Throw Out Those Knives And Spoons, The Fork Diet Has Arrived
A new fad diet called the "Fork It!" diet entails eating foods with only a fork. It eliminates finger foods, soups, and foods eaten with a knife. Fork It! focuses on eliminating normal high calorie treats and including more healthy foods that can only be eaten with a fork. The diet makes sense in theory by upping whole foods and allowing you to eat normally at breakfast and dinner with a small lunch and no snacks. Counting calories tends to stress and confuse some dieters. "Fork It!" doesn't call for either, just to eat intuitively and use smaller portions without snacking during the day.
The positives (and think of that term loosely here) of this fad diet are the smaller dinner portions and elimination of mindless snacking. For most, this can help remove calories that would normally be consumed with a huge dinner and multiple snacks during the day. Also, the diet calls for more vegetables and whole foods while eliminating sweets. This provides an abundance of nutrients, minerals, and antioxidants that might have been lacking. If you want to lose weight with this diet, the Fork It! Website recommends you make your intake a little less, 200-400 calories.
Like every other fad diet the Fork It! method has flaws. First, the diet isn't clear cut with what foods can technically be fork eaten. It gives you food restrictions and eliminates some foods completely, but there are foods that people could twist and eat with a fork (pudding, ice cream, etc.). Next, the elimination of foods can lead to bad habits. For example, if a diet contains sweets daily and they are suddenly removed, more than likely, cravings will come back stronger, which can lead to binges and weight re-gain.
When asking Layne Norton who has his PhD in Nutritional Sciences, he responded with, "I think the restrictive diets where you can only eat a half dozen or so foods are not only unhealthy because they don't give you a diverse intake of nutrients but I believe they promote eating disorders and binging. Certainly some foods are more calorie dense than others, but that doesn't mean you can't include them in a healthy diet in moderation if you stay accountable and self monitor."