The 16 Dumbest Diets In History
Many fad diets seem to center around the idea that food is too delicious, so the best way to lose weight is to eat gross things.
Published 5 months ago in Facepalm
Humans have spent their entire history trying to find methods to cheat their way into losing weight. While we seem to have figured out some pretty useful ones today, there have been many that haven’t stood the test of time. Many fad diets seem to center around the idea that food is too delicious, so the best way to lose weight is to eat gross things.
These fad diets span almost the entirety of recorded history, from Ancient Rome to modern TikTok. It seems like in those thousands of years, not much has changed. Some people just don’t want to exercise or make healthy choices. They want to follow a magical regimen created by a crazy guy who probably dropped out of school.
Pop a few cotton balls in your mouth and check out this list of 16 of the dumbest diets in history. Seriously, don’t try any of these. Just have a salad instead.
1
The Vision Diet
Created by a Japanese inventor in the 2000s, the Vision Diet involves wearing blue-tinted glasses to make your food look less appetizing, thus stopping you from overeating. Apparently, scientific research says red and yellow foods are the most appealing, with blue being less delicious looking. I guess scientific research has never heard of blue raspberry flavor.
2
The Baby Food Diet
One internet fad diet that stands above the rest is the baby food diet, which is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of eating normal food, you eat 16 jars of baby food a day. Experts say it won’t help you lose weight, and you’ll experience near-constant stomach cramps and diarrhea. I feel like it’s obvious– take one look at a baby and tell me that’s the body type you want.
3
Tapeworm Diet
The early 1900s had the tapeworm diet, where people would purposely swallow tapeworms in order to lose weight. Sure, you might lose weight from having a disgusting parasite inside you, but you’ll also suffer from anaphylaxis, vomiting, damaged vision, or even death. Not to mention the knowledge that a gross worm is wriggling around inside you.
4
The Werewolf Diet
This diet has you limit your eating based on the cycles of the moon. Based on what phase the moon is in, your eating options and window are modified. For example, during a full moon, you’re supposed to fast and drink only juice for a 24-hour period. That’s pretty much the opposite of what a werewolf does.
5
Arsenic Diet Pills
This diet from the Victorian era was one of the deadlier fad diets to ever exist. These “miracle cures” claimed to “speed up the metabolism”, but they contained small amounts of arsenic, an incredibly dangerous and poisonous element. I guess you would be pretty skinny as a withered skeleton.
6
Sleeping Beauty Diet
Going to bed hungry stinks. Well, what if I told you that in 1976, there was a whole fad diet built around it? The sleeping beauty diet involved being sedated for several days. When you’re asleep you don’t eat and when you don’t eat you don’t gain weight. As you can imagine, sedatives are not the safest of substances to mess around with, so this diet was not the smartest.
7
Activated Charcoal
Celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Gwyneth Paltrow swear by the properties of activated charcoal as a food additive, claiming it binds to toxins inside the body and flushes them from your system. Nutritionists agree that charcoal does do this, but clarify that food is not a toxin.
8
Reach for a Lucky
Another diet that may have worked to lose weight but incurred undesirable consequences was Lucky Strike’s “Reach for a Lucky” ad campaign in 1929. They encouraged customers to “reach for a lucky instead of a sweet” to lose weight. Because cigarettes are so much healthier than candy.
9
Fletcherism
An American named Horace Fletcher created a diet in the early 1900s called Fletcherism. It prescribed chewing food until you’d extracted all the “goodness” and then spitting out the remaining mass. There were specific guidelines on how long to chew: a shallot had to be chewed 700 times. Fletcher reportedly carried around a sample of his own feces to show how weird it was.
10
The Cabbage and Urine Diet
Cato the Elder was an Ancient Roman statesman who invented a diet in 175 BC that entailed exactly what it sounds like. Cato believed that cabbage could cure a wide range of ailments from dysentery to warts to even drunkenness. He thought cabbage was so potent that you could receive positive effects even from drinking the urine of somebody who had eaten cabbage.
11
Rubber
During the Industrial Revolution, people used rubber to try and lose weight. No, not by eating it, though with some of the other stuff on this list I wouldn’t be surprised. Rubber underwear and corsets were worn to try and shed pounds, the rationale being that it would hold fat in and induce sweating, which would help promote weight loss. This fad was curbed by World War I needing rubber for the war effort.
12
Dinitrophenol
During World War I, it was noticed that many of the workers in munitions factories in France were losing weight very quickly after being exposed to Dinitrophenol, or DNP, an ingredient in artillery shells. After some testing where a few individuals died, DNP was marketed and sold as a weight loss supplement. It blinded or caused cataracts in over 100 users. The explosive chemical has since been outlawed.
13
Cotton balls
A 2013 fad diet that was originated by models and then took hold online. It involves dipping cotton balls in liquids like lemonade or smoothies and then eating them. The rationale is that the cotton ball will cause a feeling of fullness in your stomach while not providing those evil nutrients that help your body run. This diet can unsurprisingly lead to intestinal blockages and malnutrition.
14
Move Away From the Swamp
Writer Thomas Short made the observation in 1727 that overweight people often lived near swamps. Thus, the logical way to lose weight was to move further away from whatever swamp you might be near. He outlined all this in a treatise called “The Causes and Effects of Corpulence”. Good thinking, Thomas. It definitely has nothing to do with food.
15
The White Wine & Egg Diet
This diet involves drinking a bottle of wine for breakfast, along with copious amounts of eggs. The other components of the diet are grilled steak and coffee. It was first created in 1962, and medical experts have advised against it ever since. One woman who tried it said that it made her “feel like the sludge at the bottom of a compost bin.”
16
Byron’s Vinegar
Nowadays, many celebrities are proponents of fad diets involving vinegar, especially apple cider vinegar. This fad diet has roots all the way back in the early 1800s, with Romantic poet Lord Byron. He popularized a diet that involved drinking vinegar and eating potatoes soaked in it. Side effects included vomiting and diarrhea. Not too pleasant.
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