LOL! Crazy “Diet Plans”

In this post we explore the lighter side of dieting…as in, the one that gets you laughing (hey, anything to burn a few more calories, right?) at the wacky lengths people will go to in their effort to lose weight. Note: If your diet resembles the following five in any way, you may want to reconsider. You can always count on the healthy meals, exercise and healthy snacks diet plan…perhaps not the fastest way to lose weight, but definitely the healthiest. Here we go with five crazy diets that people have actually tried to use to lose weight (and why they don’t work…although some don’t need any explanation whatsoever):

Fletcherize! Followers of Horace Fletcher were instructed to chew, chew, chew, and then chew some more. In addition to chewing eat bite of food 32 times, followers of this wacky “diet” then had to tilt their heads back and allow the food to run down their throat. Anything too big to trickle down was supposed to be spat out. Why not Fletcherize? Well, it isn’t really a diet, unless dieting means wasting food and possibly alienating others from dining with you…ever again.

The Tapeworm Diet This crazy notion had people swallowing capsules containing tapeworms: parasites that live in your digestive system and consume anything that you do. A few problems with this diet: Having a worm living in your digestive system can wreak havoc on your entire digestive system, causing nausea, vomiting and other digestive unpleasantness. Tapeworm eggs can cause massive organ damage and even kill you. Oh, and there’s no proof that it ever actually worked for anyone; tapeworms were the dietary snake oil of the Victorian era.

The Cotton Ball Diet Proponents of this diet ate cotton balls, dry or dipped in gelatin. The idea was that they’d fill you up without causing any weight gain—cotton balls are, after all, free of calories, and give a heady dose of fiber as well. This could’ve been a great idea except that humans can’t digest the fiber in cotton balls, and regardless of any diet plan we’re on, we need to consume calories to survive.

The Vision Diet The idea behind this one was that wearing indigo-tinted glasses would make your food look disgusting, so you would eat less of it…right? Aside from not having any scientific basis whatsoever, this “diet” can harm your vision and, should you overcome the bluish hue your food would take on through them, actually not help in any way. Unless eyestrain is one of your diet goals.

The Sleeping Beauty Diet Elvis was actually a big proponent of this one but hey, Elvis was a big proponent of sedatives in general, so it really isn’t all that surprising. The idea was to sedate yourself so that you were sleeping most of the time…after all, you can’t eat when you’re asleep, right? Possible problems with this one include side effects from the sedatives, lack of participation in fun and healthy activities and, of course, lousy results. Most dieters who followed this trend just woke up extra-hungry and would, therefore, over-eat…which may be why Elvis is more famous for his incredible sandwich concoctions than the so-called “diet plan” he endorsed.

Laughing, by the way, burns about 1.3 calories a minute. LOL!

Filed Under Diet Q&A, Diet Tips, Healthy Snack Diet Plan, What's New 

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