What Is The Most Ridiculous Diet Of All Time?
A fun list of the 25 most ridiculous diets of all time. The tapeworm diet appears, of course, but the baby food diet does not. Egregious oversight! My favorite one on the list is number twelve:
The Weight Loss Cure They Don’t Want You to Know About: This diet gives the tapeworm a run for its money. Why? The weight loss “cure” consists of nothing more than ingesting the urine of pregnant women. Whether this is effective or not really doesn’t matter-there is absolutely, positively, a better way to lose weight than injecting yourself with pee.
Bleh.
The most ridiculous diet I was ever on was this diet involving pickled beets, string beans, and vanilla ice milk. My mother used to put me on it every so often. I do still enjoy all of those foods, but somehow, the diet never seemed to work as a long-term weight-control plan. Imagine that.
So, on this feel good Friday, let’s laugh at stupid diets. What’s the most ridiculous diet you’ve ever been on? And what’s your favorite diet from this list?
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Feel Good Friday, Personal, Question, Weight Loss
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Eww! I’d rather stay fat than drink anyone’s urine… ever.
Oh, I was on an all-vegan diet called EAT TO LIVE once and though it does work it’s so ridiculous to think I was capable of eating only plants for the rest of my life.
So, okay, they’re publishing a list of the stupidest things people have done to lose weight, they’re bashing long term calorie restriction, but they still have the tone that says there’s an effective way out there. When are they going to publish the list of effective weight loss methods? That’s what people want to know. You don’t try ingesting tapeworms or urine until they’ve done just about everything else.
Worst diet I’ve ever been on: The one I’m on right now, morning sickness. I’ve never really dieted, so this is really killing me. I’m not used to the idea that I shouldn’t eat. I hate losing meals at a time when I can’t resist the need to vomit anymore. I can’t wait for this to be gone.
Maybe this is totally pedestrian, but Slim Fast.
I had a major maxillofacial surgery when I was in high school to resolve some nightmare-ish orthodontic issues, and my jaws were wired shut for about 6 weeks. It took another three weeks for my mouth to open again. So I was on pureed food and liquids for 10 weeks.
The surgeon got really upset that I lost so much weight, but there wasn’t much I could do.
Why I ever thought a liquid diet was a permanent way to manage my weight, I’ll never know.
Stupid SlimFast.
One of my local news channels always showcases a stupid diet. One time, there was a fruit diet that I considered trying which you did for a week. Mornings and afternoons you ate an apple and drank water. For dinner, you had a very small meal, usually salad and a lean piece of meat. Snacks were fruit and/or water. This diet guaranteed 7lbs of weight loss by the end of the week.
But then after hearing many people say that they developed horrible headaches after going on it, I decided to chuck it. Also, a diet of just fruit, water, and vegetables would do horrible things to my anemia—this fat girl NEEDS red meat and protein in her body to stay healthy, thank you.
The local hospital/clinic is pushing this new liquid diet now. A friend of a friend was on it, and now a bunch of my husband’s co-workers. They literally eat no solid food for at least 8 weeks, instead eating only this one protein shake prescribed by doctors.
If it’s doctor approved, it must be safe! Right?
What further blows my mind is that they’re pushing it on people who just aren’t that fat. I figured the extreme stuff was only recommended for the people 400+ pounds, but apparently anything above 270 is fair game.
The stupidest diet I was on was the “pretend you are trying to detox but really you’re on a liquid fast to lose weight” diet. Um, it wasn’t called that.
It involved drinking some nasty (expensive) stuff and sometimes mixing in some nasty (expensive) powdered syllium (sp?) husks and pretending it wasn’t the grossest stuff I’d ever chugged down (thankfully I don’t throw up easily). I can’t remember how long you’re supposed to “detox” but I lasted at least a few days on nothing but that stuff.
