Shocking! The Real Truth About Women's Diet Plans

We've probably all heard about the Grapefruit Juice Diet, the Soup Diet, and all sorts of other diet plans. The names of these diets are well-known and easily recognized. They all have their fans and their detractors, and they all claim to have proof that they work well without damaging your health.

Here's some straight talk about diets: The only diet that will work for you is one that you can easily maintain and sustain without making any drastic changes to your lifestyle. None of these popular diets fit that description.

To be perfectly honest, none of these quick-fix, fad diets provide the nutrition you really need. This article is a gallery of some of the least healthful fad diets ever concocted, and the reasons why their outlandish methods of losing weight will never work for most people.

1. Grapefruit Juice

According to the Grapefruit Juice Diet, all you have to do to lose weight is eat whatever foods you like (as long as you eat more fats and proteins than carbs), while also drinking grapefruit juice at a rate of 64 ounces per day. In theory, the grapefruit juice and the protein will work together to boost your metabolism and burn more fat.

However, more objective scientists have shot down this theory by pointing out the complete lack of scientifically-valid research to prove that this plan actually works.

2. Baby Food

Tracey Anderson, who is a well-known trainer, designed the Baby Food Diet. It advises dieters to go through as many as 14 jars of baby food throughout their day, and conclude the day with a "real" dinner, if desired.

Baby food has a very small amount of calories, so, on some level, it makes sense that a diet like this would cause one to lose weight. On the other hand, critics have pointed out serious flaws in this approach to dieting. Namely, baby food lacks many of the nutrients that adults need, and this diet may increase the chances that the dieter will end up binging on junk foods.

3. Soup

There are a number of variations on the Soup Diet, most of them featuring chicken or cabbage soup. In every version, the basic idea is the same: Eat a normal breakfast, then eat nothing but soup for the rest of the day.

Simple? Definitely. Healthy? Not necessarily.

The basis of the Soup Diet is what is known as "caloric restriction." It focuses on forcing your body to burn fat by limiting the number of calories you take in, but does nothing to ensure that you're getting the nutrients your body needs to function optimally. Any diet that does not require you to eat foods that give you those nutrients is not to be trusted.

You may lose some weight while on a caloric-restriction-based diet like the Soup Diet, but you'll be harming your body by depriving it of nutrients. Not only that, but with diets like this one, there is a very good chance that you'll regain all that weight as soon as you go off the diet.

4. Cookies

The simple concept behind the Cookie Diet appears delicious at first: Every day, you eat 6 cookies, followed by dinner at the end of the day. The cookies, however, aren't much like anything your mom might have made. Most of them contain some type of meat protein (yes, really).

Some people have had success with this diet, but, again, their success is most likely because they consumed such a limited number of calories per day while on this diet - about 800 to 1,000.

The main problem with this diet plan is that you probably won't be able to stick to it for very long. The cookies aren't exactly great-tasting, and you'll probably experience cravings for "real" food before long.