The Grapefruit diet first emerged in the mid 70’s as a popular fad diet. The basis behind the Grapefruit Diet is that grapefruits contain “fat burning” ingredients and that just eating or drinking grapefruit before your meal, you’ll burn more fat and lose weight fast.

There are now a wide variety of Grapefruit Diets in use, however, the original Grapefruit Diet called for eating a few vegetables, a small amount of protein, and grapefruits. The duration of this diet was three weeks and the calorie restriction was less than 800 calories each day. This, obviously, is one of the more stricter diets. While the diet is considered one of the most “boring”, as you don’t have a lot of food choices, the diet has helped many get a jump start on losing weight.

The diet, according to many doctors and researches, will help you lose weight due to the mass-to-energy ratio. If you are restricting your diet to such a low amount of calories, in doing your normal day-to-day activities, you will be burning off more fat than you have taken into your system.

One such Grapefruit Diet consists of eating one-half grapefruit or 8 ounces unsweetened grapefruit juice for breakfast along with two eggs (prepared to your liking) and two slices of bacon. For lunch, your choice of grapefruit (half or 8 ounce glass) and a salad with your choice of dressing. For dinner, you can eat your choice of grapefruit, a salad with any type of dressing, a meat of choice, and a red or green vegetable.

The benefit of this type of diet is that it is high in fiber and it is high in vitamin C. With grapefruit, you are also get beta-carotene which is found in the pink grapefruit. This has been known to help reduce cholesterol and maintain a healthy heart.

The important thing to remember about the Grapefruit Diet is that it should only be done for three weeks. This is not a solution to losing all of your weight. It is simply a jump start to get the weight coming off and as with any new diet, you should seek your physician’s advice before starting.