No gimmick diet can substitute for a healthy lifestyle—quality food, plenty of water, and exercise go a long way to keeping you in shape. Yet it feels as if every day, some new diet is introduced to us, and many people hop on the bandwagon without a moment’s doubt. Some diets work, and others don’t work at all, while some diets are so crazy and bizarre that we couldn’t help but share them with you.

10.The Urine Diet

The urine diet is a bizarre weight loss practice that involves restricting your diet to 500 calories a day and injecting yourself with the urine of pregnant women. The diet can supposedly help you lose up to 0.5 kilograms (1 lb) a day. Strangely enough, this miraculous weight loss is attributed to the injection of urine, as opposed to the limit on your calorie intake.

The urine of pregnant women has a special hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which is created by the placenta. If injected into the body of a non-pregnant person, this hormone can trick the brain into thinking that the body is pregnant, which, some say, makes the body metabolize much faster. Some of those who have tried the urine diet are extremely happy with the results and attribute their weight loss solely to the urine injections, firmly believing that it is thanks to these shots of urine that they did not feel hungry during the dieting period. Skeptics, however, argue that the urine and the hCG hormone have nothing to do with weight loss.

They accredit weight loss purely to the 500-calorie diet and warn that the urine diet poses obvious dangers. For a cheaper (the urine costs between $300 to $565 for a six-week supply) and more beneficial way to lose weight, limit your calorie intake (which you must do with this diet anyway), and take up exercise instead.

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