Fad Diets don't work because they are flawed at the grass root level!

Fad diet is a term used to describe a whole array of short term, ad-hoc diet approaches used to temporarily lose weight through unsafe and unrealistic methods.

There is a new method in the market every other day falling in this category. Fat diets work like this in general:

For a short period of time (10 days to 1 month), your diet is restricted to a select collection of bad-tasting health foods or recipes. Also, you're told to minimize your eating in this period. The diets vary a lot but generally fats are completely avoided in these diets.

As a reaction of this 'starvation diet', initially your body cells lose water and there is a rapid apparent loss of weight (due to water loss).

After the initial water loss period, as you continue to starve, your body starts to burn your muscle mass in order to keep up with the energy needs. It will still not start burning fats which is the basic reason behind obesity. And as you avoid fats in your diet in this period, your body will try to preserve every pound of fat that it has in its store.

If the dieter goes on with the fad diet for about 2 weeks to 1 month, eventually most of the muscle mass is burnt and then the body starts burning the stored fats having no other alternative to stay alive. But the dieter starts getting weaker, gets lazy and is not able to perform or live well in this initial stage of fat loss because it requires a lot more effort and time for the body to produce energy from fat rather than from muscle.

And finally something breaks and generally it's the diet plan (and thankfully enough because otherwise the dieter will be starved to death losing fat). At this stage, the dieter is back to his normal eating but as that happens, initially the body is perplexed. It thinks some kind of joke is being played upon it. First, a food supply that wouldn't keep a mouse going.. and now.. you're feeding like an elephant.

So the body takes some time before it's back to re-structuring your muscle and during this time, it stores most of the food intake as excess fats.

So at the end of it all, the dieter is back to his initial weight gaining back all the weight he lost and quite often, little bit more.