How to Follow the Mayo Clinic Diet

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette and I'm a registered dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic and I'm going to talk to you about the Mayo Clinic Diet. This diet is actually a misnomer. It is not actually associated with the Mayo Clinic. It has been around for many many years and the original author isn't known. It is actually very similar to the grapefruit diet so it is a fat diet. It is not a nutritionally sound program. The main premise is eating a lot of grapefruit and really restricting a lot of other foods. It is very limited in different fruits, different vegetables, very small amounts of meat and it is meant to be a short term diet for very rapid weight loss and if someone were to follow it that is exactly what would happen. You would lose a lot of weight very quickly within that week that you are on this diet for the simple fact that you are eating very very low calorie. The problem with this diet is that you end up losing a lot of muscle mass. You are just not consuming enough protein or healthy fats to have your body run efficiently. So this is not the kind of weight that you want to lose and as soon as you discontinue the diet and resume your normal eating habits you will gain back all of the weight that you actually lost. So the Mayo Clinic Diet is not recommended for people. It is a very unhealthy diet and it doesn't have the recommended nutrients, the recommended amounts of protein or fats or the various vitamins and minerals and unfortunately it is not endorsed by the Mayo Clinic and it is not associated with them. They have actually made an effort to really try to get information out there to discourage people from using this diet and to make sure that people know that they are not actually endorsing this diet. So that is just some information for you on the Mayo Clinic Diet."