TikTok's latest diet trend: ‘10-Day Egg Diet,’ but is it safe? (2024)

TikTok’s obsession withfood and dietcan at times be inspiring — the platform is filled with creative recipes and healthy eating options. However, it can also lead tosome fairly bizarrediet trends that can sometimes beoutright risky.

Some recentfamous TikTok diet trendsinclude lettuce water, the salmon rice bowl and the “Green goddess salad.”

Now a new trend gaining traction on the site —the 10-day egg diet— has some nutrition experts worried it’s encouraging people to take a highly restrictive approach to losing weight.

The trend promotes a diet that involves eating eggs for three meals a day — and barely anything else. The diet does permit green tea, apples and oatmeal along.

Videos that have racked up hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of views show TikTokers trying the 10-day challenge, claiming it’s their attempt to lose 10 pounds in 10 days.

One user showed one of her daily meals on the diet, noting she ate three hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, three for lunch and a bowl of plain oatmeal with boiled water for dinner. The video, which has more than 20,000 likes, claims it’s her plan to “lose 10kg in 10 days.”

The 10 day egg diet, which is a version of the traditional ‘boiled egg diet’ that’s been around long before TikTok, still may be too restrictive, experts argue.

Like mostcrash diets, it doesn’t create a sustainable approach to long-term weight loss. It also limits the amount of fiber and nutrients from dark, leafy greens and whole grains that are important for health.

Healthlinegave the diet a 1.33 score out of 5, noting that “although the boiled egg diet encourages eating healthy food groups and may promote short-term weight loss, it’s overly restrictive and unsustainable. Any weight you lose may be regained once you return to your typical eating pattern.”

The 10 day egg diet is also one of several trends that experts have pinpointed as being potentially harmful for young people when it comes to broader body image issues.

Onestudypublished inPLOS ONElast year found that the majority of diet-related posts on TikTok “presented a weight-normative view of health, with less than 3% coded as weight-inclusive” and not much of the nutritional content on the site is distributed by experts.

The researchers also noted that nutritional content on TikTok “may contribute to disordered eating behaviors and body dissatisfaction in the young people that are TikTok’s predominant users.”

Even some TikTokers who have followed through on the trend admit there are a few unpleasant side effects from eating mostly eggs – including some stomach irritation and nausea.

“I think the last nine days of eating the bare minimum have caught up with me today, and the whole day I felt nauseous,” one user said on her last day of the diet.

In other words, if you’re hoping to lean on TikTok for nutrition advice, use your judgment and careful discretion: There’s a much wider variety of healthy recipes to choose from.