Forget all the others, hormone diets claim to be the secret to fast, easy weight loss. But are they really just preying on our insecurities? Healthy or Hoax host Stacey Morrison finds out.

Can eating for your hormones help you lose weight?

When it comes to weight loss, everyone is looking for the silver bullet. Add in ageing and all of a sudden the tricks you used to lose a couple of kilos when you were 20 years old don't work anymore.

Could hormones be the key? Stacey Morrison finds out if hormone diets are healthy or just a hoax.

Kadambari Raghukumar, host of the RNZ podcast Here/Now, was sent a link to a diet marketed as a 'metabolic renewable programme' and thought she would give it a go.

"It sounds very attractive. I mean, how do you not click on that, right, 'metabolic renewal'? Renew is the most attractive word you can put out there," she says.

Raghukumar was asked a series of questions about her current weight, daily stress levels and how much exercise she does, with the end promise that she would find out how her hormones were working and then be given a diet that would kickstart her metabolism and help her lose weight.

Raghukumar was disappointed in the results, which labelled her a 'Hormone Type 1'.

"It said 'Hormone Type 1' is mixed signal hormones. But hang on a second, isn't everybody mixed signals at some point in their life? Your body's always throwing different things out to you. That just sounds a little too vague. I couldn't make much sense of it."

Raghukumar was told that this hormone type meant she could find it easy to lose weight and gain more energy.

"But it also told me certain things that I, to an extent, already had known," she says.

"It gave me the rundown as to how you can reduce cortisol levels, which is invariably related to stress and I found that quite, just really generic. It doesn't really take a test to know that about anybody's life really, the more stressed you are, the more likely you are to gain weight."

In the end, Raghukumar decided the diet wasn't worth it.

"I stopped before I could even get to the stage where I was going to subscribe to the programme.

"I just thought, 'do I have to sit here and watch an infomercial of this'? A man with a very glamorous name for a doctor talking to me in a very, very heavy American accent telling me what I can do to change my life? I couldn't really follow through with it."

Could a hormone diet work?…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details