Does the celery diet aid weight loss? Should you use the celery in an attempt to lose 5 pounds in 5 days? It is easy to dismiss the celery diet as a joke, but it is not. The reason the celery diet should be taken seriously has to do with the fact that a lot of people seem to believe that celery does help people lose weight.
In fact, I was told by a number of seemingly sane people that they have used the celery diet to lose weight fast. One person, for example, told me that he turned to the celery diet because other diets have failed him. Yes, he has tried and could not lose weight on the Slim-Fast Optima Diet and the so-called Cactus Diet, but he told me that the celery diet has helped him lose 20 pounds in about two weeks.
So how does the celery diet work? Well, it does not work. The reason for this is simple: the theory that celery contains fat-burning nutrients is completely bogus and unsubstantiated. In fact, nutritionally speaking, celery does not contain much of anything. It is mostly comprised of water. 1 cup of celery contains only 16 calories, 1.6 grams of fiber and less than 1 gram of protein.
Can the celery diet help you lose weight? Yes, it can. Celery is very low in calories, so if you eat nothing but celery, you will lose weight. You will also deprive your body of essential nutrients, which your body needs to burn calories and stay healthy. In short, even if you lose weight, your weight loss is destined to fail miserably because it is unsustainable.
And here is something else you need to know: while this diet fad is known as “the celery diet,” even the name of this nutritional atrocity is misleading. People who try this diet usually do not eat just celery. They eat celery with peanut butter.
Two tablespoons of peanut butter contain 188 calories, which is significantly higher than 16 calories you get from a cup of celery, but even if you get a combined total of 204 calories from a cup of celery and two spoons of peanut butter, you would need to eat about 6 cups of celery and 12 spoons of peanut butter to consume about 1,200 calories, which makes the celery diet, well, hard to swallow, if you will.
It goes without saying that the celery diet is not only dangerous for your health, it is also a prescription for a weight gain. I bet even if you manage to lose some weight, once you are off this diet, you will gain more weight that you have lost.