The Sacred Heart Diet is believed to have begun at the Sacred Heart Memorial Hospital. However, so far no reliable evidence of this has been found.
By looking at this fad diet, we can safely assume that the motive of the Sacred Heart Diet was nowhere near promoting health. Keep reading and you’ll understand the reason behind this assumption.
The founders expected the diet to work magically and help obese patients lose 10-17 pounds within a week in order to prepare them for any upcoming surgical procedure.
The diet of course was severely restricted, patients were only allowed to consume soups and broths with a few vegetables or fruits. This diet plan was to be followed for a week with some minor differences in every day’s meal plan.
Before we do a thorough postmortem of the cons of this diet, let’s familiarize you with the intensity of this diet.
Sacred Heart Diet Meal Plan:
As mentioned earlier the hero of the Sacred Heart Diet is broth/soup of chicken or beef.
You can only consume low-calorie fruits like cantaloupes or watermelon, bananas are a big no. you can have the typical chicken or beef broth until you feel full.
You can consume the regular broth with vegetables except beans, peas and corn, in all forms.
For dinner, you can have potato baked in butter.
You can eat all veggies, fruits and soup but no baked potato. And the diet claims that by this day you would have already lost about 5 pounds if you followed the diet correctly.
You are required to consume as much skimmed milk as you can. And you are also allowed to consume at least 3 bananas with the regular soup.
You eat soup at least once this day. You are recommended to eat 1 can of tomatoes with about a ridiculous amount of 10-20 ounces of red meat.
In addition to the soup once during the day, you are required to eat as much beef and veggies as you like.
On this day you will be allowed to eat vegetables with sugar-free juices and brown rice.
This is just a rough idea of what this diet looks like. To us, It looks anything but healthy.
Cons of the Sacred Heart Diet:
Here is a detailed explanation of what are the possible cons of this diet.
Multivitamin Consumption:
With such a restricted and imbalanced intake of food, you will definitely fall short of natural vitamins and minerals in your body. Hence, you’ll be required to cope with that deficiency by consuming multivitamin pills. This is one major red flag we always warn you about.
Malnourishment:
This diet has the potential to lower your metabolic efficiency resulting in poor absorption of food nutrients by your body. This will not only lead your body to malnourishment but also will drain you of your valuable energy and strength.
Malnourishment weakens your immune system and hence makes you prone to a number of infections and diseases.
You may drop a few pounds but that will just be water weight, so this will give you false hope and a false encouragement to continue what is almost poisonous for your body and mind.
Highly Restrictive:
The diet limits the intake of macronutrients like fibre, starch and carbohydrates while increasing the consumption of other stuff like natural sugars from fruits. This will create an imbalance of nutrients in your body.
Low starch and carbs will result in almost no energy, which will hinder your physical and mental capacities. Depriving your body of natural fuels will result in fatigue and lightheadedness.
Unhealthy Amounts of Red Meat:
While it restricts your carb intake, this diet increases your protein and that too red protein intake to ridiculous levels. You can observe how high amounts of red meat consumption are encouraged in this diet for several days.
Red meat when consumed in high amounts can cause severe issues. With its high sodium content, you are subjected to be at risk of high blood pressure and the levels of fat can result in high cholesterol, clogged arteries and as a result heart attacks and strokes.
Weight Regain:
This is definitely not a plan that you can follow for a long time, in fact, it would be a miracle if you get past these seven days without feeling severe nausea, fatigue, headaches and stomach issues.
Also, since most of the weight loss is the water weight so this won’t be a sustainable long-term weight loss. you‘ll get all these pounds back within a week or so when you get back to your normal eating habits.
Takeaways:
The culture of these fad diets has drained our values of self-love and self embracement rather has left us with self-pity, self-hate, and tons of insecurities linked to how we look and how we feel.
What is worst is to see the youth willing to put their physical and mental health on steak by following such ruthless diets with horrible consequences.
So by any chance, if you are still expecting some good out of the Sacred Heart Diet, we suggest you reconsider your priorities in regards to health and weight loss, because trust us these two are not always the same.