Weight loss diets are big business — very big business. Last year alone, Americans spent an estimated $46 MILLION on diet products, books, and programs. That’s a lot of bucks!

Weight loss diets have been around for a while now. William the Conqueror was so disturbed about the weight he had gained that he locked himself in a room, ate no food, and drank only alcohol. Sounds like fun, but it didn’t work. He died when he fell off of a horse, and he was so obese that the clergy had a problem fitting all of him into his stone sarcophagus.

I remember my grandmother going on the banana and pineapple diet. She ate nothing but bananas and pineapples for several weeks. She didn’t lose any weight because she ate so many of them, and after she gave up that fad diet, she never ate another banana or pineapple as long as she lived.

Some of the fad diets that come along are weird, some of them are laughable, and some of them sound so reasonable that one would think that maybe the painless road to weight loss had finally been discovered. The old eat less/exercise more tried-and-true road to weight loss isn’t much fun. So if a painless weight loss diet has been discovered, the world wants to know what it is.

The Atkins Diet was a biggie. The diet said that the problem of weighing too much wasn’t caloric intake or lack of exercise. The problem was carbohydrate intake. We were told to eat all of the meat and meat products that we wanted; just avoid vegetables and all grains and we would lose weight without being hungry. The thing is, the plan did work — for a while. It just didn’t work forever. Pounds were lost and promptly regained. The body needs a well-balanced diet to function correctly, and it simply will not put up with that kind of abuse for long.