Is A Juice Diet Any Good For Weight Loss?

Juice diet is a popular diet. Most people follow it as a detox diet for weight loss. It has many forms based on orange, vegetables and other possibilities. It is also actually a fad diet or crash diet, involves intake of fruit juices, and water only. It is an extreme diet, being that no solid food is consumed during the diet. So is the juice diet actually healthy and helps detox your system? Does it actually help you to lose weight?

Think of it this way. The point of the juice detox diet for weight loss is to consume fewer calories than your current metabolic rate. With the calorie deficit, it seems like it will help you lose weight. But is there really a calorie deficit in your juice diet? Or are you actually consuming too many calories on your juice diet?

If you are drinking eight to ten glasses of packaged orange fruit juice, then you might be consuming a large amount of sugar with it. Sugar makes you store fat. So, stay off the packaged fruit juice.

Now, if you are on an unsweetened fresh fruit juice detox diet or vegetable juice detox diet, then you know you are not consuming the extra sugar calories but fewer calories. If weight loss was just a game of calories, then this could work, but there are other complications to it.

Vegetables and fruits are loaded with vitamins, minerals and nutrients, so you assume vegetable juices and fruit juices are also good for your health. Your assumptions that vegetable and fruit juices have these nutritional benefits are right, but being on a juice diet completely deprives you of macro nutrients like protein and fat.

Let us discuss about protein. On the juice diet, there is no protein source. The human body has a certain amount of muscle weight. Besides giving your body shape, muscles also help protect your bones from injury, and stores energy for your body. When you eat little or no protein on the juice diet, then it is insufficient to maintain these muscles. As a result, your body experiences muscle catabolism - where your body uses muscle protein to maintain essential muscles. This can result in losing muscle. When you lose muscles, you lose muscle weight. So, the weighing scale may indicate that you have lost weight, but is that the weight you really wanted to lose? Furthermore, with lower muscle content in your body, your metabolic rate goes down. All these only serve to make losing fats harder for you!

Next time, before you blindly believe in such fad diets, do a proper research first!