Three-Day Cardiac Diet Pros & Cons

Although fad diets like the three-day cardiac diet tend to get a bad rap from diet reviewers such as those on the sites TheDietChannel.com and FadDiet.com, these diets are wholly without merit. Although the three-day cardiac diet does leave quite a bit lacking regarding sustainable weight loss and nutritional instruction, it can help you to shed a few pounds if you are incredibly short on time.

Three-Day Diet Pros

The three-day diet is a structured eating plan that promised substantial (up to 10 lbs.) of weight loss in just three days' time. This is accomplished through heavy caloric restriction, as can be seen from a sample breakfast from the plan, consisting of only black coffee, grapefruit, one slice of toast and 1 tbsp. of peanut butter. Regardless of what you think of the menu items on the plan, the diet will almost certainly result in weight loss due to the heavy caloric restriction involved. Therefore, one of the major pros of the three-day diet is that it will work. While it is impossible to say whether you will lose up to the promised 10 lbs., you will certainly lose some weight while on the plan, making it a useful diet for individuals looking to shed some weight in a relatively short period of time.

The other major advantage of the three-day diet is that it prepares dieters to build the mental discipline necessary to follow longer and more involved dieting plans. This occurs because the three-day diet forces its users to follow the plan verbatim, with no room for error or divergence. Teaching yourself to become 100 percent compliant to a dietary plan is vital for success, and the three-day diet is a good kickstart to forming this type of discipline and applying it to more substantial plans.

Three-Day Diet Cons

The main drawback to the three-day diet is its incredibly short length. Three days is not a sufficient amount of time to make any real or lasting progress to your physique, and it is more likely than not that you will simply regain the weight you lost in the compensation period immediately following cessation of the diet. This leads to an endless stream of yo-yo dieting, where no real progress is made despite substantial sacrifice (three days' worth at a time).

The other major problem with the three-day diet is that it is merely an eating plan without any instructional material explaining the how or whys of dieting or nutrition. This means dieters relying on the three-day plan will find themselves adrift if they decide to forgo the plan as written and attempt to construct their own plan in the future. Therefore, while someone can certainly lose weight on the plan, it does nothing to teach them how to keep the weight off once the plan grinds to a halt.