Does the Hollywood diet work? The answer is yes and no, depending on what you are looking for. If you are just looking for dropping some quick pounds, then yes, it works. But what kinds of pounds are you dropping?

Let me tell you what you are not dropping. You are not dropping fat. Well, you are probably a little fat. But most of your weight loss will be something else. Mostly it will be water weight. There will also be a little muscle loss and some fecal loss.

If you’re interested in a diet, then you are most likely carrying around fat that you’d like to lose. I get that. So make sure what you do causes you to actually lose the weight. Losing water from your body isn’t good for you and is going to come right back when you get fully hydrated again at some point.

Honestly, you are not going to lose fat faster than about 1 pound per week. If you’re losing weight faster than that, it’s not fat. So you can instantly rule out any program that promises weight loss of more than 4 pounds per week. Either they are lying or you are going to lose something besides fat.

Yes, it’s a bummer that you can’t lose the weight faster, but that’s just how it is. Accept it and you’ve taken the first step towards weight loss.

The next step to take is to reduce the amount of food you take in, but not by much. Also you want to switch out the processed foods you eat for fresh and items you prepare yourself from scratch. That will give your body the building blocks it needs to flush the toxins out of your body.

Now here’s the catch. If you believe that the special drink is making you lose weight and you follow other healthy principles and change your lifestyle, then it will help. It will help your brain, which will help you. It’s the same way that a placebo will make you feel better. Your brain is helped by an illusion and in turn, it helps you.

You need to realize though, now that you’ve read this, the illusion probably doesn’t exist for you anymore. It’s just time to grow up now and take full responsibility for your own weight loss. And that’s the most rewarding thing, when you finally take personal responsibility.

Most experts will readily agree that although the health benefits of following a low glycemic index (GI) diet, it can at times be a little confusing, so you need all the help you can get to make sure that you follow it correctly! Foods can rank ‘differently’ on the GI list according to how the food is grown, cooked or even how it is processed. It is also true that foods are digested by the body at different speeds, according to our own metabolism, how much we eat and what we eat the foods with.

The Glycemic Load

The glycemic load GL is a little bit complex! Basically it was developed by nutritionists and it is a way in which all the available carbohydrates can be assessed. In short it looks at not just what you eat, but how much you eat and the foods that you are combining a particular food with.

Here comes the science bit: to assess the GL of a food, find out the GI of that food. Then you divide the GI by 100 (say the GI is 10, divided by 100 you are left with .1) Then you multiply the amount you are going to eat by its weight (use grams, these are easier to work with). So before our calculation resulted in .1 and you are eating 100 grams of a food, then the GL is .1 x 100 which is 10!

Good and Bad Glycemic Loads

A GL that is less than 10 is good; anything that is between 11 and 19 is rated as medium and above 20 is high, so these foods should definitely be avoided. Understanding glycemic loads is a lot trickier than simply following the glycemic list, but it does make sense to at least try to assess the glycemic loads for foods, because it is more accurate than using the glycemic index list alone.

However, as with many things, it is probably better to take things slowly. If you start off from scratch using the (GI) list and then assessing your GL, you may find the whole process cumbersome and too taxing.

It is probably better to start off choosing foods from the GI list that are low ranked initially. Then after you have got used to this way of eating, then you can start to assess your GL.

The glycemic index list is still a useful tool in ensuring a healthy lifestyle/way of eating, but the further understanding of foods that assessing the glycemic load gives us, helps give us an even deeper understanding of foods and how they affect our bodies

While the Master Cleanse is not meant for weight loss, many people use it to lose weight since it offers radical weight loss, around twenty pounds in two weeks. The Cleanse has been used for over five decades to rid the body of toxins and cleanse the internal systems like the colon and digestive tract. However, after a few celebrities started using this method, and talked about the weight loss benefits, it is fast becoming the go-to weight loss method of millions.

The Master Cleanse is a fasting diet. During this diet, you are only allowed to drink a special drink made out of lemons, peppers and maple syrup and nothing else. It is said that the drink provides the body with all the nutrients that it needs, removing the need to ingest food.

Over two weeks, the body cleanses itself of all toxins and also removes the attachment that we form to certain kinds of foods, making it possible for people who do this diet accurately to keep the weight off successfully for long periods of time.

While you can use the Master Cleanse to lose weight, it is much more effective for people who have large amounts of weight to lose. However, everyone on this diet will lose at least a few pounds since there is significant amounts of water loss as well as fecal matter that had built up over the years is also expelled from the body.

It is also important to do the diet in precisely the required manner to experience weight loss, so you may find yourself trying it once, not succeeding since you did not follow the instructions and then giving up on it. It is important to prepare yourself for a 100% liquid diet for ten to fourteen days since eating even the smallest amount during this time will mean you have to start from scratch.

All being said, the Master Cleanse is a very controversial diet. Many doctors say that it offers no real benefits to the body, and that any weight you lose through this will come back after some time. It is always recommended that you incorporate healthy eating habits and exercise into your schedule instead of going on a fast.