2 really dumb diet fads

There are tons of diet fads out there and most of them fall by the wayside after an initial surge. Often these fads are brought on by paid celebrities who may or may not actually even use the process themselves. In one of the most famous fad diets, Oprah Winfrey (an often guilty party in peddling diet lies) talked about a diet drink product similar to Slim-Fast and a wide variety of other drinks and claimed it was responsible for her near 70 pound weight loss in the late 80's. The drink, which was meant to be the only thing you consumed at all, resulted in a person receiving only 500 or so calories a day. I got news for you folks, this is NOT a wise decision and if you did want to do something like this, you don't need an expensive shake to pull it off.

Oprah would later admit that it was a lie and she regrets ever getting involved with the company in the first place.

People don't seem to learn though as these diets come and go like the tides on the shore, and new ones pop up every couple of weeks it seems. There are two diets in particular that were recently brought to my attention that seem particularly stupid and I can't imagine the type of person that it would take in order to believe that there would ever be any sort of long-standing benefit from either.

The Werewolf Diet

This unfortunately isn't as fun as it sounds. You don't even get to transform and kill at random. No, instead it just follows the lunar calendar and that during every full moon you will consume only water and fruit or veggie juice for 24 hours. The claims that this "diet" makes are widespread and backed up by absolutely no science whatsoever. It makes the usual "juice cleanse" claims which might have some sort of validity to them but the fact of the matter is that fruit juice, particularly the kind that comes in a box or bottle in the stores, normally has tons of sugar, much of it added after the fact.

Have you ever had raw, unsweetened cranberry juice? Trust me, you don't want to. The reason why it doesn't taste like chalk mixed with bile is because of all the sugar they put into it.

There is no science to back up any of the claims of this diet but there is plenty of science out there to show that even if you do lose any weight doing this "diet," you will quickly gain it all back.

Bodies just don't work like this, unfortunately.

The "5 Bite" diet

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This crazy diet consists of a tried and tested method of losing weight: Starving yourself. It works every time! The problem with this an every other starvation diets is that you can actually really screw up your metabolism by doing it. You see, your body is an incredibly complex machine that is capable of adapting and coping with many situations, even if you are not aware of it. If you make drastic changes, your body has drastic reactions to it. In this case and every other starvation diet case, your body will respond by slowing down your metabolism so when you do eventually come off of the stupid "5 bite diet" your body will still be in a slowed down "starvation mode" of using the fuel you provide it with.

This is why almost everyone that has ever done a crash diet and then returns to their old ways gains all the weight back. Just like Oprah did.

The thing I find so upsetting about this diet is that it wasn't designed by some quack or even a troll on the internet. It was designed by an actual medical professional named Dr. Alwin Lewis of California. One would assume he would know better.

The way the diet works is that you skip breakfast every day (hmmmmm, I thought that was the most important meal of the day?) and then you have 5 bites of anything that you want for lunch, and then again for dinner.

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_{You mean I can eat ALL OF THAT and lose weight? You're kidding!}

Are you going to lose weight on this diet if you can manage to stick with it? OF course you will but that is because five bites of almost anything doesn't amount to anywhere near the amount of calories that you probably need to function properly.

There are a ton of health problems that can come from this and I find it medically irresponsible that this doctor is endorsing this crazy plan. This one is actually pretty widespread too. Go ahead and do a web search for it... there are tons of articles and many of them are promoting the idea.

The way that I lost 50 lbs and increased my overall quality of life did have some diet changes, but except for right at the start where I eliminated a lot of things we already know are major culprits in weight gain, what I really did was gradually change my overall diet to be more healthy, mostly be eliminating processed sugars and excess carbohydrates.

I also exercise on a regular basis - fad diets rarely take that into account and this is why these diets appeal to the lazier people on the planet. There are no shortcuts folks and the people online that insist that there is are simply taking advantage of a naive population that is at best going to fail and at worse is going to suffer adverse health affects.

_{From athlete to fatty and back}