Extreme Fad Diets Throughout the Decades

Angela Capanna One day, I was innocently and mindlessly scrolling through Instagram when a post startled me so badly that my jaw literally dropped. Someone posted a picture of an old diet from the 1970s. This diet mainly consisted of two things – eggs and white wine. Seriously. No joke. Even for breakfast. The personal chef in me wanted to scream “Nooooooooo!” at my phone, but luckily, I reined in that urge so my family didn’t think I was totally insane. Anyway, it got me thinking, what other crazy diets have peopled followed over the years? I did some research and rounded up the craziest, most extreme, and therefore, probably the unhealthiest diets.

Wine and Eggs Diet

White Wine Hard Boiled Eggs This diet was originally created by Helen Gurley Brown in 1962, but republished in Vogue magazine in 1977. The magazine promised a 5 pound weight loss if you faithfully follow this meal plan for 3 days. I like wine as much as the next person, but there is no way I could drink it all day long, especially first thing in the morning.

Breakfast

• 1 hard-boiled egg

• 1 glass white wine (dry, preferably Chablis)

• Black coffee

Lunch

• 2 eggs (ideally hard-boiled but poached if necessary)

• 2 glasses white wine

• Black coffee

Dinner

• 5-ounce steak (grilled with black pepper and lemon juice)

• Remainder of white wine (one bottle allowed per day)

• Black coffee

Grapefruit Diet

Also known as The Hollywood Diet, this plan originated back in the 1930s. This low-calorie diet claimed people could lose 10 pounds in 10-12 days. The original diet required people to eat half of a grapefruit (no, you can’t sprinkle or smother it with sugar) before or during each meal. In addition, dieters had to eliminate sugar and carbs (potatoes, rice, pasta); stay on the diet for twelve days, then stop for two days and repeat; eat a high protein, fat, and cholesterol diet; limit themselves to one cup of coffee a day; and as most experts recommend, drink 8 glasses of water a day. Although research has refuted the theory that grapefruit contains a fat-burning enzyme, a new version of the grapefruit diet is now trending, with the support of Dr. Oz. I’m happy to see this is a healthier, more balanced diet. You can read more about this here https://www.womansworld.com/posts/grapefruit-diet-139583

Cabbage Soup Diet

This diet first became popular in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s when models and flight attendants followed this diet to lose weight quickly before weight check-ins. So many things wrong with that sentence right there, but anyway… Dieters were promised a big weight loss, up to 10 to 15 pounds in 7 days. The catch? You need to eat cabbage soup, pretty much for every meal. Other food is allowed, but very limited and eating endless amounts of soup is encouraged. I had a friend try this years ago, and eating cabbage soup in the morning literally made her nauseous. She didn’t even make it through two days, and according to her, probably put on more weight because she binged the next few days after feeling so deprived. After all, websites consider this diet as a “whole food cleanse”.

Master Cleanse Lemonade

Lemonade Now we’ve gone from eating just soup to just drinking a lemon concoction. Yeah, that will be more satisfying. The drink contains lemon juice, maple syrup, water, and cayenne pepper. This liquid diet involved drinking 6-12 glasses a day! While this diet originated in the 1940s, Beyonce credited the Master Cleanse for her twenty-pound weight loss for the movie, Dreamgirls.

Other Extreme Methods

Oddly enough, some diets don’t focus on what you eat at all. For example, in the 1920s, Lucky Strike cigarette brand advertised “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Sweet!”, as a way to capitalize on nicotine’s appetite-suppressing quality. I literally couldn’t even believe this was real, I’m still shaking my head about this.

No Diet Pills In the mid-1950s, the Tapeworm Diet became popular. Need I say more? People would take parasite-packed pills. Rapid weight loss, yes. Extremely unhealthy and borderline dangerous? YES, YES!!

Remember Dexatrim? It was a popular diet pill that first hit shelves in 1979. It was a widely-used and effective appetite-suppressant…until the main ingredient, phenylpropanolamine (PPA), was linked to increased risk of stroke.

Workout Shoes While extreme, unhealthy diet trends continue to exist today (the promise of a quick, dramatic weight loss is just too enticing), I’m happy to see that majority of our society has moved away from this. Nowadays, we are continually encouraged to eat whole foods and stay away from processed foods. Whole 30, Paleo, Keto, Macro Counting, etc., all encourage the dieter to eat healthy, balanced meals with whole foods and are generally simple to make (or at least have fewer ingredients). It all comes down to taking in fewer calories than you burn – so maybe hitting the treadmill really is the way to go! 🙂