Mmmm, also did the Master Cleanse thing which is lemon and cayenne pepper and maple syryp. Also supposed to be a “detox”. Also followed by people who are pretending they are detoxing but are really hoping to lose weight (and yes, I’m sure there are people out there who really do it to “detox”, I’m sure).
Ach, DH and I did the Master Cleanse thing as well and made the not-inconsiderable mistake of trying to drive a longish distance on the second day of not eating anything but Lemon-Pepper-Maple nastiness. Needless to say, after DH almost wrecked the car thanks to low blood sugar, we stopped.
Ah, the soup diet.
My parents did this occassionally, and encouraged me to hop on board with them. All the tomato-cabbage-vegetable soup you could want. And some kind of wierd relationship with bananas.
I have had a passionate loathing for tomato my entire life. So even if I’d wanted to diet, this wouldn’t have been the one for me.
Double-posting to add: sure, Karen, morning sickness sucks. But I think you’re losing sight of the big picture here- and the golden opportunity to sell your pee to the highest bidder.
Mrs.millur, and boy do I have lots of it! Now taking bids! Anyone? Anyone at all? Well, I never liked those little cups anyway.
I don’t see a link to the list?
I haven’t dieted much, but the most ridiculous diet I’ve been on was one where you had to eat these measured servings of these very specific foods in a certain order, because the foods were supposed to react with each other in your digestive system to magically produce weight loss. My mom’s friend swore it worked! I think you were supposed to follow the diet for 3 days, eat normally for two days and then follow it again for 2 days or something like that, and it was supposed to make you lose 10 pounds a week. It involved a lot of canned tuna and raw cauliflower. I only lasted a week because I hate canned tuna, and I didn’t lose any weight.
Back in the day, I knew a bunch of eating disordered girls who would cut up sea sponges into little pieces and put it in sugar free jello to eat. They experienced the sensation of feeling full, seconded by the sensation of bowel obstruction.
That was the truly dumbest thing I ever heard.
Fat Stylist, OMG, I did Eat to Live a few years ago! Oh MAN–that was the scariest 4 months of my life, and also when I realized my body clearly WANTS and NEEDS to be fat. Because I was eating LOADS of just produce, and I only lost, like, 15 pounds back then, over 4 months. Starvation, anyone?
I, a normally very sunshiny person, noticed there was something bad happening to me (besides doing something that was NOT fun at all)–apparently, completely omitting animal proteins from your diet can cause depression. Even though I was eating heaps of soy.
So, yeah, Eat to Live? BOO-URNS.
The Ornish plan was a killer. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, unless you don’t have access to a wide variety of whole grains and fresh produce. Guess what I didn’t have access to. (Still don’t.)
I have to say, morning sickness still tops out as the worst way I’ve ever lost weight. I can deal with a lot of things, but nausea is my Achilles heel. To this day, I still have trouble with the smell of cooking eggs. Being too poor to afford to eat more than once a day is a close second, though. At least there’s no vomiting.
OMG, I was on that string bean, pickled beet, vanilla ice milk diet!!!! and my mom was the one that put me on it. I was remembering it just yesterday, but had forgotten about the ice milk part. So weird.
The other diet I was on was called “spend the summer trying to get skinny with your best friend.” This involved my friend and I staying at her aunt’s house for two months as a kind of make-shift weight loss camp, and we tried to eat only a single slice of cantelope a day. I probably needed to lose about six pounds at the time.
Let me count them….
1. Bahamian diet–powered junk that you put in fruit juice–BLECH! To this day, I still can’t drink orange juice!
2. The hard boiled egg diet. I quit after just one day it was so heinous!
3. Eat to Live–been there and done that one too.
I’m still livid that the South Beach Diet is listed. But that’s an entirely separate rant.
The worst “diet” I’ve ever been on? It would be a toss-up between the cabbage soup diet or the grapefruit/banana/egg diet (3 of each everyday and nothing else).
