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Laxatives, baby food and cabbage soup: The diet tricks that are ruining women's health

Half of women in the UK have reportedly tried using laxatives to lose weight even though it doesn't work

Despite recent campaigns urging women to be healthy not thin and the increasingly irritating 'strong is the new skinny' label that's taken over social media (since when did we need a new skinny?), we're still taking dangerous measures to conform to skeletal ideals of beauty.

Taking laxatives is just one of these drastic methods women in the UK admit to using when trying to lose weight, with half of the women polled in a study on attitudes to weight and dieting, claiming to have resorted to anti-constipation medication to lose pounds.



The poll by UKMedix.com found that after laxatives, fasting was the next popular weight loss method, followed by the cabbage soup diet, the liquid diet, body wraps, the cereal diet, the baby food diet, the raw food diet, the small plate diet and perhaps most alarming of all, 14 per cent of women surveyed said they ate foods known to make you ill to bring on vomiting and/or diarrhoea.

The research is pretty frightening, especially as all of these methods are seriously flawed, both in terms of health outcome and permanent weight loss. Laxatives, for example, simply encourage the loss of water, which will go straight back on when you hydrate yourself. And regular use can cause severe bowel damage.


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It would be great if we could take a pill and magically lose weight without threatening our health or knowing that we'll put it straight back on again, but as every good nutritionist will remind us, there is just no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to losing weight.

Sarah Bailey of UKMedix.com said: "Some of the weird weight loss techniques we found to be most commonly employed by women in the UK were worrying - particularly those who claimed to turn to laxatives or eating foods known to disagree with them, or make them ill."


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She adds: "This simply isn’t healthy, and putting your health at risk to lose weight is absolutely not advisable - despite the results showing that a whopping half of women would do so."

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