What impact would alternating a healthy diet with a junk food-based diet from one day to another have on the body?
What I mean by the above-mentioned alternation is having a menu along the lines of:
Monday - everything raw: a large variety of fruits for breakfast, a large salad with a variety of veggies, seeds and condiments/herbs for lunch, and a large mixed smoothie with lots of fruits and veggies for dinner; mineral water as liquids all throughout the day.
Tuesday - chocolate bars and potato chips for breakfast, a large hamburger, fries and cheesecake for lunch, and a pizza for dinner; all types of soda as liquids all throughout the day.
Wednesday - a large bowl of oatmeal with vegan milk for breakfast, spaghetti with vegetables for lunch, and steamed veggies with condiments/herbs for dinner; only water as liquids.
Thursday - full English breakfast for breakfast, hot-dogs and cupcakes for lunch, and potato chips with gravy for dinner; soda and beer as liquids.
Friday - veggie salad with nuts and seeds for breakfast, vegan soup with lots of vegetables and legumes for lunch, and a large variety of fruits for dinner; water and tea as liquids.
Saturday - bacon omelet for breakfast, two cheeseburgers and ice-cream for lunch, and potato chips and candy bars for dinner; all types of soda as liquids.
Sunday - vegan sandwich for breakfast, mashed potatoes with tofu for lunch, and a large salad with herbs/condiments for dinner; water and chocolate milk as liquids.
You wouldn’t be as healthy as if you ate healthy everyday and you wouldn’t be as unhealthy as if you ate junk everyday. That’s all one can say, honestly.
There is no magic that happens because you alternate junk with health food. Maybe you’d be shitting well days after eating healthy and constipated days after junk.
Maybe for a short period of time you’d be okay, but it’s not sustainable whatsoever. Let’s say as a control, you’re a 30 year-old male eating the recommended nutrition plan from the FDA, you rarely or never smoke, drink in moderation, and casually exercise to sustain muscles groups. One day you start aforementioned diet. What you will initially see with this diet’s immediate effects will be your quality/quantity of sleep, feelings of bloat, and probably some gastrointestinal distress especially after your “junk” days. Now, after about two or three weeks, your body and mind will start to normalize these patterns and begin to adapt to them. This is going to start doing a lot of things (granted, there are always things that will be different person to person based on X, Y, and Z factors). Think of a car over correcting on an icy highway: you’ll eventually crash.
Here’s what you can probably start to expect to see:
1.) Exhaustion: poor sleep quality and quantity as a result of diet will cause problems with mental acuity & agility, being more irritable, slow decision-making, and poor physical performance among other effects. With your depleted mental state, you’ll start to see poorer performance in your job (whether it’s an office job or being a firefighter or a welder or whatever) and becoming stressed about other trivial things. Your cortisol levels are gonna rise which will contribute towards…weight gain!
2.) Weight Gain: alternating days back and forth of binging “clean” and “dirty” foods and beverages will throw your body and brain off big time. In a lot of ways your “junk” days are like this binge of non-calorically dense foods full of sugar, high cholesterol, simple carbohydrates, fats & oils, and empty calories (booze). So you’ll fill your body up, feel this huge bloat, have heartburn & excess stomach acid, and your stomach will melt a sort of sludge that your body tries to extract nutrients from. The next day purging to do a bunch of veggies and vegan based foods that may not fill you up as much will start to trick your body into storing more of the unhealthy fats you get on junk days, because it’s thinking “oh shit, we’re running out of food, we must be in a fight/flight situation”. Ergo, you start to get more visceral fat (the yellow, thick nasty stuff) around your gut, but, legs, and over time your arteries with plaque.
3.) Organs: Once you start getting fat, that visceral fat’s all around your organs, pressing and pushing, constricting and separating. It’s going to cause your heart to pump more blood to help sustain your precious organs and to maintain arteries and blood vessels through your body. Picture your heart to your toes as I-95 and your gut area as Washington DC. Originally on the route to your toe, you had I-295, I-395, and I-495 highways which took you to other major parts of the DC area. Now fat-forward and you’ve got a ton of weight. Now instead of a healthy freeway, you’ve got 5 major turnpikes, 15 different parkways, 9 toll roads, 3 bypasses, and so on so forth. Bottom line: your heart is pumping a ton more blood to sustain your organs because now the fat is interfering with the established order of things. When your heart starts pumping more blood, the heart rate rises and the pressure which it must push the blood through veins and arteries gets higher and higher, thickening the heart muscle and weakening it. Not to mention, the diet says you’re drinking a few days each week. That alone already raises blood pressure and heart rate because the body is trying to filter the literal poison through the liver and clean it ASAP. Overtime, if you keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger with no major change, you’re organs won’t get as much blood and will eventually shut down. Granted though, this normally takes years, if not decades to occur with zero change to lifestyle change and throwing complete caution to the wind.
