This question has lead to protracted debates among fitness instructors and nutritionists. Some claim that this fad diets could actually make you put on more weight. Others claim that you cannot be able to lose weight if you ignore this fad diets. However recent studies have shown that when it comes to losing weight fad diets have nothing to do with it. What these fad diets propose is that you significantly reduce your calorie intake. However when this happens your body will naturally adopt to the significant decrease in the amounts of calories by going into starvation mode and this is when all the trouble starts to set in. when the body is in starvation mode it will start to preserve the amount of body energy. The only way it can do this is to start burning up muscles and conserving body fat. This has an adverse effect in your body fat-muscle ratio. You will experience an increase in body fat since the body is not burning it and at the same time your lean body muscles will deplete.

Depletion of the lean body muscles also has an effect on your metabolism; it leads to a decrease in body metabolism. Your body metabolism is controlled by the amount of lean muscles present in your body, and therefore the more lean muscles you have the higher your metabolism  and vice versa. If you clearly recall your biology metabolism leads to the burning of calories. Therefore since your metabolism is very low this means that you will not be able to burn off a lot of calories which will end up being stored as fat in your body.

This fad diets will also make you feel weak due to lack of energy. Normally for the body to be able to generate energy, it requires plenty of calories. And therefore since you are taking very little calories, you will be depriving the body of its energy source.

The other thing about fad diets is that they increase your food cravings. Try going for a whole weak on this diets and you will be amazed by how much you will begin to crave food. You start salivating seriously by the end of the weak and this naturally means you will eat twice as much of the food you were avoiding. Back in college there was this guy who was seriously struggling with his weight, and therefore he went on this fad diets. After one week he could not stop his food cravings and so he always ended up breaking the diet. Food end up becoming like a forbidden fruit and you know what they say 'forbidden fruits taste sweeter'.

Losing weight is not about depriving yourself of food, all you need to do is to eat healthy and by this I mean a balanced diet. The other thing you need to do is to go on a training regimen geared to losing weight. This should include aerobic exercises and weight lifting. A lot of people ignore weight training and tend to concentrate more on aerobics. However you need to do balance the two equally for the best results.