ShareThisOld joke: Guy walks into a health club. Goes up to a trainer and tells him, "Dude, I need to lose 15 pounds, fast." Trainer says, "OK, let's cut off your arm."
Newer joke, almost as ridiculous: In March, during an episode of the TV show "Lipstick Jungle," stars Brooke Shields and Lindsay Price are lunching and dishing with blond bombshell Kim Raver, who is looking guilty for looking so good.
Shields: "Did you color your hair?"
Price: "She says it's exercise. She's lying."
Raver: "All right, I'm going to come clean. It's the Hollywood Cookie Diet."
As fast as you could say "Google search," another fad diet exploded. Desperate dieters (are there any other kind?) flocked to the cookie diet's home page, where they breathlessly learned that replacing breakfast and lunch with two cookies at each meal and then having a "sensible" dinner would make them lose 15 pounds a month.
Meanwhile, registered dietitians everywhere rolled their eyes, and physicians snorted with derision.
Throw another get-slim-quick scheme onto the slag heap of faddish claims, alongside such classics as the cabbage-soup diet, grapefruit diet, chocolate diet, popcorn diet, not to mention that Mount Rushmore of weight-loss plans (Atkins, Pritikin, Jenny Craig and Tarnower) and those geographic compass points (Beverly Hills, South Beach, Brazilian Burn).
Once, just once, American Dietetic Association spokeswoman Andrea Giancoli would like to see a diet book based on, you know, reality shoot its way up the best-sellers list.
"But eating a balanced diet and exercising isn't sexy," says Giancoli, a registered dietitian in Los Angeles. "I could write that book, but no one would buy it."
Then again, even that old burn-more-calories-than-you-consume mantra won't give impatient diet patients the drastic shedding of poundage they crave as much as a slice of double fudge chocolate cheesecake.
No, the only proven surefire weight-loss scheme for everyone is the Amputation Diet. Web site impresario Tom Nardone, whose www.faddiet.com serves as a repository for nutritional claims, has posted a cheeky table of weight-loss body-purging ideas, ranging from a haircut (2 to 6 ounces) to donating a kidney (3 pounds) to amputating a leg (15 to 45 pounds).
"It's proven," Nardone, exuding the faux fervor of a huckster, says from his Michigan home. "Cut off a limb. It works."
Short of that, experts say the most reliable diet out there is this slow, steady and glazed-expression-inducing plan: Burn more calories than you consume.
Not that you'll see that mantra touted in TV ads all January and waiting in your inbox each morning. People would rather believe that the pounds will "melt off" in mere days by either the gimmick of focusing on one food or dutifully avoiding one or two groups of food.
"Our society is geared toward thinness," Giancoli says. "There are all these pills and books and diets and gimmicks that are promising to help us. And it doesn't matter whether it's been proven that they don't work. We fall for it every time because we're so desperate."
Like hemlines and hairstyles, diets come in and out of fashion. Every 15 years or so, the famed cabbage-soup diet -- first made popular by '50s housewives -- makes a comeback, as does the touted grapefruit diet, which has been proved time and again to be ineffective for everything other than preventing scurvy.
Or, there are ingenious reincarnations. The Beverly Hills Diet (heavy on mangoes and other exotic fruit) now is reconfigured as the Acai Berry Diet. Atkins' seminal high-protein, no-carb diet of the early 1970s begat Atkins II in the early 2000s, which begat the South Beach Diet, sort of an Atkins Lite. The low-carb, low-calorie Scarsdale Diet has morphed into the Skinny (Witch) fruit-and-fiber diet du jour.
Then there are the simply weird offerings with no solid medical groundwork: In the 1970s, the Sleeping Beauty Diet actually sedated people for days so they simply wouldn't eat. Today, there is the Eat Right for Your Type, a diet specifically tailored for your blood type.
And what about those cleansing "detox" diets that celebrities always are hyping? Medical professionals say to flush 'em.
"We have built-in detox systems in the liver and kidneys, and skin that does a bang-up job detoxing on its own," Giancoli says.
