As residents prepare to partake in festival activities, the Ministry of Health is urging persons to be conscious and careful of the measures they are willing to undertake to achieve the ideal “summer body”.
Speaking on a recent installment of “Health Bytes”, National Epidemiologist Harmonie Brewley-Massiah said that in the summer months, health professionals bemoan the increased popularity of several fad diets which promise unbelievable results in very short periods of time.
“Whenever you hear summer body and carnival body lumped in together, we get very, very scared…. with that comes a lot of these fad diets or crash diets and that is something we have been seeing over the past two months roughly… now we have really seen a ramping up of persons reporting that they’re intaking these things so that they can lose weight rapidly”, she said.
Brewley-Massiah lamented that more often than not, people fail to consider what they are sacrificing when they switch out nutritional meals for teas and juices made from ingredients with very low calorie and nutritional content.
Public Health Nutritionist Patrice Maduro shared similar sentiments and said that the issue at hand can be greatly attributed to modern day demands for instant gratification.
“We live in a period of time where everyone wants the quick fix… that’s unfortunately the time that we live in. This is one of the reasons why we are seeing a lot of fad diets even down to very dangerous types of plastic surgery to achieve the instant look…. you think about the lengths people will go through to achieve that instantaneous look,” Maduro explained.
“There is an impact and if you do these things over time there’s different stresses that you can place on your heart, your circulatory system, your digestive system and insulin wise … these things can actually be precursors in itself to noncommunicable diseases that we already have a problem dealing with”, she warned.
Members of the public are urged to refrain from participating in the dangerous practice of fad diets and to instead consult their medical practitioner for advice should they be interested in weight loss or lifestyle change.