Return of the Grapefruit Diet?

When I was a sophomore, I went kind of bonkers on my meal plan and totally ran outta free-food-cash at the end of my second semester.

By CC Staff

While I was whiling away the couple of weeks between the end of the semester and sweet, sweet winter break, I ended up supplementing my meager collegiate diet with tons of grapefruit, since I was lucky enough to have a fruit tree in my backyard.

I came up with all kinds of ways of eating these acidic, pink babies: drizzling them with honey, cubing them in salads, juicing them, and slamming them down with a glass of O.J.

What I didn’t know then was that eating a little grapefruit with every meal helps you shave off pounds. Of course, thems were desperate times, and I don’t think I cared very much about stemming my freshman fifteen, but whatevs.

Still, according to a 2006 study, something about the acidic plant compounds found in grapefruit helps lower insulin levels — and the smaller the amount of insulin you have coursing through your blood after eating, the more efficiently your body uses food for energy, rather than storing it as fat. It seems unbelievable, but apparently participants in the study who chowed on citrus before they ate lost on average 3.6 pounds more than people who didn’t.

After my long-term grapefruit diet ended, it took me months to even be able to look at the damn things again, so I worry that months of citrus meal-prefaces would drive even the most devoted dieter to madness.