The 10 Most Ridiculous Diets Ever!

While these diets are ridiculous, unsustainable, and often times dangerous, if your main goal is to lose weight, you just might find them useful. After all eating next to nothing seems to be a tried and true method of dropping pounds. And they’ll stay off—at least until you come to your senses.

1. The Atkins Diet
Don’t get me wrong: the Atkins diet can help you lose weight. I’ve tried it and I lost weight, but I really missed fruit and had a huge headache. Although wildly popular, and quite effective for some  people, the Atkins diet is just not sustainable for most dieters. This diet cuts out healthy foods like fruit, and adopts a limited list of foods that are often high in fat and otherwise unhealthy. Above all, this diet's extreme restriction makes it incredibly difficult for most people to stick with it.

2. The Apple Cider Vinegar Diet
Yummy—nothing like a few teaspoons of vinegar to get you prepared for a meal! This diet relies on the premise that apple cider vinegar, taken fifteen minutes before a meal, will decrease hunger and curb the urge to nibble. There’s no real evidence that apple cider vinegar can help you lose weight, but reducing portions and exercising, like most of the proponents of this fad also tell you to do, will.

3. The Hollywood Diet
It should be obvious that drinking nothing but juice is bound to leave you hungry and unsatisfied.  Yet many continue to try this quick-fix detox programme as a way to permanently lose weight. Unfortunately, that's just not going to happen. This juice has a high sugar content, and nearly all of the weight you'll lose is water, which will come right back.

4. The Grapefruit Diet
This horrible diet is simply unsustainable, offering little nutrition calories, or taste. Even worse, excessive consumption of this acidic citrus fruit could lead to a stomach ulcer. Additionally, grapefruit juice is dangerous when mixed with some medications.

5. The Magnetic Diet
This diet follows the concept that all foods have magnetism that attracts either health or disease. It requires that you drink only water and eat specific foods with "invigorating magnetism," and follow an eating schedule that creates a caloric deficit. Despite all the jargon it's actually a very simple method of eating nutritious foods like fruit, vegetables, and whole grains, combined with portion control and exercise.

6. The Blood Type Diet
This confusing diet requires that you eat according to your blood type. For example, if you're a blood Type A, that means vegetables are your ideal food. The main reason why this diet works at all is because -you guessed it- you're limiting what you eat!  Of course, this can be achieved through portion control, and you can eat what you feel like whether you're a "hunter," "nomad," "cultivator," or any combination thereof.  

7. The Master Cleanse
Also known as the lemon water detox diet, this can't really be called a 'diet' because you're not eating anything! With the master cleanse, you'll subsist on lemon water with cayenne pepper and maple syrup. Incredibly temporary, any weight loss resulting from this detox will come back almost immediately.

8. The Russian Air Force Diet
This diet doesn't require you to stand in the bread line, but it does require you to survive on near starvation-levels of food. Originally developed in the former Soviet Union to keep soldiers fit, you're allowed to put herbs, salt, pepper, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, and ketchup on all your meals. But about those meals … breakfast is coffee only. Lunch: two eggs, a tomato. And dinner allows you to feast on a sliver of meat and a salad. Yes, you will lose weight.  And yes you'll feel like you're back in the USSR....

9. The Cereal Diet
You’re supposed to replace two meals a day with two bowls of cereal. From Special K to crunchy nut cornflakes, many cereal boxes now claim you can lose pounds in just two weeks". Of course, the premise is the same: when people have to measure the amount they're eating, they end up eating fewer calories, so they lose weight. And it’s not like these cereals are 'health' food as such - they're generally packed full of sugar.

10. The Cabbage Soup Diet
Mmmm … cabbage. Unless you’re trying to lose up to ten pounds in a single week, then maybe cabbage doesn’t sound so bad anymore. But being light headed, weak and suffering an inordinate amount of flatulence is a high price to pay. Slim, but stinky.

Useful Sites and Books

 'The GI Diet:  The Easy, Healthy Way to Permanent Weight Loss' by Rick Gallop.  Click here for details

'The Food Doctor Ultimate Diet:  Changing the Way You Eat for Good' by Ian Marber.  Click here for details

The BBC website has extensive information on diet.  Click here to visit

The Food Standards Agency website offers comprehensive info on all aspects of a healthy diet.  Click here to visit