3.The Grapefruit Diet
Who doesn’t love a juicy slice of grapefruit – but for every meal? This warhorse of the diet world has been hanging around since the 1930s, claiming that if you eat a half a grapefruit with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you’ll miraculously melt away the pounds. While grapefruit is a good source of vitamins A and C and fiber, Whittingham points out a single fruit is not a key to weight loss, and it can even interfere with the body’s ability to break down certain medications. How’s that for a squirt in the eye?
4.The Cabbage Soup Diet
If you sniff hard enough, you may remember the stinky smell of cabbages wafting across American kitchens in the 1980s. This 7-day plan restricts dieters to just a few foods each day, such as bananas or brown rice, plus endless bowls of cabbage soup. “It includes almost no protein and is very low in carbs and fats, not to mention it’s very hard to stick to because it’s so unappealing,” Whittingham says. We have one thing to say about a cabbage-based diet: flatulence.
