Over the holidays each year, the average person reportedly stacks on a grotesque 8 pounds of fat, thanks to the traditional gorging that takes place at parties and family gatherings. The holidays are seen by most as an excuse to indulge in everything we restrict ourselves from throughout the rest of the year, but the bitch of it is that it can take up to three months to lose all that seasonal flab. So naturally, there's a sizeable profit surge in the first few months of the year for most diet products and get-thin-quick schemes, as people are scrambling to drop the added chunk the fastest way they can. Unfortunately, a great deal of them are deceitful, ineffective and even possibly dangerous.

Chances are, either you someone you know has tried one of those ridiculous detox diets that claim to "rid the body of toxins" and cleanse your insides so you're all squeaky clean for your next smoggy, chain-smoking trip to Starbucks for a venti triple latte caramel diabeticcino with extra whip. There's a comically inane list of magical remedies out there, from miracle cabbage drinks to cayenne pepper, from boiled lemons to vitamin drinks and so on.

Then there's the total scams that take full advantage of customer desperation, like the IonCleanse contraptions they sell at the mall. You may have seen it - it's a device where you put your feet in a small tub of water and an ionizer runs through and supposedly sucks all those nasty, dangerous toxins out through your feet. When "complete," the water ends up looking a fecal shade of brown, which you're supposed to believe came out of your body. However, the trick is that the ionizer in the water turns it that color, with or without your nasty kickers in it. You can turn it on without anyones feet in the water and it will turn the same nasty brown just the same. People are spending hundreds of dollars on these retarded treatments, just to watch the water turn brown and think it is doing them some good.

What the scheming whores at IonCleanse and just about every other snake oil salesman out there don't want you to know is that the human body naturally and regularily cleanses and detoxifies itself, without any ridiculous "detox" diets. That's right - your body actually knows how to take care of itself, thanks to millions of years of evolutionary development. The British Dietetic Association, which represents 6,000 dieticians across Britain, has announced that there is no "potion or lotion" which could "magically" rid the body of chemicals. The BDA insists that there is no such toxic build-up, and branded the industry "pseudo scientific".

Dr Frankie Phillips, a spokesperson for the BDA, said: "The whole idea of detox is nonsense. The body is a well-developed system that has its own built-in mechanisms to detoxify and remove waste from top to toe. Skin, the gut and liver and kidneys are all chemically-controlled powerhouses that respond to signals in the form of, for example, hormones, to remove waste products – typically detoxifying the body constantly. There are no pills or specific drinks, patches or lotions that can do a magic job."

In other words, don't be one of the suckers that runs with the latest detox trend. A healthy, varied diet will give you all the cleansing youll ever need. By messing around with these "cleansing" diets, you could end up totally confusing your metabolism, and there's a good chance that your body will begin to store almost everything you eat as fat as a method of emergency body protection.