Want to lose weight? Fad diets come and go. Many fad diets, like the Grapefruit Diet, come into and out of fashion more often than the hula hoop.

Here’s a great list of the silliest fad diets ever.

The Master Cleanse
In the 1940s, nutrition guru Stanley Burroughs created the Master Cleanse, a fast during which the dieter subsists solely on a mixture of cayenne pepper, fresh-squeezed lemon juice, maple syrup and water. The Master Cleanse is still popular today, especially among anorexics and aspiring anorexics, despite the fact that most nutritionists and doctors say that "detoxing" is a nonsensical and potentially harmful idea.

You wouldn’t fall for the claims of fad diets, would you? Here’s a healthy diet you can follow safely and lose weight.

Are you looking for a good weight loss diet? Perhaps you’ve heard of the grapefruit diet. The grapefruit diet has been around in various incarnations for at least 70 years. For some strange reason unknown to everybody the diet starts with a breakfast which includes half a grapefruit. Hence the name, grapefruit diet.

The rest of the grapefruit diet in any of its incarnations is basically just a low-calorie diet. You will lose weight on the diet, simply because it’s such a low-calorie diet. The grapefruit has no magical properties at all, unfortunately.

Is the grapefruit diet good for you? Since this diet is such an extremely low-calorie diet it’s not good for your health. It’s OK if you stay on this diet for a day or two, but it can lead to bad habits, primarily mental habits: thinking that that that there is some magical way in which you can lose weight quickly and simply.

There’s no harm in trying the grapefruit diet but remember that the grapefruit itself has no special powers; it’s just another low-calorie diet.

If you’re looking for a good diet, look at sensible, weight loss plans like the Fat Loss 4 Idiots diet. This diet has been popular online for years and many people have lost weight on it.

There are hundreds of fad diets around. Perhaps you’ve heard of a diet  called the negative calorie diet. This diet was heavily promoted for a while. The main premise of the diet was that you can eat foods which take more calories to digest than are contained in the food itself.

The negative calorie diet recommended foods like celery, and cranberries, for example. The main problem with this "negative calorie" diet was that no one could stay on it for any length of time. Basically it was just a low-calorie diet dressed up in new clothes.

In essence there is no such thing as a "negative calorie".

All foods have calories, so you’re headed for dieting disaster if you try to eat extremely low-calorie foods all the time; or indeed so-called negative calorie foods. The best way to lose weight is to eat a good diet — you will lose weight, and feel great too.

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