If you have walked down the diet and nutrition aisle at the book store, flipped through any popular newsstand magazine, or turned on your television past primetime, you have seen the endless parade of fad diets on the market today. Actually, all you have to do these days is talk to friends and family members to hear about the random diets many of them are trying out. Popular fad diets spread rapidly through word of mouth, the biggest marketing strategy ever.

So there should not be a single overweight person on the face of the earth, right? If we have hundreds of diet strategies that are proven and guaranteed to shed the weight rapidly we should all be running around happily in our bikinis, but we are not! The reason we are not is because these popular fad diets do not work. The fact that new ones come out about every week should be solid proof that they do not work; otherwise we would not need so many of them because we would already be thin!

If we are ever going to put the popular fad diets in their place and stop shelling out billions of dollars every year to the diet peddlers, we must start to understand why they do not work, and why they can actually do more harm to our bodies than good.

Some popular fad diets are downright dangerous and could leave your body completely out of whack, making it even harder to lose weight than it was to begin with. You can identify these diets by a drastic reduction in calories, the complete elimination of entire food groups, or requiring you to eat only one particular food, such as soup. You need all the nutrients offered in our food supply for your body to function, and starvation level calorie limits will cause your body to turn on itself and start breaking down muscle for energy.

It is obvious why these diets fail: most people will not starve themselves to death and the physical side effects of these diets are too much to endure for long.

The biggest battle for most dieters are the hundreds of other popular fad diets which do not go to such extremes, but still fail us over and over. Many are still too strict to be successfully followed in the long run, and that in itself is a crucial flaw. Even if it might not totally mess your body up, if you cannot reasonably follow it for the rest of your life there is no point in starting it to begin with.

Popular fad diets do not work because they cut out the hard work that rebuilding a healthy body requires. Simply eliminating carbohydrates or fats or eating enormous portions of lean protein is not going to make all your fat cells shrink back to their natural size. It simply does not work that way!

Next time someone tells you about an amazing diet that has helped them drop ten pounds in a week without lifting a dumbbell or eating a vegetable, do not jump up and run for the book. Watch this person for a period of time and I bet you will find that sooner than later they start to pack the weight back on. Popular fad diets cannot be followed in the long term, so they will fail you every time.