Fad diets are diets that involve rapid weight loss, but are only to be followed for a short period of time.   The term has also come to mean any diet that explodes into national or international fame, only to plummet into obscurity. Some of these fad diets include the cabbage soup diet, the Atkins diet, and the cookie diet.

Another name for these fad diets are food faddism. Any time one particular food suddenly becomes a superstar, that’s a food fad. Common aspects of these fads include:

- Some elements of the food are said to have miraculous properties.
- Many other foods are completely eliminated from the diet, because they are thought to have negative properties.

One of these fad diets that has these elements is the Atkins diet. In Atkins carbohydrates must be avoided because of their negative characteristics. At the same time, carbohydrates are the miraculous element — actually the lack of carbohydrates because it creates a metabolic state in which the body burns fat at an amazing pace.

Although it is a long-term diet, it did have short phases during which carbohydrate cutting was taken to the extreme. Unlike many fad diets the Atkins diet was designed to be something a person could stick to for a long period of time.

As with many fad diets Atkins rose quickly and fell just as quickly. For a number of years the Atkins diet was everywhere, and everyone seemed to be following it .  Entertainment magazines were full of movie stars and music stars and sports stars who claimed amazing weight loss and fitness all due to the Atkins diet. But after the death of Dr. Atkins, the diet became much less of a household word.

Many fad diets can be quite dangerous.  The Subway diet made popular in television commercials wasn’t exempt. At its center was a young man named Jared who had lost hundreds of pounds in only a year by eating Subway sandwiches. Jared’s diet was severe — going down to 900 calories a day from over 10,000.  Doctors agree that weight loss on that scale isn’t healthy. Even so, the Subway diet when followed in moderation can work.  Particularly because the diet included exercise — Jared walked 6 miles a day while losing the weight.

Be careful when taking on some of these fad diets. A long-term eating strategy combined with moderate exercise is usually the better bet.

Everyone is familiar with the Subway Diet featuring Jared, the guy who lost 245 pounds in a year by walking and replacing two meals a day with Subway sandwiches. If you ever wanted to know how this whole thing got started, keep reading.

Jared Fogle worked his way through college by working at an adult book store.  Like many people he sat around too much and ate too many snacks – his habits causing him to balloon to 425 pounds.  Jared realized his weight was critical and so started looking for a way to drop some pounds.

He tried various diets, but they didn’t work because he still had all those hours behind a counter during which to cheat.  One day he noticed a Subway sandwich store about a mile and a half from his apartment.  The seed of the Subway diet was planted.

Jared changed his daily diet to nothing but a sandwich, baked chips and a diet soda for lunch and dinner, walking the 3 mile round trip for each meal.  Now instead of a 10,000 calorie per day with no exercise lifestyle, he was eating only about 900 calories while walking 6 miles every day.  For Jared the yet named Subway diet made 245 pounds disappear in the span of a single year.

How did this Subway diet become a national ad campaign for the Subway chain?  After losing the weight Jared ran into a friend who worked with the school paper.  This buddy barely recognized Jared, so he decided to write an article about his amazing weight loss.  It was then incorporated into a Men’s Health magazine story about crazy diets that shed pounds.

When a Chicago Subway owner read the story he contacted his advertising agency about making it into an ad.  When the Chicago guys tried to get funding from the national advertising agency for a campaign, they were told it would bomb, so they funded it themselves for a local run in Chicago.

Soon the Subway diet was a success.  It was a natural for Chicago based Oprah to feature Jared and his Subway diet on her popular national show.  Subway’s national ad people contacted the Chicago ad people about airing the ad nationally.

Many people have lost a lot of weight on the Subway diet.  However, be aware that Jared was an exception and not a rule for being able to lose that much weight in so short a time.  A little more moderation is needed, but exercise and cutting calories are a proven one two punch combination in the fight against obesity. If you want the fool proof method – less time consuming and a NON BORING approach – to lose fat, you should check out the following pages below:

Eat Stop Eat Review

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Many people have heard of the Atkins diet, the short name for Atkins nutritional approach.  Dr. Robert Atkins invented this low-carb diet.  He had gained a lot of weight in medical school.  He read about this diet in the medical journal.  He perfected it and released it to the public.

Atkins, in his Atkins Diet, believed prevailing theories about weight gain were all wrong.  First, he dismissed the idea that saturated fats were bad. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem.  In Atkins theory eating too little fat make things even worse.  He pointed to all the low-fat foods that were high in carbohydrates.  That meant people on a diet often ate foods that were worse than they normally ate.

The Atkins diet shifts the focus.  Once Carbohydrates were removed from a diet, people would burn more stored body fat.  Once the fat was burned, the pounds will follow.  Atkins flipped the equation from lowering caloric intake.  The diet would work because it burned calories.  In fact Atkins cited a study that claimed the body would burn an extra 950 calories on his diet.  That sounded good but it wasn’t true.

In addition to claims of weight loss, Dr. Atkins said his Atkins diet could help people with type 2 diabetes.  Being overweight is generally considered the major cause for type 2 diabetes.  Therefore, by means of losing weight a person on the Atkins diet would be addressing their type 2 diabetes.

But the Atkins diet is also low in carbohydrates, which must be avoided with type 2 diabetes regardless of caloric intake, so by means of this aspect of the diet Atkins claimed those who suffer type 2 diabetes would no longer need medication such as insulin.  The jury is still out in the medical world as to the causes of type 2 diabetes.  So while science agrees with Atkins that lowering intake of Carbohydrates will help with the disease, it would disagree that the step alone would remove the necessity for medicine.

What are the specific rules of the Atkins diet? Induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance are the four necessary phases of the diet.  Here is an overview of the most important phase – Induction.

As the first phase, Induction is the most crucial and most restrictive portion of the Atkins diet.  This phase should be followed for a period of two weeks.  During this phase carbohydrates are severely limited   only up to 20 grams per day.

The goal is to enter a fat burning metabolic phase called ketosis when the body, starved of glucose, will begin converting stored fat into fatty acids needed to power the body.  Weight loss during this phase can be extreme – some Atkins followers reported losses of 5-10 pounds a week.

The other Atkins diet phases are generally used for determining the levels of carbohydrates ideal for losing weight and for maintaining a standard weight   not gaining weight.  The diet lost popularity after Dr. Atkins died, but it’s still popular.

My recommended diets for fast fat loss and great results:

Eat Stop Eat

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