What makes these diets endure -- aside from their celebrity cachet -- is how they expand on what Kaiser Permanente Sacramento registered dietitian Monica Randel calls "a kernel of medical truth."
"Every diet book on hand has something that's accurate," Randel says. "But they tend to take that and exclude everything else."
To suss out fact from fiction in diet claims, we asked registered dietitians to weigh in on the three trends currently dominating the dieting landscape:
-- High-protein, low-fat: Also known as the Atkins Generation of diets, these rely on a regimen of high-protein (a/k/a fat) and extremely low-carbohydrate intake where the goal for dieters is to reach "ketosis."
That's when the body, which normally runs on energy-producing glucose, starts to burn ketones, a molecule from fat, as a fuel source.
"It's a survival mechanism and, in principal, you've got to wonder whether that's the way we were meant to be -- in a ketotic state," says Dianne Hyson, a registered dietitian and chairwoman of the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences/Dietetics at California State University-Sacramento. "You lose weight because the body thinks it's starving and these mechanisms kick in."
While such a diet high in saturated fats and eschewing nearly all carbohydrates has been proved to reduce weight in the short term, medical professionals worry about the long-term risks. The body in ketosis becomes highly acidic and research has yet to be done on its effects on areas such as bone loss, heart disease and kidney function.
"Every time you break down a protein molecule, you have to get rid of the nitrogen involved," Hyson says. "(Nutritionists) worry about what happens long term to a healthy kidney when you've amped its workload."
Hyson says Atkins dieters don't last long on the regimen because restricting grains and fruit can lead to constipation and headaches. "Plus, there's just a lack of variety in the diet."
So why does Atkins and its ilk remain so popular?
"I think people just want to be told that it's OK to eat bacon," Hyson says.
-- Glycemic Index: Originally designed for diabetics to monitor the effects of foods on blood-sugar levels, the low-glycemic diets flooding the market are being adapted and adopted for the rest of us.
The theory is that carbohydrates that elevate blood sugar quickly and plummet dramatically should be avoided in favor of carbs that are digested slowly and make only minor changes in blood-sugar levels. Low-glycemic foods often are high in fiber and low in fat.
So, what's the problem with this diet?
"Everybody digests food differently," Kaiser's Randel says. "The glycemic indexes in a specific food can vary as much as 100 percent in a patient. It depends on what you eat that food with, among other factors.
"Even in our diabetic unit, we're downplaying the use of glycemic index. The thing that's quote-unquote good about it is that high-glycemic foods tend to be the ones that aren't the greatest choices...
"But if you followed the low-glycemic trail, you couldn't eat carrots. Come on. It's not a great thing to put all your stock in."
Studies have shown that those on low-glycemic diets showed a decrease in LDL, the so-called "bad" cholesterol. Not surprising, since many of the high-glycemic foods are processed baked goods.
But adhering to the low-glycemic doctrine can backfire. Among offerings that fit in the low-glycemic diet are ice cream and fructose-sweetened beverages. And foods that nutrient-rich foods dietitians promote, such as potatoes and most fruit, are high on the glycemic scale.
-- Monounsaturated fat: Riding the wave of the antioxidant craze, monounsaturated fats have seen a spike in popularity. People who once eschewed nuts, seeds, olives and avocados as fattening now see them as an alternative to carbohydrates. Plus, the foods have anti-inflammatory properties.
The key, though, is moderation.
"I actually think one using monounsaturated fats is healthier than many others," Hyson says. "But you need a balanced diet and exercise for it to help you lose weight."
But the two popular diets espousing monounsaturated fats -- Flat Belly Diet and Skinny (Witch) Diet -- restrict total calorie intake to 1,400 to 1,600 calories. That might be difficult to maintain, long term, says the ADA's Giancoli.
"Limited research found that a high-carb diet led to more accumulation of fat in the abdomen vs. a high-monounsaturated fat diet," she says. "It's a stretch to conclude that they lead to a flat abdomen."
Kaiser's Randel, however, says she has the answer to the flat-belly problem: "Exercise and eating less will do it."
(Contact Sam McManis at smcmanis(at)sacbee.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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