The Diet Secrets

Promising results in nine days, the Fat Smash Diet is both one of the most popular and most controversial diets around.  It gained its share of fame and notoriety after it was featured in the VH1 show Celebrity Fit Club, where fading celebrity contestants competed with each other to lose weight.

Contrary to initial impressions, the diet is neither a quick fix nor does it make undue promises.  Instead, it is a lifestyle system that steers you towards making proper food choices for maximum health.  Like most good diets, it focuses on picking nutrient-rich,  low calorie foods that are filling, which help both keep hunger pangs away while keeping you healthy.

While Smith promises results in nine days, the actual system is a 90-day program.  It doesn’t mean you won’t see changes in nine days, though.

Phase I

The diet starts with a 9-day detox period designed to clean your body of impurities as well as break existing bad habits that are keeping you fat.  You eat four to five meals a day, with your meals consisting of either raw, grilled or steamed food choices.  They will be very limited choices, though, so look forward to a pretty difficult adjustment period.

Phase 2

The second phase consists of building a new foundation for healthier eating and lasts for three weeks.  The main feature of this phase is the introduction of a little more variety in food choices, such as lean meat, seafood and cheese.

Phase 3

The third phase lasts a full month and sees the introduction of carbs like pasta and bread into the diet.  Servings will also be slightly larger although it still needs to be tightly-controlled.

Phase 4

The last phase of the diet, called the Temple, is intended to be the diet that you bring with you for the rest of your life.  Included in your intake will be regular calorie sources like beer, pizza and potatoes.  Along with the food, you’ll need to implement principles that will keep you fit for the coming years, like exercise, portion control and eating more frequently.

Doing The Fat Smash

If you’d like to do the Fat Smash Diet, you can join the Celebrity Fit Club website (paid membership required).  Your subscription includes access to all the information and tools you need to complete the diet as well as continue it over the coming years.

As far as my celebrity trivia knowledge goes, Angelina Jolie and Claire Danes are neither friends nor close acquaintances. Yet, they both do share an admiration for the Volumetrics Eating Plan.

Devised by Barbara Rolls, a professor of nutritional science, the Volumetrics Diet is an eating plan hinged upon the common sense idea of stacking up on low-calorie food choices that manage to leave you full. As a result, you satiate your hunger without consuming high amounts of calories.

Dieters performing the Volumetrics eating system base their choices on an Energy Density (ED) Index created by Barbara herself. Food that fall on the low scale of the index should facilitate fullness while packing on limited calories. Items that are high in water content make up the bulk of the prescribed food choices that include soups, fruits and vegetables.

Unlike many diets, it doesn’t eschew important nutritional components such as carbohydrates nor does it encourage deprivation. Dieters under the program, in fact, typically eat more food than portion-controlled dieters yet, according to one year-long research, lost significantly more weight in the process.

You can learn more about the diet via Barbara Rolls’ Volumetrics book, where she lists 125 delicious recipes for low-ED food choices that should help trim you into shape. She also picks out normal food most people are likely eating and shows how to replace them with low-calorie alternatives without giving up their sumptuous taste.

Calorie Shifting is an eating system, where you confuse your body’s metabolism by shifting your calorie consumption (like 2000 calories one day, for instance, and then 1500 the next).  It’s a technique often employed when your weight loss has stagnated despite putting in the same effort as you did early in the diet.

It works by creating an effect similar to what happens when bodybuilders change their workout when their growth has stagnated, effectively stimulating the body to behave differently from what it has been used to.  By forcing your metabolism out of a comfortable level, your body will potentially end up burning more calories.

Calorie shifting is, in essence, a supplement to a good diet.  If you’re currently not carefully watching what you eat, then any effects calorie shifting will do is likely to be minimal.  If you’re on a good diet, however, performing the technique can help greatly in boosting its results.  Actress Jeniffer Love Hewitt is said to have lost close to 20 pounds after incorporating calorie shifting to her diet back when those nasty papparazi photos of her flabby thighs were still fresh in people’s minds.

When you’re calorie shifting, it is important to establish a baseline calorie consumption.  If you’re on a diet that has you consuming 1500 calories a day, for instance, then use that as your starting point.  There are many variations of calories shifting, each one with their own advantages.  Here’s a sample way of performing this:

• First Week: Add 300 calories to your diet for two days.
• Second Week:  Remove 400 calories from your diet for two days.
• Third Week: Add 400 calories to your diet for two days.
• Fourth Week:  Remove 500 calories from your diet for two days.

After four weeks of doing calorie shifting, you should return back to your regular diet.  You don’t want your body getting accustomed to this new eating pattern, after all.  You can redo the system after every month or two if you feel your current weight loss efforts still need an extra boost.

These diets go past the typical reduced calorie eating programs into near-fringe territory.  They supposedly work great, though.

Raw Food Diet

Personally, I think this is one of the best eating programs out there - if you can manage it.  Raw food contains live enzymes that boost energy and many native nutrients, much of which are destroyed when put through heat. Most raw dieters, as expected, stick to vegetarian fare, although some do engage in animal joys like raw eggs and sushi.  A select few are even said to extend it to raw meat.

Actress Uma Thurman is said to be a big proponent of this system.

Seven-Day Color Diet

Under the week-long plan, you stick to eating one color of food per day. On Mondays, for instance  you stick to white food items. Tuesdays you go red. The rest of the week (in order) require you to eat green, orange, purple, yellow, and rainbow colored foods, respectively.

I’m not sure if there’s a scientific principle behind it or if this was done just for the heck it - it sure sounds mighty fun, though.  Christina Aguilera is known to follow this eating and the results look awesome.

Master Cleanse Diet

This is both a cleansing and weight loss diet designed to be performed over the course of ten days.  On this system, you stick to consuming nothing but a drink made from freshly-squeezed lemon juice, water, maple syrup and Cayenne pepper.  You can drink as much as you want but you can’t have anything else to go with it.

Beyonce was said to have done this diet and lost a good twenty pounds in the process.  Five pounds each probably came off from each thigh - just kidding.