3 Hour Diet

What it is: Created by fitness journalist and author of The 3-Hour Diet: How Low-Card Diets Make You Fat and Timing Makes You Thin, Jorge Cruise, the 3-hour diet encourages eating whatever you like, as long as portions are small and you keep to a strict time schedule of – yep, you guessed it –three hours.

How it works: This diet is not about what you eat but instead how you eat, suggesting that spreading your meals out into small increments throughout the day increases your BMR (Baseline Metabolic Rate) or essentially, how fast your body burns calories. Cruise also claims the diet plan increases energy and decreases appetite.

What you do: To follow the 3-hour diet, you must consume three meals, two snacks, and one treat daily. Sixty minutes after rising in the morning, dieters must eat breakfast. The rest follows in three hour increments –a snack three hours post-breakfast, lunch three hours after that, another small snack three hours later, dinner is next after three hours served with or shortly followed by a small treat such as a mini chocolate bar. All of this must be completed within three hours of going to sleep. Eat whatever you’d like but keep the portions reasonable for meals and small for snacks.

Benefits: This diet is for anyone who doesn’t want to restrict what they can eat; you can eat just about anything as long as you control the portions. It is flexible for budgets, sharing meals with a family, and eating out.

The downside: Many studies show that eating smaller portions more frequently does not actually effect one’s overall metabolic rate. Also, this diet requires being able to stop and eat every three hours, which many people with careers or families find almost impossible to stick to.