Cleanse Really Help You Lose Weight?

There’s no dearth of weight loss articles on the internet, and although the “it fad” keeps changing from time to time (paleo in, keto out), there’s one thing which doesn’t lose its appeal year after year – liquid diet. Meal shakes, smoothies, juices, broths, there are quite a few products readily available in your nearest supermarket just in case you want to “drink” your meals. All these companies make the same promise while promoting their products. These products are believed to effective in cleansing your body from inside and detoxifying it. While liquid diets are billed as weight loss shortcuts, should you rely on these much-hyped products to lose your extra pounds?

Can You Really Do A Patty From Netflix Series Insatiable?

Insatiable, a black comedy-drama web TV series premiered on Netflix has Patty Bladell (Debby Ryan) as its central character. Patty, the teenage protagonist, is constantly bullied by her classmates for being overweight and after meeting an accident, she chooses to live on a liquid diet for three months. Patty finally takes revenge on the bullies, but there’s a plot error. Patty, the protagonist, goes on a liquid diet as she breaks her jaw in the accident and her mouth is wired shut. Once the wire comes off, she resumes her solid food but doesn’t gain weight, which simply doesn’t happen in the real world. Liquid-only diet has been depicted as one plausible weight loss method in this Netflix TV series. Well, the reality is a bit different from what the makers of this TV show wants you to believe.

What Do Liquid Diets Actually Do?

Is there a healthy way to follow a liquid diet plan to lose weight? For the sake of delving into this matter, let’s just define a liquid diet as a diet which replaces all of your meals with juices, broths and shakes for a few weeks. This kind of diet may also include liquid diets prescribed by your doctor, such as oral rehydration solutions. Juice cleanses are rich in sugar and low in calories typically, and meal replacement shakes are meant to give you the daily dose of protein and essential nutrients. Generally speaking, liquid diets are lower in calories compared to your usual solid food diet. However, one thing common among all sorts of liquid diets is that they don’t contain sufficient amounts of nutrients or calories that would be enough for you to sustain for a period of a couple of weeks.

Are You Starving Yourself To Lose Weight?

When you embrace a liquid diet, you actually start starving your body and force your body to use your stored energy. When you live on a liquid-only diet, you end up burning glycogen, a type of glucose which is stored in your muscles and liver. You don’t just burn through the stored glycogen, but you lose the water which is attached to it. As you lose your water weight, you will feel that you are losing weight at the beginning, but the weight will come back as soon as you resume your solid food diet. Also, once the stored glycogen, you will start losing your muscles and fat cells. While losing your fat cells is not a bad thing at all, it would be difficult for you to gain back your muscle mass.

Liquid Diet Won’t “Detox” You

If you are trying to get rid of all those toxins your body has amassed, you will be happy to know that your body naturally works to detox itself. Companies that depict their liquid diet products as the ultimate detox drinks would never tell you that human body organs, such as liver, lungs, kidneys as well as lymphatic system work really hard to get rid of all the toxins. If you avoid solid foods for a certain period and switch to a liquid diet, it won’t power-wash your digestive system. Even worse, you may get constipation.

If you really want to lose weight the natural way, first drop the idea of choosing an ultra-restrictive diet. When you force yourself to choose a diet which is not actually suitable for your body, you actually change your natural relationship with your food and develop a psychological misconception. Losing weight is not just about changing your diet. Make sure you are getting adequate calories and nutrients and also exercise a lot to lose weight the natural way.