Our list about some of the most idiotic diet trends arrives just in time for the first inklings of New Year’s resolutions.
Eating “right” and “healthier” – complemented with a gym or yoga studio membership – is near the top of the list for many. Dieting is often involved.
If you insist on bulking up on certain types of foods while completely ditching others, don’t bother with these farcical diets.
And go ahead and admit it now: You’re not going to stick to healthier eating anyway. By January 9 or so, you’ll be back to throwing down the worst crap ever.
Fletcherizing a.k.a. The Chewing Diet
Horace Fletcher, back in the early 1900s, claimed that the surefire way to lose weight is to chew every bite of food, at minimum 32 times, before spitting out the remaining gruel.
The nutrients, via the 32 chews, would be enough to keep a body functioning while the rest of the masticated food was simply fat-causing porridge.
There’s even an episode of the original The Bob Newhart Show in which Bob Newhart, who has probably never weighed more than 140 pounds in his entire life, references Fletcherizing. It remains the only cool thing about the crackpot idea.
The Lip Gloss Diet: “Huge Lips, Skinny Hips”
There’s a lip gloss on the market that claims to contain properties that curb hunger. Apply a bold and sexy gloss that contains Hoodia, a chemical-free appetite suppressant, lick your lips naturally, swallow per normal and ta-da! Minimal stomach rumbles.
Kate Moss is among the believers.
Pray Away the Weight
This insanity has been around for years and seems to date back to a 1957 book called Pray Your Weight Away by Charles W. Shedd.
Well-meaning people (read: scammers out to make a quick buck) go back to the Scripture, pull out inspirational passages and pair them with messages that say: It’s not because you drain 120 ounces of soda down the piehole every day, or the fact that you haven’t exercised in 15 years, but you’re fat because of a lack of spiritual nutrition that only the Lord can fill — after paying $14.99 plus shipping and handling.
We hear that the suckers who are into the prayer diet also have the book The Secret on their nightstands.
Cotton Ball Diet
Instead of eating rice or something else small and nutritional that then expands in your stomach and fills you up, some jack-knives say to eat cheap cotton balls. All natural cotton, the claim goes, is bubbling over with healthy calories and natural fibers so it’s basically food.
Guess what? It’s not.
Tapeworm Diet
Tell us if this makes any sense.
Someone scours the Internet to buy a tapeworm, enters a credit card number and hits the buy button. He receives the parasite in the mail, opens the box and promptly swallows the tapeworm. It’s not just an ordinary tapeworm; it’s one (beef tapeworm cysts, for instance) that fights fat.
Yeah, perpetual projectile puking will help one drop a couple of pounds, most definitely.
The ignorant started doing this back in the early 1900s. The “diet” has recently seized momentum thanks to the ease of purchasing parasites online.
Baby Food Diet
Instead of destroying tacos for lunch or even a salad for dinner, the footholds of this Internet-invented diet, allegedly spearheaded by celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson, require the eater to replace human food with baby chow.
The idea is that the portion-controlled meals – puréed peas, sweet potatoes and squash – will automatically contain fewer calories than whatever human option is available.
Why stop at baby food? If you’re going all in, might as well go full-on AB/DL (adult baby/diaper lover).
Monkey Chow Diet
Another e-oddball – this time, comedian Adam Scott – took to his blog in 2006 and proclaimed that he would only dine on pellets that are normally fed to lab and zoo monkeys. A good chunk of Scott’s fellow freaks, most likely living in the basement of a house that had been paid off by their parents, followed Scott’s animal-food epic.
Sleeping Beauty Diet
Are you without a job? A lover? A life? Are you also overweight, with a face cratering with baggy eyes? Then sleep for days upon days upon weeks! Even months!
Elvis Presley was apparently an enthusiast of the Sleeping Beauty Diet, which can include taking a sedative to aid in snoozing. Because when you’re asleep, you can’t eat. Double bonus!
If it’s done en masse, you also can’t have a life (and you most likely don’t have one if you’re into this poppycock).
The Cookie Diet
Here’s a diet that tells folks exactly what they want to hear: Just eat cookies and you’re on the successful path to incredible weight loss.
Or not.
In the 1970s, a physician named Dr. Sanford Siegal concocted “specially formulated cookies” that included an amino-acid cocktail to dissuade hunger. The really batshit part? Hundreds of physicians reportedly fell for it and scribbled out cookie-diet prescriptions to their patients.
The diet, which as far as we can tell has never been authenticated through scientific research (shocking), is still around.
The Leningrad Blockade Diet a.k.a. the Nazi Diet
Last year, Russian documentary filmmaker Alexander Siry formed a diet club inspired by the Siege of Leningrad in World War II.
The club told followers to consume the same menu plan – about 14 pieces of bread daily and 100 grams of vodka in the evenings – as the emaciated residents of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). More than 670,000 people died during the Nazis’ 900-day war maneuver, in which the Nazis cut off the city’s food supply.
This “diet.” Stop it.
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2016.
