While there are plenty of losers in the growing obesity epidemic facing Americans today, the estimated 40 billion a year weight loss industry sure isn’t one of them.
As the waistlines have gotten bigger, so too have the aggressive, almost magical, guarantees made by diet and exercise gurus.
Everyone’s got a way to trim those pounds, and for only five easy minutes a day! It isn’t just infomercials and the diet section of your Barnes&Noble either, walk into any local health food store and you’ll be bombarded by a sea of superfoods, liver cleanses and natural, antioxidant, vitamin-enriched, gold-encrusted wonder pills long ignored by the medical establishment.
To any first timer looking to finally get rid of their unsightly and unnoticed by everyone but themselves pudge, it’s a mountain of labels and too-good-to-be-true guarantees that bear down on them. Which is exactly why I decided to take on a 2 week cleanse of my own!
Let’s be clear here, this was in no way any sort of scientifically rigorous or hard-hitting investigation of what’s really going on at the Diet and Nutrition aisle at the local Whole Foods, especially since *Spoiler Alert* I only lasted a week on the restrictive diet I set up, but there’s important lessons to be gleamed from my, and many others’, failed journey to weight loss nirvana.
