Using Celebrities As Role Models For Weight Loss: Is it Realistic?

Written by Jamie, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist

You want to lose weight but you really need inspiration, and you need it now!

Who do you turn to?

Well, according to a recent study, almost 50 percent of people between the ages of 25 and 54 turn to celebrities.

Of course it’s easy to see why celebrities can be inspiring — whether it’s Beyoncé and Reese Witherspoon or Gwyneth Paltrow and JLo — so many celebrities look amazing on the red carpet at the award shows, on that magazine cover or in their latest Instagram posts.

But professional makeup and Photoshop magic can make anybody look incredible — not to even mention those top-flight personal trainers and coaches who help celebrities stay super-toned and shredded.

Even when their poster-worthy looks are fully legit, more often than not they’re pushing one half-baked extreme diet or another.

While we can often wonder “Why am I not losing weight?” and want some fast help for our slim-down goals, we need to remember that many celebrity diets are, at best, not realistic, and, at worst, totally dangerous.

Almased, on the other hand, is part of a real-world, common-sense and safe approach to healthy eating and how to lose weight fast, but more on that below…

Here are some solid facts about why to avoid some of those crystals-and-moonbeams celebrity diets, and, more importantly, what we should really shoot for:

1. The Cleanse Diet

This nutrition-deficient diet (also known by a couple of other names) is a liquid-only regimen that’s made up of a type of lemonade, a salt-water drink and an herbal laxative tea.

While this extreme detox diet will probably help anyone lose pounds, you’ll also lose vital muscle, bone and water, and you will almost certainly gain all the weight back.

Beware of unhealthy cleanses — our bodies do most of the detoxing for us, with kidneys filtering our blood (and removing waste) and the liver detoxing chemicals we take in.

There are healthy ways to support our body’s natural detoxification efforts — such as Phase 1 of Almased’s Figure Plan Plus — and there are unhealthy ways, like the extreme lemonade cleanse above.

If we eat a low-glycemic high-protein diet that includes all of the food groups, we can lay the foundation for a lifetime of healthy weight loss.

2. The Baby Food Diet

Yes, this celebrity diet truly is as wacky as it sounds. It calls for eating up to 14 jars of baby food each day, with one low-calorie meal as a potential add-on.

You’ll lose weight with these pasty purees, but you’ll get very little adult-level nutrition and too-high daily levels of some things you don’t want a lot of, like sodium.

So for all of you who are grown-ups and have teeth, a diet filled with healthy whole foods is the only way to go.

3. The Mushroom Diet

While not as extreme as some celeb diets, this diet is still a bit misguided.

It calls for swapping one meal a day with raw mushrooms. Where it goes off the rails is for claiming that doing this will help you lose weight by targeting weight loss in certain areas, like the waist, hip and thighs.

Truth is, removing a meal per day will generally result in weight loss, provided the other two meals are balanced, but isolating weight loss to specific parts of the body through diet is not possible.

Better to target regions of the body with exercise, and not get hung up on counting on only one specific food (like mushrooms) to provide the missing nutrition.

4. Diets Featuring Clay, Coconut Oil and Cookies!

In other diets, one well-known actress swears by eating clay to help cleanse her body.

A famous model uses coconut oil for almost everything: She cooks with it, pours it on salads and uses it for moisturizing.

One reality TV star is obsessed with eating a bunch of gross-tasting cookies each day.

Another actress makes a $200 smoothie each day with mushroom powder and other ingredients: that’s $73,000 a year just for one smoothie per day for 365 days a year!

The bottom line, though, is that clay is dangerous, tons of coconut oil are fattening, and cookies are not a sustainable diet.

What is safe, nutritious and sustainable, however, is making Almased a part of your new healthy and realistic diet.

Almased: Nutrition for the Real World

Almased doesn’t lead you down any wacky nutritional rabbit holes: Quite the opposite.

Almased feeds the body at a cellular level to help boost metabolism and safely support both fat-burn and overall weight loss.

Formulated with three primary ingredients — non-GMO soy, honey and yogurt — Almased features 27 grams of protein in a natural low-glycemic formula that comes in a powder for no-fuss mixing into shakes and smoothies.

You can drink Almased shakes in place of 1, 2 or 3 meals daily, or you can just use Almased as an occasional healthy snack to preserve your weight-loss achievements.

Almased is intelligent nutrition: It’s part of a safe, realistic, achievable healthy diet that gives us what we need, when we need it. What’s better than that?