THE LIST Wacky Weight Loss

Right, so the festive season is over and now we all embark on the not-so-festive Morning After: desperate to shed our Christmas adipose, one of the most popular resolutions is to lose weight.

Like every other form of self-deprivation, we are always hoping for a quick and easy solution to dieting, some way to get around the old adage "a minute on the lips, a month on the hips": hence the overwhelming number of "fad" diets.

Want to lose those calories quickly? How about the Soup Diet? It's seven days of as much cabbage soup as you like. Apparently you can lose up to 4.5kg a week on it. The problem, as with all crash diets, is once you come off it ... that and the fact that it's "gas powered".

The Grapefruit Diet works on the theory that grapefruit contains fat-burning enzymes, so if you combine the fruit with a severely restricted diet of less than 800 calories a day, you can lose more than 5kg in a week.

The Hollywood Juice Diet promises you will lose even more - especially out of your pocket: some marketing genius bottled a combination of fruit juice and herbal extracts and sells it for $25 a bottle. The idea is you don't eat, just drink the juice four times a day (400 calories) for a week.

A cheaper version is the Lemonade Diet, another sure-fire way to lose weight, cleanse your colon and empty your intestinal tract while you are about it. You eat nothing, but may gorge yourself on lemonade made of fresh lemon juice, organic maple syrup and cayenne pepper. But that's not all - you may also have salty water, plus laxative herbal tea. Yum yum. It's only fair to warn you the diet does come with predictable side effects.

Then there's the Tapeworm Diet: although banned in the US, it is still possible to buy diet pills online purporting to contain tapeworm eggs. The idea is that the parasite will grow inside and consume all those calories, so you can eat as much as you like and still lose weight. The reality is that while you might lose a kilo or so a week, tapeworms are dangerous.

Finally, the fastest sure-fire way to shed the excess is the Amputation Diet: lop off a leg and that's goodbye to as much as 20kg. Bye-bye breasts - there goes another 6kg - and liposuction will relieve you of another 5kg or so. Weight Watchers is looking pretty good right now.