People will go to all lengths to lose weight…even crazy ones. When you’re considering a diet this year, take heed to steer far, far away from these odd ones!
1. The Tapeworm Diet
Introduced in the early 1900s, dieters started swallowing tapeworms (usually in the form of a beef tapeworm cyst pill) in hopes that the parasite would eat all the food in the stomach and cause the person to lose weight. In recent news, an Iowa woman swallowed a parasitic worm that she bought off the internet in 2013 in order to drop a few pounds.
2. The Baby Food Diet
Created by celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson, and popular among other celebrities, the basis of the baby food diet is to replace two daily meals with jars of pureed baby food. The third meal of the day should be small and low-calorie. The diet lasts one week maximum and should consist of 600 daily calories. No wonder you’ll lose weight.
3. The Cotton Ball Diet
A scary trend among young girls recently has been deemed the “cotton ball diet” where cotton balls are dipped in liquids (such as juice and smoothies) and then consumed by the dozens, purportedly making the stomach feel full without gaining weight. This horrendous trend can cause digestive system blockages, dehydration, and damage to internal organs.
4. The Cookie Diet
Cookie diets come in all forms with different names attached (Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet, The Hollywood Cookie Diet, etc.), all promising weight loss by eating special “cookies.” Basically, you eat 500 calories of high-fiber weight loss cookies during the day, then your normal dinner for a total of 1,000 calories a day. Again, duh…you’re going to lose weight, but what happens when you get back to the real world?
5. Placenta Pills
Sound totally gross? It is. After giving birth, some celebrities and naturalists like Kourtney Kardashian have their placenta converted into solution form, pills, or silver-dollar-sized pieces for consumption. Supposedly the placenta is really good blended up in a smoothie. Why eat your own placenta? Some mothers and midwives believe the placenta aids in recovery and weight loss after birth.
6. The Vision Diet
A laughable diet really, the vision diet claims that if you eat all of your meals wearing blue-tinted glasses, everything you eat will look unappealing and you will eat less, or nothing at all.
7. Ear Stapling
Ear stapling involves surgery to place staples in the inner cartilage of your ear that stimulate supposed pressure points that control your appetite, similar to acupuncture. However, your body gets accustomed to the staples after a few weeks and the tactic becomes ineffective.
8. The “Nothing But…” Diets
Coming from Idaho, I love a good potato, but only eating potatoes all day for weight loss is a stretch for even me. “Nothing but…” diet fads come and go. The potato diet started when a farmer named Chris Voigt got tired of “potato-bashers” and decided to prove them wrong by going on an all-potato diet for 60 days. He lost over 20 pounds.
Some other notorious “nothing but” diets include the Twinkie Diet where people swear to have lost dozens of pounds by only eating Twinkies all day long. Then there is the Nothing But Chocolate diet which claims by eating nothing but chocolate for a few days, you’ll lose weight because your body loses interest in chocolate.
9. The Shangri-La Diet
Based on a book by the same name, the Shangri-La diet advocates consuming 1-3 tablespoons of sugar water and olive oil twice daily between meals to suppress appetite and trigger weight loss. Not too crazy amidst all these other wacky diets, I suppose.
10. The Sleep Diet
There’s surprising logic behind a diet that promotes sleeping through multiple meals a day. It makes sense that one might lose weight if they sleep through breakfast, lunch, and then have a light dinner. Genius.
That food pyramid is looking pretty sensible about now, isn’t it?
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