Yasss! Fit tea, detox and juice diet! If you are an avid Instagram follower of all the fit chick channels that’s all that there is to a healthy lifestyle and an aesthetic body. Maybe also squats. There’s no Photoshop, those boobs are natural grapefruits and of course no one would cheat on their followers to make money from sponsors.
In case you didn’t notice it yet, I’m about to get a sprained neck from vigorously shaking my head. All my friends know I’m all for having fun and trying crazy things (I’ll soon post about my experiences with Protein-Sparing Modified Fasting [PSMF]) but sometimes I’m just baffled at how blindly people run behind fitness trends if famous people preach them. After I found people in my direct social circle talking about how they want to make a juice detox, I felt the need to air with a rant post instead of just slapping them.
If you haven’t come about the idea of detox or fit tea yet, I’ll quickly give you a rundown of the theory:
Detox
The idea behind detoxing is that a lot of waste, usually from chemicals and medicine, starts to accumulate within the human body, mainly the intestine and liver. Those wastes have a negative impact on the human health and you have to actively detox to get rid of them. Detoxing is done by replacing your complete regular diet with a liquid, vegetable & fruit juices based diet.
Fit Tea
Bear with me, it gets better than detoxing, there’s fit tea. Basically it’s a special tea formulation including things like ginger, lemon grass, green tea, etc. that promises to make you lose weight, give you clearer skin and detoxes your body.
If you are the logically thinking kind of person and have a basic grasp on the principles how the human body works, you just yelled “DA FUQ?!” and I would have to agree with that notion.
We will start with the idea that your body is full of waste that you have to flush out. According to scientists who actually know what they talk about, in contrast to e.g. health gurus on the Internet, this is complete fantasy. Driving a car doesn’t make you a race driver, building a tree house doesn’t make you an architect and therefore having a six pack doesn’t make you a scientific nutritionist.
If your body accumulates serious poisonous materials that it can’t handle by itself, you’re in a hospital or dead. Surprise, you have a liver! Most poisons you can contract via your diet are directly filtered out of your body by the liver and kidneys, that is literally their job. Those that accumulate in your body like mercury from fish, tar from cigarettes and comparable residues are not automatically excreted by your organs and – next surprise – detoxing will do nothing about them. If you stop smoking today, it might take 5 to 7 years until your lung recovers. Three days of carrot juice ain’t gonna fix that.
You cannot really lose weight through detox or fit tea.
There, I said it. Everyone who is even remotely interested in getting into shape knows that your body weight is a direct result of the metabolism of your body. On the most basic level it is calories in versus calories out. If you eat more than you burn you get chubby, if you eat less you lose weight. Your body makes no real differentiation between calories out of protein, fat or carbohydrates in that regard; unused energy gets stored in fat for harder times – which never come in Central Europe or the USA.
It is typically calculated that roughly 3500 kcal approximate one pound of fat, i.e. if your weekly expenditure of energy exceeds your diet by 3500 kcal you will lose one pound of fat. As an example to put that into perspective, one bucket of Ben&Jerry’s Chunky Monkey which I love with my whole heart is 1250 kcal. 3500kcal is also more than 7 hours of cycling at a moderate pace within a week.
3 days of borderline starvation level dieting at 1000kcal would give you only give you around 3500 kcal of deficit. And seeing how we’re talking about general weight loss and not actually loss of fat, this is completely irrelevant. Congratulations, you just lost a quarter pound fat, a quarter pound muscle and look exactly as before.
Fit tea is even worse as often it advocates that you just consume it in addition to your regular diet. How do you expect that to work? Must be magic.
Another point about these detox programs is price. Here we come to the actual background of why there is so much publicity around detoxing lately. Manufacturers of detox products sponsor athletes, Instagram fit girls and generally famous trollops (stop making dumb people famous!) to pose with their products and praise the amazing, fabulous results they achieved with them. If you do a quick research on what a ready-made 3-day detox juice package costs, you will quickly reach or exceed 100 €. So many people are willing to spend a hundred hard earned €uros on three days worth of vegetable juice but can’t afford 25-50 € for a monthly gym membership. Seems like not a lot of bang for the buck in my opinion.
As you see, the only thing slimming down is your wallet.
If someone wants give me a thousand dollars to say his fit tea made me handsome and fixed my crooked face, you know where to find me. But don’t trust everything you read on the Internet. Research trustworthy resources and focus on independent people and websites that are not affiliated with the brands.
I don’t want to pull this into length, therefore my last evidence is consistency. A detox doesn’t necessarily have to be bad. But what do you do after those three days? 99% of people will go back to their lackluster diets consisting of frozen convenience food, the cheapest meat they can buy and the least vegetables they need for decorations.
What good is three days of healthy vegetables against years of microwave burritos?
Better spend that money on a healthy cooking class where you learn how to prepare savory dishes from scratch that fit those nutritional needs of your body and taste amazing at the same time.
The only way to get into a healthier lifestyle is to chose a life of consistency. It took years to turn into a mess, it probably will take months or years to turn into your goal.
Wait wot?! So what is healthy then?
In a very short summary:
- Strive for a good mix of nutrients like 40% protein, 40% carbs and 20% fat but even better, actually calculate in grams
- Don’t detox, instead try to regularly eat those healthy fruits and juices
- Do sports at least three times a week
- Mix cardiovascular activities and resistance training – no one wants an anorexic cardio bunny. We’re all about those gainz!
- Try to eat conscious, cook by yourself and choose high quality natural ingredients
- Cut down on sugary drinks, alcohol and sweets
And last but not least: don’t obsess it. Stress is unhealthy. Try to be in balance. Sleep a lot.
TL;DR: You only want to look good and be shredded for summer to get bishes, with no value put on living another 5 years? Clearly ‘roids and meth. Just saying. j/k… maybe.