Review: The Hollywood Diet
The Hollywood diet has a glamorous name, alright. But is it Hollywood’s official diet? According to the marketing it is. In reality, there’s no evidence it’s more popular in Hollywood than anywhere else. It’s marketing, plain and simple.
Is the Hollywood diet an effective and healthy way to lose weight? Does the diet live up to its claims?
Fans (i.e., “marketers”) say it is a “cleansing diet” which allows you to shed a great deal of weight over a brief period of time.
One study (which was not a peer reviewed, double blind clinical study, mind you) involving 27 dieters, men and women age 18 to 67, showed that followers of the weight loss plan lost an average of 4.5 percent of their overall body weight, in addition to a sizable proportion of fat. Overall weight loss among participants ranged from 4.5 pounds to 16.5 pounds.
This is not surprising, considering you’re dealing with simple “caloric economics.” In other words, if you dramatically reduce your caloric intake, as you are required to do on this diet, you will lose weight. It ain’t rocket science.
Dieters reported that they were satisfied with the amount of weight they had lost and hoped to use the diet again.
The Hollywood Diet requires you to consume nothing but a specially-mixed juice and water for two days. That means you cannot eat, drink caffeine products, or drink alcohol. As a result, you’ll be consuming only about 400 calories a day, as opposed to the normal 2000 calories per day.
What’s the secret to the success of the Hollywood Diet?
Advocates of the meal plan say that it hinders your typical food intake while cleansing your digestive system (I’m extremely skeptical of any cleansing or detoxing product—see this blog post for more!).
You drink juice all day long in order to balance your blood sugar levels and to curb your appetite (drinking juice curbs your appetite? Who knew?).
The juice consists of a blend of natural fruit juices, along with enzymes and minerals that the retailers claim act as a laxative.
Under the Hollywood Diet, you’re likely to lose one pound of fat, as many as two pounds of muscle, two to five pounds of waste matter, and as much as a half dozen pounds of water, for a total weight loss of four to 14 pounds.
Therefore, while the diet offers fairly significant short-term weight loss, only a small proportion of that loss involves fat. Worse, the loss of lean muscle tissue adversely affects your metabolic rate, meaning you will burn calories at an even more reduced rate once you complete the diet.
The chief benefit of the Hollywood Diet is that it is easy to follow. Other than that, there’s very little positive to say. You will be deficient on nutrients and calories, and the diet is unsustainable, which means any weight lost on the program will return quickly. Plus, the juice is extremely overpriced… $30 a bottle is common.
Critics have dismissed the Hollywood Diet as a scam. I’d be inclined to agree that this diet is a text book example of the sort of program you should avoid at all costs.
November 20, 2009
Finally a review of the “hollywood” diet I trust. I have so many friends detoxing and saying it does wanders, but was skeptical of what it did to muscle. This review helped me understand properly what happens when you take these temporary weight loss diets.
Like it was intended, im going to loose weight by eating healthy and actually exercising, not with ridiculous dieting.
May 13, 2010
Well Done. It looks, smells, and If i was dumb enough to buy the product it would even taste like a scam.
The old saying always applies: “If it looks too good to be true, it usually is!”
Typical and sad before and after shots that could have been taken on the same day. Nice try folks, but get your sorry butts into the gym or outside!
Good review folks, good to see this as my first hit in google for ‘Ben’s hollywood diet’ and ‘scam’