You're doing it wrong! Trying to help a friend with diet

There are a lot of theories as well as a lot of bad information out there in the the fitness world, which is a multi-billion dollar a year industry. When there is this much money at stake there are going to be a lot of bad actors that are spreading bad information or "magic bullets" aimed at people that won't accept the very simple tenet of weight loss and health" Don't consume more calories than you can burn in a day.

There are other paths of course and several of them have worked for me such as the carnivore diet or Atkins diet, but these have other caveats such as increasing blood pressure and causing cardiovascular issues if the meat consumed is too fatty. What? you mean I can't just eat bacon all day and be healthy?

now I am far from a vegan. I consume a very high level of protein on purpose for the sake of muscle growth and maintenance and there isn't a huge amount of a system that goes into this such as meal prep, I just try to stay off of sugars and keep 1-2 grams of protein per kg or body weight going into my system. Hey! it has worked for me so it must be right, right? Well, not necessarily.

Just like we all have different fingerprints the makeup of someone's interior workings is going to be different from person to person but we also have to recognize that there are certain scams out there or "fringe programs" that work for some, but for most people it is a bunch of bullcrap.

How people end up getting into this way of thinking is something I struggle to understand but I suppose we are all susceptible to advertising in our own ways.

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A friend of mine that I have known since I was 12 years old had bad dietary and exercise habits all those years ago and now we are in our 40's and well, his bad habits continued for most of that time. Not only is he quite fat, but recently he was told by a doctor that he has other health issues that if not corrected, are going to almost certainly cause him an early death. He has early onset diabetes of some sort, I don't remember what it is but from what he described it is not the really bad one, but one that can be reversed. Thankfully, he finally started taking things seriously and decided to do something about it.

I haven't visited this guy in a long time because our houses are hundreds of miles apart, but on a recent visit to his part of the world he was kind of amazed that I was still in pretty good shape, but then again, when we knew one another as kids I was always an athlete and he never was. So I guess he wasn't that surprised. He told me about his health issues and how his usual meals of ordering a pizza combo for dinner (he is a very busy robotics engineer) was something he was doing many days a week.

I have no problem with pizza, but the kind that is normally pushed on us by chains is the worst kind and should be avoided entirely. Thankfully, he realized this on his own but his "new strategy" was one that kind of shocked me and I offered him some advice that I hope he takes to heart.

His solution to his problems with weight and health was to go on a juice diet. Which is a nice idea and certainly better than eating pizza all the time, is an extremely calorie rich diet, and depending on how much of it you consume, can actually contain more calories than the pizza and breadsticks. There is one benefit though, and that is that the juice calories aren't empty and contain some vitamins at least.

however, something that people don't realize and they really should, is that most juices that you can get in the store are incredibly bad for you and this is by design so that the people that make the juice can make more money at the expense of your health.

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The problem with awesome tasting fruit juice such as orange juice, which has gone from "healthy" to "villain" in the past couple of decades is a couple of things: For one thing, a standard cup of juice, when taken straight from the fruit itself, actually is a lot of oranges. I don't think very many people would actually consider eating 5 oranges for a meal, but they see no issue with drinking a glass of OJ that is precisely that. Don't believe me? well make your own glass of juice using actual fruit and see for yourself. When you do this you are also skipping all the fiber that exists in the plant and some would argue that this is very important for your body.

Now to make things even worse, as the picture above attempts to explain, the juice companies will water down the juice and fill the void with sugar or if you are in America, they will use high fructose corn syrup instead. This boosts the already high sugar content of juices to an absurd level right on par with drinking Coca-cola. Nobody would drink a Coca-Cola with a multi-vitamin and consider it healthy would they? Well that is essentially what my friend and many others do when they think they are doing something healthy by drinking massive amounts of juice.

Another problem with this sort of "diet" is that it doesn't satiate actual hunger for very long unless you drink massive quantities of it. Even if you did have the time to squeeze 30 oranges in a day to keep your tummy feeling full this would be extremely expensive, so there is no cost-benefit to it either?

My friend, from lord knows what bad intel, had a fridge filled with various "cran-drinks" because I guess he saw something that was likely funded by the cranberry industry that cranberry juice is good for your health.

While this might be true, actual cranberries are pretty gross and very bitter. In order to make these drinks palatable, they have to mix in a bunch of other stuff and guess what it is? Sugar.

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Here's one of the famous ones that has attempted various methods of tricky advertising in order to conceal that it is actually quite terrible for you. They adjust the serving size, use tiny font on the nutritional information, or use wording like "100% juice...cranberry" when in reality it contains apples, grapes, and other things that are much cheaper and taste better than cranberries do. They also have "sugar substitutes" that are technically NOT sugar so they can get away with saying things like "zero added sugar" on the label.

an 8 ounce glass of this stuff has nearly 30 grams of carbohydrates in it and almost all of that is the wrong kind of carbs. To make matters worse, the bottles they are packaged in, or at least the ones in my friend's fridge, were 16 oz bottles but the label is deceptively done on purpose to indicate that the "serving size" is half of the bottle.

Let me ask you a serious question: How many times have you bought a drink in a mini-mart and then drank just half of it? I don't think anyone ever does this on purpose.

So while my friend has the right idea about dietary changes, I think the "juice cleanse" or whatever they are calling it these days, is a bad choice if you are choosing readily available juices that are in every supermarket at a low price. As terrible as this is to say I find it to be true in that "the better the juice tastes, it is more often than not the worse for you."

Weight loss and health requires a lot more effort than a 24-pack of juice in the fridge. I advised my friend to get in the habit of lean meats or perhaps even subscribing to a meal plan service. These services are expensive but he is a friggin robotics engineer and can definitely afford it. I also advised that he plug in his sound-cancelling headphones to put on some nerd shit that robotics engineers are probably interested in, and walk around his very posh neighborhood for 30 minutes to an hour every day.

I hope he can take my advice. I don't have all the answers and I did not go to school for this. Instead, I am a guy that did a lot of things wrong and learned from my mistakes. Hopefully he heeds my advice and perhaps there are others out there that can see these carefully contrived "juice diets" for the lies that they are: a carefully contrived advertising campaign to sell more sugar water to people at the expense of their own health.

_{I lost 50 lbs guys. I went down a dark path and emerged into the light on the other side. It's not difficult, but you have to stay focused and dedicated}