Weight Loss, Dieting & Obesity

Silly Fad Diets :
The Bread Diet - Comments and Review.

<--- Return to "Silly Fad Diets Index"

Important Note: This review does NOT relate to either "The Bread For Life Diet" or "The Hunza Bread Diet".

The Bread Diet seems to have died a natural death. It was a very common quick-fix, rapid weight loss diet fad in the mid 1970s and into the 1980s, but rarely raises its head in public anymore. For that, we can be thankful. The Bread Diet probably qualified as one of the all-time worst silly fad diets.

The basic premise of The Bread Diet was that bread, when eaten and then chased down with water, becomes a very filling yet relatively low calorie meal. The idea was to east NOTHING but bread every second day and anything else you wanted on the alternate days. That "every second day" was supposed, therefore, to be a low calorie day and if you stick to the routine for a few weeks, you'd lose lots of weight.

While there may be a small degree of truth to that premise, weight is not all you'd lose. Your health would suffer very quickly. Not to mention your sanity. Nothing but dry bread three or more meals per day, washed down with water? How long do you think you could maintain a regime of that nature?

The constipating effect of the bread & water becomes noticeable quickly. While some may argue that fiber in bread will help your regularity, for the most part most breads are refined grains, particularly refined wheat starch. Every primary aged school child knows the simple home-recipe for making glue - a flour & water paste. Now, stick that in your bowels and suffer. Most people today also know that excessive starch intake breaks down into glucose in your bloodstream very rapidly, raising insulin levels, which then results in accelerated fat storage.

Any real nutrition on The Bread Diet comes not from the bread, but from the "other" day in the cycle when you can eat whatever you want. Let us remember why most people are overweight in the first place -- because they ate whatever they wanted. Can you see this simplistic extreme regime re-educating any dieters in good, long term, sustainable behavior modification to maintain any weight loss and prevent rebound?

For whatever the short term weight loss benefits (if any) of the bread diet, the damage to your health, the unsustainable nature of this diet, the lack of any lasting behavior modification and the guarantee of weight rebound once you stop the program means that the bread diet is, in the end, just another silly fad diet.