|
’Net Junkie Shawn "Speedy" Lopes |
Faddiet.com
may be helpfulA glorious weekend of Thanksgiving overindulgence will do it to you every time. After the last of the leftover turkey sandwiches has been consumed and the pumpkin pie box tossed out to trash, Americans everywhere will approach their bathroom scales with more than a little fear and apprehension. The inevitable will be confirmed, of course, and a quick dash to the old home computer will follow.
Web sites like faddiet.com will begin attracting more hits from those who choose to forgo exercise and a sensible diet and opt for get-thin-quick schemes over the holidays. Thankfully, faddiet.com doesn't promote these extreme diets as sure-fire ways to managing your weight. In fact, it even pokes a little fun at the diet craze with cheaters' tips and a humorous hints to getting rich quick by creating your own outrageous fad diet.
Faddiet.com does list a number of popular diets like "The Cabbage Soup Diet," which allows dieters to consume as much cabbage soup as they desire, day or night, whenever hunger comes calling. The soup involves nothing more than onions, green peppers, diced tomatoes, celery, a package of onion soup mix and a head of cabbage. For one week you are restricted to little more than fruit, cabbage soup, vegetables, skim milk, the occasional potato, brown rice and unsweetened drinks. Faddiet. com calls this "The King of All Fad Diets."
The Atkins Diet, however, with its low-carb approach to weight loss, seems to be all the rage these days. Though experts have taken issue with the peculiar dieting method, which forbids breads and cereals, the Atkins Diet allows dieters access to once-taboo foods as pork, oysters, scrambled eggs, cream cheese and ham, making it an attractive alternative to other restrictive fad diets.
The Scarsdale Diet Plan, by contrast, is a fairly routine, week-long diet regimen consisting of modest servings of lean beef, chicken or fish, vegetables, fruits and the like. You'll find more of the same, though with even skimpier portions, in the Three-Day Diet, which faddiet.com deems "One of the worst of the bunch." It takes a fairly big commitment to get through half a week on toast, grapefruit, saltine crackers and half-ounce servings of tuna. Reading this stuff actually makes me want to go on two or three diets at a time, since one of these obviously won't give me enough to eat.
Note: Web sites mentioned in this column were active at time of publication. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin neither endorses nor is responsible for their contents.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
’Net Junkie drops every Monday.
Contact Shawn "Speedy" Lopes at slopes@starbulletin.com.