4.) Diseases: one of the highest risks that you’ll experience with this diet here is the risk of developing diabetes. You’re at such a high risk because you’re basically playing pendulum with your glycolysis (blood sugar) levels. I’m no doctor, so I can’t say how long it would take to develop diabetes as a result, but I can imagine within a course of ten years it being possible. As stated before, another obvious risk is heart disease and failure as a result of an overworked heart muscle. Your liver is the next obvious risk with consuming alcohol in unhealthy portions and frequency - every time you get drunk, you damage your liver, the enzymes elevate to help repair it, scar tissue is formed as it heals, and rinse/repeat until you develop cirrhosis and jaundice with failure eventually without a transplant or medication. Kidneys is another risk you run into as it’s another filtration system, feeding directly into your urinary tract for expulsion of toxins. With weight gain and loss of blood flow, your kidneys will struggle to help manage bodily fluid health and eventually require dialysis.
5.) Physical Issues: other issues you’re going to run into with this diet is your physical performance. Workouts will suffer if you do workout under this diet simply because you’re not burning clean energy, so you’ll achieve subpar results (picture that can of gas that’s been in the garage for five years versus premium unleaded at the gas station). Recovery will suffer as well from strenuous activity too since you’re not consistently getting good nutrients in your system and your sleep is suffering too. With weight gain from this diet you’ll eventually have joint pain and lower back pain from carrying a heavier gut. Even without gaining weight, your elevated heart rate from diet alone will cause your to be more out of breath ascending stairs or anything elevated/climbing related.
TL;DR: you can pull this off for a short duration with minimal issues, but after a month or so you’re going to start to suffer in a lot of ways. Do everything in moderation!
Disclaimer: not a doctor or nutritionist. Tactical athlete, backcountry hunter, amateur cross fit athlete, former cross-country/track runner, and casual lacrosse player. Speaking on personal experience of ups and downs with nutrition and exercise with the advice and supervision of trained health and fitness experts.
Good resources: -Bodybuilding.com to get your macronutrient amounts for your body type/desired physical goal-“Gamechangers” on Netflix regarding plant-based diets and wellness (I’ve been making gradual plant based diet changes and it’s been a huge difference for the better)
Bruh just eat healthy in general first then eat whatever junk food you want without going overboard. I find that getting full on good stuff makes it less likely I want the junk food and even if I do it’s never as much.
My personal guess would be that you would feel crazy spikes in mood and general well-being.
Remember, food is nutrition is medicine. What you put into your system has an impact on a number of functions. The most important of which is brain.
Healthy eating and good health!
Eating everything raw is not necessarily “healthy.” Nor is a completely vegan diet. People make this error, not realizing that cooking promotes the digestibility of food. Eating an excessive quantity of raw food is taxing on the digestive system. As for eating vegan, if you’re eating meat on alternate days, you’re not following a vegan diet, you’re following a plant-based diet. Saying you’re vegan one day and not the next is like saying you’re a faithful spouse on the days you don’t cheat. Veganism is a philosophy and a way of life, not merely a diet.
Unless you have a spare body somewhere, for when you wreck the one you currently have, forget the harebrained ideas and just eat a diet within an accepted normal range.
meh would just say eat what you like don’t miss out any moment of your life don’t take it for granted good food really elevates ones mood for the day just make sure to keep yourself well fed everyday :)
The important question is what are the calories. If you controlled calories it would be pretty healthy. In practice, the days you eat junk food would have much higher calories than you need, and it would be unhealthy.
We can speculate but, race, age, activity level, hereditary, etc all play a role. I’m not sure if this is a serious question. As in, you want a straight forward/direct answer ? I wouldn’t think that you would be expecting one. Look up chad ochocinco’s diet then ask Billy from Alaska about his diet. They wouldn’t respond the same
I don’t think this a diet you should be striving for ultimately but if it’s manageable for you then do it. (Assuming you are just eating the bad food everyday currently). I don’t think people should be forced to give up everything to be healthy… it’s not sustainable. You should gradually make healthier choices and slowly remove the unhealthier items to just a few times a month.
Junk food once a week would likely give you carvings for days, while a healthy diet with no junk food would make the management a lot easier.
Junk food every other day would screw you up somehow (liver, diabetes, etc.).
That said, you can find a middle ground to it. As in, you can get burgers made with 100% meat (even better with homemade), some cheese and salad instead of going to a fast food and eating a dollar burger full of sugar.
The basic trick (once you go to a nutritionist) is avoiding stuff with a lot of ingredients and cooking at home as much as you can (i.e. preparing meals for the whole week and leaving them in the fridge)
2 bread bums, 200g of meat, one slice of cheese and salad = hamburger
flour, water, yeast, tomatoes, cheese = pizza
You can have portions of those a couple times a week and not die in the process.