There are thousands of diet plans on the market at any given time. From the short-lived movie star diets, to the bizarre eat-really-weird-stuff diets, to the dangerous pill popping, potion-swallowing diets.

If losing weight is a priority in your life you probably don’t want to screw your health up to achieve it.

This article shows the 4 things to look for in unhealthy diet plans.

1. Unrealistic Promises of How Much Weight You Will Lose

Large weight loss is the primary bait on the hook for most unsafe diet plans.

Weight loss is the common denominator of diet plans in general but when large numbers are recklessly thrown around, you need to proceed with caution.

Is the weight loss number realistic? Most professional dietitians that I have studied suggest that 1 to 2 pounds per week is reasonable and healthy.

I realize that losing 1 pound per week isn’t exciting but over the course of a year that 1 pound adds up to 50 pounds. That’s a number you CAN get excited about.

2. Unrealistic Promises in How Fast You Will Lose the Weight

We live in a high speed world. Microwaves are fast but not fast enough. Waiting 30 seconds for food to heat up seems like forever. Internet connections are faster today than they were a year ago but still not fast enough.

So, wouldn’t it be nice if we could not only lose a lot of weight but also lose it really, really fast? Of course it would. Twenty pounds in seven days would be awesome!

The fatloss marketers know you’re in a hurry to shed weight so that’s what they promise. They combine your need for speed with their promise of delivering fast results and you’re hooked.

Losing a lot of weight fast is rarely achievable, at least not in a healthy manner it isn’t.

3. Effortless Weight Loss

Lose weight with no effort on your part is another main-stay of the weight loss marketers.

If there was a fat loss pill that actually worked I suppose you could cut weight without effort. But there are no such pills, therefore you are left with the traditional safe means of eating healthier, exercising more, and being patient.

4. Unhealthy Means to Lose Weight

a.) Severe calorie restriction

Some diet planners theorize that if you consume a lot less calories than your body needs then you will naturally lose weight.

What they don’t understand is that every part of your body, from your blood to your brain, MUST HAVE the proper amount of nutrition daily to function properly. You want your body and brain to function properly don’t you? Then severe calorie restriction qualifies as unhealthy.

b.) Starvation

Starvation is a close relative to severe calorie restriction only more stupid and twice as dangerous. If severe calorie restriction is bad, total food abstinence must be worse.

Starvation diets are reckless, unhealthy, and unnecessary.

c.) Pills

So-called diet pills are basically amphetamines with a few other ingredients thrown in for filler. You may get a mental buzz from this drug but the claim that the pills actually cause weight loss are erroneous.

Don’t become a drug addict in your quest to slim down.

d.) Liquid Potions

Drinking a daily dose of chemical soup concocted in some third world laboratory by a chemist of dubious qualifications is a health disaster waiting to happen.

Just because your next door neighbor’s second cousin claims that "Brand X Super Fat Burning Elixir" burned buckets of fat off their body in a few days shouldn’t be enough proof for you to try it.

Conclusion

Most unhealthy diet plans are easy to spot because they are riddled with unrealistic promises about how much and how fast weight can be lost, with little or nor effort on your part.

If they also compromise your health with unhealthy weight loss methods, then it’s better to drive a stake through the heart of that diet plan and find a safer one. There are too many healthy diets on the market to be experimenting with dangerous ones.