How to create your own fad diet (and get rich).

I got inspired to write this over the weekend during some down time based upon a "banana diet" post I saw a few days ago here on the forums. The diet and fitness industry has made many millionaires over the years, so why can't that next millionaire be you? When you think about it, it's a pretty good business to be in. You would be hard pressed to find a more gullible audience to sell a product to, and with the number of people actively trying to lose weight you have a virtually limitless crop of new prospects. Now all you need is a plan to establish yourself as an internet guru for weight loss, so I have devised a quick reference guide below to give your new fad diet some nuts and bolts and "teeth". While other writers out there with a flair for the dynamic have tackled this subject before, this is nonetheless my contribution.

1) Name Your Fad Diet Just like in any other facet of marketing or advertising, there is power in a name. It's branding, after all, so you want to select a name that encapsulates your brand but is still catchy like the hook from a top 40 track. Try to use power adjectives like "extreme", "hack" "secret" etc., as the clincher to making a successful fad diet is to make it appear as though it's both new and groundbreaking. Imitation is often the greatest for of flattery, and past successful fad diets have often incorporated geography into the name like South Beach, Hollywood, etc. so consider picking some glamorous locale and associate that with your diet.

Alternatively, or in conjunction with the above, you can use the name of a food item in the name, as this has often seen past success as well in the form of the grapefruit diet, cabbage soup diet, the aforementioned banana diet etc. Also consider descriptors that have timing intervals which have been capitalized by Intermittent fasting fads, so 5:2, 6:8, etc. Many people find legitimacy and comfort in numbers.

Lastly, don't overlook the power of symbolism. The "Paleo" and "Warrior" diet folks have taught us that romantic imagery in word choice is good for more than just the name of classical literature and Indie Pop music albums. Even if these are aspects that have nothing to do with your diet, they set the tone and are memorable. Rawr! Again, branding.

2) Devise a Food Plan If you want your fad diet to have any kind of staying power so you can stay rich long term, then your diet has to at least somewhat "work". Here again, we can take what has worked in the past and incorporate this in fresh and exciting ways. As we all know you need a calorie deficit to lose weight, and the easiest way to accomplish this from the context of a fad diet is to either eliminate certain foods or food types, or else demonize a particular food macro as harmful. The simple act of doing this is going to reduce calorie intake of those who participate, giving you a greater chance of users actually losing weight. As an example, carbs and fats are already far too played out in the fad diet world, so why not take a stab at demonizing protein? After all, it is a macro that is a little too proud of itself these days, right? You are just the person to take it down a peg and blame it for the obesity epidemic.

You also can go after the ethical crowd too, so don't overlook this as a possibility. Emotional ploys are well noted for their ability to motivate action. So as another example, maybe devise a diet that states that Vegans are not nearly extreme enough to account for all the ethical and environmental implications facing our world. Call it something like "hyper-veganism" and play the SJW card to the hilt. Just trying to get your creative juices flowing, but the possibilities are literally endless. If you want your fad diet to be successful you need to think outside the box.

3)Give your Diet the Appearance of Being Legit/Scientific Nearly all fad diets are going to need somebody besides just you singing it's praises, and you can go after this concern in a two pronged attack. While in earnest all you are really selling is a colorful narrative, it has to appear to be on the up and up from casual observation.

First you are going to need some kind of medical or scientific authenticity, and you have several options to accomplish this feat. The easiest way is to either cherry pick or quote mine. There are thousands upon thousands of studies out there of varying degrees of quality, and if you look hard enough you can probably even find a study saying the Earth is not roundish. Even if the information from the study you pick is entirely out of context or even entirely irrelevant, it does not really matter for your purposes. There are also plenty of niche journals that have almost no formal peer review process and are well noted for their propensity for nonsense. The journal, 'Medical Hypothesis', for example, is a case in point for such lunacy. Most Joe Blow's out there are not going to take the time to read over a complicated scientific work anyway. All you really need is to give the appearance of legitimacy, not actual legitimacy.

