Is the Serotonin Power Diet any good?

Are you trying to lose weight or are you trying to build muscle or, GASP, both?

Define a “good” diet, please. How can we judge if it’s a good diet if we don’t know what your dietary goals are!

I took a quick look at the first Google hit for the diet name, which seems to be the official website. Already I’m skeptical due to this claim:

Give Yourself a Serotonin Boost: 30–60 minutes before your next meal, munch on a serotonin soothing snack: pretzels, cheerios, popcorn, or cherry licorice bites. Notice how it takes the edge off your appetite and energizes you. By harnessing the power of serotonin, THE SEROTONIN POWER DIET allows you to eat less, lose weight and feel good about yourself again.

Guess what – snack on ANYTHING 30–60 minutes before a meal and it’ll take the edge off your appetite! As well, it attempts to correlate this single event (snacking and feeling more full before eating) with having the results of: “eat less, lose weight, and feel good about yourself again.” Which I find extremely hard to believe. Thus my conclusion is that, like most diets, its underlying premise may or may not actually work (more than likely not, and more than likely the actual diet itself is a small portion in a grander scheme of eating better and exercising, yet the book tries to take credit for those two things as well), and it is selling you false hopes. Please take a look through the archives where we have discussed other diets in the past for good advice about how to approach having a healthy diet and living a healthy lifestyle in order to maintain a healthy weight.

I lost 80 pounds eating only meat for 5 months. It’s the only way I could see that worked to lose weight. My body had no carbs to burn so it went directly to fat for energy—talk about fast weight loss!

Fad diets never work in the long run, big picture, real life, everyday eating situations. A good diet becomes a lifestyle. You learn to eat correctly for the rest of your life. Don’t get me wrong, you will most likely loose weight on any diet because it cuts your calories….but when you come off your fad diet and try to eat normal again, (mind you, you didn’t learn how to survive everyday eating on your fad diet), you will most likely gain the weight you lost back.

There are simple rules for a lifetime way of eating that will take the extra weight off now and leave it off.
1. Eat less calories than you burn.
2. Eat a nutritious diet, balanced in vegetables, fruit, and other complex carbs like whole grains, protein, low saturated fats, low in simple carbs like processed sugars. The Mayo Clinic has a good nutrition page that tells you how much of what foods you should have in a healthy diet. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/food-and-nutrition/NU99999
3. Have a meal a week that you eat what you want, so that you don’t feel deprived….have a desert you like here too.
4. Diets always work better when you exercise.