Dukan Diet Scam

Surprise!  Another day another diet.  This time it's the Dukan Diet Scam.  This French born diet has been fairly popular over there and has slowly been making its way into the United States for the last many months.  As I start to read about this diet.....lets see it focuses on eating a lot of lean protein.....so far so good....oh wait, what's that?  You can eat as much of it as you want?  What?  This is phase one.  A very unbalanced protein only diet with the exception of a lot of water and 1.5TBS of oat bran.  What?  Seriously? 

Phase 2 is just as good.  You get to add no-starch veggies.  As many of these as you want along with all the protein you can pig out on.  And a bonus of another .5TBS of bran on top of phase one. 

Phase 3?  Another .5TBS bonus of bran, we're up to 2.5TBS!  Wow!  Still all the protein and veggies, but now you can have a serving of cheese, a low sugar fruit, and 2 bread slices.  And 1-2 party meals a day, basically eating whatever you want.  Sweets?  Ice wine?  You name it.  So you've hopefully gotten close to your weight loss goals, and now you're given the leeway to really overeat and ruin it all.  Great idea!

Phase 4 the maintenance phase....Oh, and eat whatever you want.  Chicken and Waffles?  Sure.  Fried ice cream?  Why not.   But be sure to follow these so important rules.  Another .5TBS of oat bran, now we can party! 3TBS of oat bran!    Walking for a measly 20 minutes a day.  That's going to burn a ton of calories.  Not.  Oh, and once a week go back to phase one for a protein starvation diet. 


This Dukan Diet Scam is not meant for anyone who is only looking to lose say 20lbs or so and is just overweight.  The ability to pretty much eat as much as you want in the first few phases, adding whatever you want in the last phase on this Dukan Diet Scam would be a disaster for this type of person.  For someone morbidly obese I could see this "diet" allowing for weight loss temporarily, as it's going to be pretty difficult to eat more than one's calorie maintenance levels with just protein and/or veggies, but later on as you can reintroduce just about whatever you want and as much of it, there's your recipe for disaster.  Walking for 20 minutes?  What's that going to do?  Burn a few dozen calories?  Big deal.  Good luck keeping the weight off long term with this joke of a plan. 

At the end of the day, diets don't work long term, period.  The day people figure this out, the world will be a better place.