3 Day Tuna Diet

You might have heard of the 3 day tuna diet, maybe even in connection with a famous hospital, as an easy and quick way to lose weight over just three days. While the diet has the feel of an urban legend, there are people on the Internet who claim to have used it.

History of the 3 Day Tuna Diet

The diet has been floating around on the Internet for several years, and is often passed around as a diet recommended by a weight-loss clinic or a doctor. While it's not clear how this diet got started, it is known that no hospital or doctor has recommended it.

The institution most often linked to the 3 day tuna diet is the Cleveland Clinic, which states on its website that there is no such thing as the "Cleveland Clinic Diet."

The page goes on to state: " We all wish that weight loss and other health benefits could occur with simply making three days worth of dietary change. But severely restricting your calories, and including/excluding specific foods from the diet is not the way to long-term, sustained weight loss and health benefits."

Still, the story persists, and the diet can be found on numerous web pages, most of them calling the diet what it is: a fad diet.

Components of the Diet

The 3 day tuna diet is, as you'd expect, a three-day plan, but it does not require you to exclusively eat tuna for the three days.

Despite the fact that there's no real known source for this diet, the different websites you can find it on have remarkably similar ideas of what the diet entails.

Here's a sample, giving you the full day's menu for day one:

• Breakfast
  • Black coffee or tea (can be sweetened with artificial sweetener) or water
  • Half a grapefruit or equivalent in juice
  • One slice of toast with a tablespoon of peanut butter
• Lunch
  • Half a cup of tuna
  • One slice of toast
  • Black coffee, tea or water
• Dinner
  • Three ounces of any lean meat
  • One cup green beans
  • One cup carrots
  • One cup vanilla ice cream
  • One medium apple
  • Black coffee, tea or water

The diet goes on in a similar fashion for two more days. In addition to the foods listed, dieters are advised to drink four more glasses of water (or diet soda) daily. Herbs, salt and pepper, lemon, vinegar, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup and mustard are also allowed.

After the three days, dieters are advised to go back to eating normally but not to overeat.

Diet Claims

Losing weight with tuna isn't a good idea.

Some websites claim that you can lose up to 10 pounds in three days following this diet. That seems highly unlikely, and most websites that contain the diet do not include testimonials or anyone saying they have actually had success with the diet.

By all accounts this diet is a fad and cannot deliver what is promised. What it likely would deliver instead is a very cranky and hungry dieter. Consulting a calorie counter lets you know that lunch on day one is not much more than 200 calories, and the whole day would give you less than 1,000 calories, which is really not enough to function on. Talk about a crash diet.

Any diet that involves starvation (or severe calorie restriction) will produce some weight loss, but that weight loss is mostly water and will immediately return once you start eating normally again.

It's a much better idea to choose a healthy diet and stick with it over the long term than to try an unfounded (and probably unsafe) diet just because it promises quick results. Some examples of safe diet programs include:

• The South Beach Diet

• The Zone Diet

• Weight Watchers

• The American Heart Association Diet

As many people have learned from years of working to control their weight, when a diet promises quick and easy results, you should probably expect anything but..