Honey Diet

Mitch Mandel

Forget soothing sore throats. Drinking hot water with lemon and honey can help women lose three pounds a week—at least, according to the aptly named “honey diet.”

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If you’re going with the version described in U.K. author Mike McInnes’s upcoming book, The Honey Diet, here’s how it works: Every morning and night, you down a simple elixir of hot water, lemon, and one to two tablespoons of honey. Then, you replace all sugar in your diet with honey, skip potatoes, eat unlimited vegetables (but only two pieces of fruit a day), get protein with every meal, swap out refined carbs for complex ones, and eat zero grains one day a week.

“You can call it what you want, but to me this to me is a fad diet,” says nutritionist Rania Batayneh, M.P.H., author of The One One One Diet. Basically, it’s an extreme low-carb diet with a lot of honey—which is funny since honey packs 17 grams of carbohydrates per tablespoon. Plus, crazy-restrictive diets like this one aren’t sustainable and can lead to fat gain, not loss, over the long term.

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When you crash diet, the weight you lose is typically from a combination of muscle and fat. But when you get fed up and gain the weight back? It’s all fat. That’s not meant as a diss to honey, though. Honey is teeming with antioxidants, which can help you rehab your relationship with your skinny jeans. The key is treating it as a sugar-substitute, not a food group, says Rania.

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