Water & Pepper Diet

The Water and Pepper diet, known by a variety of names, provides few calories and is meant to purge your colon. The combination liquid diet-cleanse will reportedly help you lose up to 20 lbs. in 20 days, much of it from stored-up waste in your digestive system. Although the diet has been around for more than 50 years, it remains controversial. It would be best to seek medical advice before embarking on the plan.

Versions of the Water and Pepper Diet

The Water and Pepper diet is an informal name for the decades-old Master Cleanse diet that has enjoyed recent incarnations as the Lemonade Diet, Lemon Water Diet and Cayenne Pepper diet. In most versions, you drink about 8 cups a day of lemonade made from water, lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. Another version of the diet replaces the maple syrup with honey and permits you to snack on small portions of nuts, cereal, crackers and salads.

Celebrity Views

Celebrities helped revive popularity of the diet in the new millennium. Beyonce, for instance, boasted of losing 20 lbs. in two weeks while following the Master Cleanse in preparation for her role in "Dream Girls." Beyonce has since said, however, that she regained the weight she lost and now prefers a more balanced approach to dieting. She counts calories during the week and eats what she wants on the weekends, according to the "Sunday Telegraph."

Nutrition and Weight Loss

Eight cups of the spicy lemonade provides about 800 calories, most of them from sugar. You get a little bit of nutrition from minerals in the maple syrup and vitamin C in the lemon juice. It is difficult, however, to get proper nutrition on diets --- even well-balanced diets --- that contain fewer than 1,500 calories., according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Based on the caloric count of the Water and Pepper diet, you would lose 2.4 lbs. of fat in a week. Additional weight loss would come from water and any backed-up waste in your colon, according to "The Times."

Considerations

Common side effects of the Water and Pepper diet include headaches, nausea, hunger pangs and diarrhea. If you remain in the diet for more than a few days, your metabolism will slow as a protective measure against starvation. It may remain slow after you resume normal eating, meaning it will not quickly process the additional calories. This is why it is common for people to regain the weight they lose on extreme diets. Sometimes they gain more than they lost in the first place, the so-called "yo-yo" effect of habitual dieting.

History

The Master Cleanse diet was designed by Stanley Burroughs, a California naturopath, who introduced the idea of detoxifying your body by drinking spicy lemonade in the 1950s. His practices, which included color light therapy, remained controversial throughout his lifetime. He was convicted of second-degree murder after a patient he was treating for cancer died while on the Master Cleanse diet. The California Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction but upheld lesser charges, including practicing medicine without a license and the unlawful sale of cancer treatments.