Ridiculous celebrity diets you should avoid at all costs!

Five fads your body doesn’t deserve to suffer.

We’re suckers for celebrity diets, aren’t we?

No matter how ridiculous the regimen sounds, if the glamorous X Factor judge Cheryl Fernandez-Versini swears by it, we’ll give it a go and hope it produces some great results.

But some can do more harm than good, and the British Dietetic Association (BDA)has revealed its annual list of top celebrity diets to avoid in the New Year.

Founded in 1936, the BDA is the nation’s largest organisation of food and nutrition professionals with over 7,500 members.

And with so many diet books and celebrity-endorsed fitness DVDs on the market, here are the ones to avoid to ensure you lose “lbs” instead of “£s”.

1 URINE THERAPY

BEAR GRYLLS reportedly drank his own urine for his TV show.

Urine Therapy includes the drinking of one’s own urine for cosmetic or medical/wellbeing purposes, and some claim that its urea component can have an anti-cancer effect.

BDA Verdict: Literally, don’t take the proverbial! It’s for emergencies only, as Urine Therapy has no scientific evidence that it adds anything beneficial to the body and its safety has not been established.

Anti-cancer claims are simply not backed up by scientific studies.

2 PALEO DIET

MILEY CYRUS and Matthew McConaughey have reportedly followed this diet, also known as the Paleolithic Diet, the Caveman Diet or the Stone Age Diet.

It’s a diet where only foods presumed to be available to Neanderthals in the prehistoric era are consumed and all other foods dairy products, grains, sugar, legumes, “processed” oils, salt and others like alcohol or coffee are excluded.

BDA Verdict: Jurassic lark! A diet with fewer processed foods, less sugar and salt is actually a good idea but unless for medical reasons, there is absolutely no need to cut any food group out of your diet.

In fact, by cutting out dairy completely, you could be in danger of compromising your bone health because of a lack of calcium.

An unbalanced, time-consuming, socially-isolating diet is a sure-fire way to develop nutrient deficiencies which can compromise health and your relationship with food.

3 SUGAR-FREE DIET

AS followed by Tom Hanks and Alec Baldwin, this is when you exclude all types of sugar and often all carbohydrates, too from your diet.

BDA Verdict: Not a sweet success. We encourage cutting down on free sugars, adding sugar or products already containing added sugar, in addition to being label aware, because as a nation, we consume too much sugar on the whole.

Cutting out all sugar is not only almost impossible, but would mean cutting out foods like vegetables, fruit, dairy products, nuts not exactly a healthy, balanced diet.

Also beware of the substitutes some of these plans recommend agave, palm sugar and honey, which are actually just sugar in another form and a huge contradiction.

4 VB6 DIET

BEYONCE and Dita Von Teese have reportedly followed this “vegan before 6pm” diet. After 6pm, nothing is off limits.

BDA Verdict: VB careful! This should set you on course to eating during the day, at least, less processed food, more plant-based foods like beans, pulses, wholegrains and nuts and much more fruit and veg.

But a vegan diet doesn’t automatically translate into a healthy one. The danger here is that post-6pm becomes a window of opportunity to munch a myriad of foods high in calories, saturated fat and packed with added salt and sugar, undoing your earlier healthier choices.

The time of the day doesn’t matter it’s nutritional balance that’s important.

5 THE CLAY CLEANSE DIET

ZOE KRAVITZ, daughter of singer Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet, has reportedly followed this diet which claims a spoon of clay a day removes toxins from the body and removes negative isotopes, helping you detox and stay in shape.

BDA Verdict: This idol has feet of clay. The Food Standards Agency issued a warning about clay after high levels of lead and arsenic were discovered in products.

The whole idea of detox is nonsense as the body is a well-developed system that has its own built-in mechanisms to detoxify and remove waste and toxins.

BDA spokesperson and consultant dietitian Sian Porter says: “It seems that as a nation we are constantly on the search for that magic bullet approach to losing weight, wanting a quick fix to give us the bodies we so often see on TV, in glossy magazines and adorning billboards up and down the UK.

“Quite often the fad diets we come across come at a price.

“Firstly, there can often be a cost to your health and secondly, there are often accompanying books, products, paid-for memberships or online services that can quickly add up.

“The truth is, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”