The grapefruit diet

By Weight Loss Consultant • Related • Filed Under

A lot of weight loss diets are designed to be short term solutions. You know what it’s like if you are a big Hollywood star – you’re working round the clock on the set of the latest Blockbuster movie; you haven’t got time to stick to a hard and laborious diet. So instead, many celebrities opt for a radical diet that just lasts a couple of weeks, that will burn away those unwanted fatty bits and drop an instant number of pounds.

Over the years, a wide range of “one food” diets have been promoted, such as the rice diet, and the banana diet, etc. One of these diets is the Grapefruit Diet. In the 1930s, the grapefruit diet started as the Hollywood diet. This is a very low calorie diet, that works around the idea that grapefruits have in them a particular enzyme that can speed up the metabolism. This grapefruit diet suggests that grapefruit performs as a magical fat-burning enzyme when eaten with other foods. In this once popular diet program, you need to eat a whole grapefruit and a few vegetables every meal. Celebrities such as Brooke Shields and Kylie Minogue have been found to have tried the Grapefruit Diet for a quick shedding of a few pounds.

How exactly does the grapefruit diet work?
The diet has been around since the 1930s – when it started, it was known as the Hollywood Diet. Because of claims that the grapefruit contains a fat-burning enzyme, it generally means that as you eat grapefruit, these enzymes will work to burn away all the fat in your system much quicker than usual.

What do you do when following the diet?
The diet itself takes twelve days to complete. Every meal that you eat, you also eat some grapefruit with it. You need to be drinking around eight glasses of water a day, and you can also have unlimited amounts of black coffee. You can eat as much vegetables as you like, and you can even prepare them in butter, if you wish. You just cannot eat complex carbs, or snack between your meals.

What would be a typical meal?
On the Grapefruit Diet, breakfast could consist of: eggs and bacon, and a coffee to drink, alongside half a grapefruit. A good lunch or dinner would be meat and salad (or vegetables) – of any style and amount, as long as you accompany this dish with grapefruit.

Can you stay on this diet long term?
No – the Grapefruit Diet is not suitable for a long term eating plan. Because it has a very low calorie intake, it means that your body is not getting all the nutrients it needs. For a twelve day period, this is acceptable, but not long term, as it could have serious health implications. Even for twelve days, following this diet strictly could be harmful to some people. If you do wish to continue the diet, you need to take at least two days away from it, where you are eating a healthy consumption of food. It is highly recommended that you do not return to the diet too frequently, however.

Diet plans that focus on a single food have appealed to many of those wanting to lose weight fast. On the grapefruit diet one may achieve a quick weight loss, but then all the weight will be regained upon resuming normal eating. Grapefruit in itself does nothing to promote weight loss or metabolism. By eating nothing but grapefruit for two to three weeks, you’re actually starving yourself. The grapefruit diet supplies only less than eight hundred calories per day, which are not sufficient to keep the body functioning normally for long. This type of FAD (Fat And Desperate) diets is potentially risky and nutritionally unbalanced. It will not help you drop weight healthily but only encourage poor eating habits and food faddism. In addition, many grapefruit weight loss pill contain the over-the-counter (OTC) stimulant and appetite suppressant phenylpropanolamine (PPA) which is reported to cause hypertension, anxiety, and palpitations. No matter how much you may dream about slimming quickly, there is simply no such solution as a superfood with magical abilities to drop weight naturally with doing any harm to your health.

Related information

Leave feedback on this product, program, diet or articles for future consumers!