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:

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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.

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Discover the Shocking Truth About the Cabbage Soup Diet

There’s a very simple explanation for the cabbage soup diet – FRAUD.  There’s no need to know anything more about this ridiculous diet. For the sake of filling time, more information is presented.

The inventor of the cabbage soup diet isn’t known. Like a chain letter or junk e-mail it was sent from fax machines to fax machine in the early 80s. The diet went under many names, often using a part of the name of a well respected institution such as the Russian peasant diet, or the St. Jude’s diet. But in reality the diet had nothing to do with many of these namesakes.

The cabbage soup diet calls for drinking nothing but water or unsweetened fruit juice on days when juice is allowed.  In general this is the diet.

• Day one — cabbage soup plus as much fruit as you can eat, but no bananas.
• Day two — cabbage soup as usual, and vegetables including a half baked potato without butter.
• Day three — add vegetables and fruit to the daily cabbage soup, but no bananas or potato.
• Day four — enjoy the daily Cabbage soup plus up to eight bananas and skimmed milk.
• Day five –  cabbage soup and as much as 20 ounces of beef, as well as 6 tomatoes.
• Day six — cabbage soup plus as much beef and vegetables as can be eaten, but no potatoes.
• Day seven — cabbage soup, brown rice, vegetables, unsweetened fruit juice, but no potatoes.

According to the cabbage soup diet you could lose 10 pounds in just a week.  Unfortunately that would be 10 pounds in water weight. Nutritionists agree that it’s just not possible to lose 10 pounds of fat in only one week. It is however, possible to get sick from a lack of nutrition which is one danger with the cabbage soup diet.

The other problem with the cabbage soup diet is that it’s a very difficult diet to follow. That isn’t to say that it’s complicated, but cabbage soup seven days in a row can be quite bland and boring. It was common for people to last only a couple of days before quitting. There was even an attempt to spice up the cabbage soup diet with new recipes, but that failed.

Realistically people don’t need a fad diet like the cabbage soup diet to lose weight. Losing weight is a simple matter of eating less, and becoming more active.

If you really want to follow a diet that is extremely simple to follow yet a powerful arsenal for shredding the fat, then you need to read my review on Eat Stop Eat, which allows you to eat whatever you want to lose fat fast as long as you follow short yet intense muscle building workouts like Turbulence Training.