Another possibility is to enlist the power of a quack who just happens to have impressive academic or medical credentials. As a person that has spent a great deal of time in academia myself, I can attest that long tenured professors tend to get more and more, ummmm, "eccentric" the longer they stay in the game. They are going to make outrageous claims anyway, so they are often the perfect people to tap as advocates for your plan. Think about it; if practices like Chiropractic, homeopathy, and other renditions of complete pseudoscience are still able to flourish to this day, getting a fad diet to sound legit should be easy for you.

Lastly, you are going to need testimonials for the diet's users. It is important to get these as early on in the process as possible before dieters get wise to your ruse. The first 10 pounds of loss is the ideal window, as this is when people are most excited about weight loss and before they might start to become disillusioned with your diet. Impressive before and after pictures are also important, so it at least appears that it can be a long term solution for health. You can always pay someone for these. However, you also have to figure that even extreme fad diets are going to produce a certain (likely low) percentage of users who do actually lose a lot of weight. These are the user pictures you need, then just make it appears as thought this is the norm and not .000001%

4)Find a Way to Monetize Your Diet Just having a website or blog and having followers is not going to make you rich, so you need to find a way to keep money consistently coming in month in and month out. Luckily there are lots of great options out there to ensure that you are able to make the payments on your Lambo each month and still have money leftover to get your pubic area waxed.

Offering a premium version of your website with exclusive content has been a mainstay of fad diets and the talking heads which advance them. This should be the first item you investigate for your revenue stream. If you have done a good job up to this point of selling yourself as well as your fad diet, emphasize personal attention from the almighty himself, YOU! Doing podcasts or video conferences is a great way to pull this off.

Another solid tool to add to your cash generating arsenal is the distribution of low cost, "white paper" downloads which explain your diet in detail, give meal plan examples, and offer testimonials for users. Taking this a step further, publication of an actual book is a possibility worth exploring. Even if you suck at writing, hiring a ghost writer is not an expensive prospect these days, and the royalties if it's a hit can be enough to keep you in diamonds and furs for years to come.

With the success of other nonsense film projects like "What the Health", "Knives over Forks", "That Sugar Film" etc. there is nothing that spins your narrative better than a documentary. You can control all the elements of persuasion and get your propaganda message out there in splendid fashion. Lazy dieters might not be willing to read walls of text on your website, but they will sit on their couch and watch a video. As I have learned from working in the advertising business, assume that your audience consists entirely of those with an educational background that ended at 8th grade.

Lastly, you can also investigate getting into the merchant goods gig. The possibilities are unending, but how about some t-shirts with your smiling picture on them? Branded food items or drinks? Glorified placebo supplements that do nothing? Use your imagination and get creative.

5)Defend your Fad Diet from the Naysayers If your fad diet gets big enough, it's only a matter of time before the medical and scientific community paints a big target on your back. The best way to deal with this is to be prepared and incorporate a strategy that has been used successfully by other niche organizations like the Church of Scientology and "attack the attacker".

First of all, you can attack the medical establishment as a whole. Many Americans already have a generalized distrust of these institutions anyway, so paint them as archaic and monolithic institutions that are more concerned with maintaining the status quo than in helping them lose weight. The AMA is the dated orthodoxy, while you on the other hand are progressive minded and nimble.

You can also go the conspiracy theory route, taking a page out of the book of many within the non-GMO and organic food camps. Attack food producers as orchestrating a worldwide conspiracy to hook people on their products, and for bonus points include a tie in involving them being in cahoots with world governments. The good thing about making these types of outlandish claims is that they are so ridiculous that those who are implicated in them often won't even bother responding, which you can say gives further credence to your accusations.

Summation As you can see from the above, creating and successfully orchestrating a fad diet is not without it's challenges, but it can also prove to be a very lucrative endeavor. The best way to be successful is to mentally distance yourself from the diet's users and focus on profit, seeing the users themselves as simply a means to a monetary end. Furthermore, you can limit the impact on your conscience if you have one by the reality that they probably would of fallen victim to another fad diet anyway, so why not yours?