Hollywood Diet

The Hollywood Diet Plan

The Hollywood Diet is quite simple: stop eating for 48 hours and get all of your body's nutritive needs from a juice drink. You can have water, but no caffeine, no alcohol, no food, and no smoking. You combine 4 ounces of water with 4 ounces of the juice and sip it slowly over the course of 4 hours. You do this four times a day for two days, following each 4 ounces of the diluted juice drink with 8 ounces of water. Your total intake for the day, then, is 16 ounces of the juice concentrate, plus about 80 ounces of water (the 16 ounces mixed with the concentrate, plus 8 ounces to follow each of the eight 4-ounce servings of the diluted juice.

What's In It?

The official, bottled version of the diet concentrate contains water and fructose, pineapple, orange, apple, prune, white grape, and lemon juices, and extracts of bilberry, green tea, ginkgo biloba, and grapeseed, along with a few preservatives and stabilizers.

A homemade version, popularised in a weekly women's magazine, includes soy milk, orange and cranberry juices, yogurt, wheat germ oil, and flaxseed oil. This version probably contains slightly more calories per serving than the bottled product.

Is It Safe?

A very limited, doctor-supervised study of this diet, involving 27 volunteers, did not indicate any danger to the participants, all of whom reported significant weight loss over the two-day experiment.

Benefits

If you look at the Hollywood Diet as a cleansing juice fast, rather than a weight-loss diet, it does provide some benefits. Freed from the need to break down solid foods for two days, the digestive system can rest and throw off some accumulated waste. As the body is not having to deal with incoming toxins, it is free to process those that it has stored -- which accounts for some of the fat loss. The diet does encourage adequate hydration, which also helps the body eliminate stored toxins and metabolize fat. The adequate hydration combined with the diuretic effect of some of the juice ingredients can also help combat water retention.

Concerns

As water is calorie-free, and the bottled drink product has 100 calories in 4 ounces, the person following the Hollywood Diet is consuming a mere 400 calories a day -- a dangerously low number of calories. It would be very unsafe to continue this inadequate calorie consumption for more than two days, or to repeat the two-day juice fast more often than the recommended semi-weekly interval. (That is, two days of the diet, followed by two to three days of eating normally.)

Some of the ingredients in either version of the juice may cause allergic reactions or severe cramping. At least one dieter has reported online that the reactions she experienced were "like having a bad case of the stomach flu" and caused her to resume normal eating after only eight hours.