The ones that made me feel the worst were South Beach and Eat to live. South Beach gave me horrendous stomach cramps and messed up my er… evacuations…and it took my body several months to get back to normal. I was already vegan when I started Eat to Live so the lack of animal products didn’t bother me at all, but the lack of fat made me feel awful, tired and cranky all the time. When I started cooking with olive oil and allowing myself to eat avocados again, I almost instantly felt better.
The silliest though has to be these fiber ‘shakes’ my doctor put me on. It was like pouring sawdust into water and I was supposed to drink it like 4 times a day. It was revolting.
My worst one was nothing as exciting as most that are listed here — Jenny Craig. Worst. Food. Ever. The stuff tasted like crap and was way too expensive, plus it didn’t help me lose weight. Yeah, THAT was a huge waste of money, but luckily I didn’t do it for too long before I came to my senses.
Back when I was in college, the big diet trend was the “American Heart Association 3 Day Diet” which of course was not created or endorsed by the AHA and likely never had anything to do with the AHA. This was pre-Internet, so everyone was passing around faded photocopies of the thing, which said that if you followed it EXACTLY you’d lose 10 pounds in 3 days due to some unexplained chemical reaction between these foods. Gave it a half-hearted try once but couldn’t deal with the “no seasonings” policy. I had a roommate who swore by it, though–even though she never lost any significant amount of weight with it.
Ooh it would have to be tie between Slim Fast (not the best choice given my lactose interolance :) ) and the pizza and diet soda..I kid you not, I was 14 and the doctor basically advised me to eat 1 sicilian slice and a can of diet soda for lunch and dinner everyday…WTF…That lasted about 2 weeks…to this day I can’t stand the taste of diet coke….
Cabbage soup diet! The soup part is fine but the “eat this food on day one, and this food on day two” get to be a real PITA!
The only detox I have ever done is one that eliminates possible allergic reactions or toxins, while on a vegan diet. Eliminate processed sugars, wheat products, alcohol, and caffiene. Take fiber and herbal supplements designed to cleanse the colon and maximize liver function.
While it is hard for me to give up my meat, I do it twice a year, for about a week each time. You can by the fiber and herbal stuff at any drug store and the restrictions are not all that insane for short periods of time.
The people who came up with it make it very clear that it is not a diet, nor a weight loss plan. And that it should not be done for more than a week at a time, no more than 2x per year.
My husband and I went on The South Beach Diet about 5 years ago. We didn’t lose any weight, and it made us both irritable and depressed. My husband (who is a baker by hobby!!!) would just stand and stare longingly at the bread in the bread aisle whenever we went grocery shopping.
Fat Stylist, I hope you didn’t mean that as an insult to vegetarians. I tried to do the “Eat to Live” diet. I couldn’t do it. I eat plant foods all the time. Dr. Fuhrman recommends a meal size salad for lunch. I got sick of salads very fast. The rest of my family is sick of salads. He only allows one serving of complex carbohydrates a day.
Even his height weight equation is suspect. For women, he allows 95 for five feet and 4 pounds for each inch. To weight that little, I would need to lose muscle, bone and other internal organs. Osteoporosis anyone?
By the way, not all vegetarians are thin. We come in all shapes. We tend to eat healthier because most of us became vegetarian or vegan for health reasons. Most people I know that are vegetarian don’t allowed artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners in their diets.
I guess his is most ridiculous diet that I tried. I couldn’t live off of salad and beans. I love green vegetables, but there comes a point when enough is enough.
1. Cabbage soup diet. Supposedly endoresed by Johns Hopkins Med. School (it was not). I never made it past the “bananas and milk” day, which was, I believe, Day 5 out of 13.
2. Hollywood Diet. Each day, you ate weird crap, which supposedly mixed in your stomach and caused a Magic Weight Loss Reaction. My roommates and I all tried it. During finals. Not good. I remember beets, cauliflower, a hot dog, 1/2 c of vanilla ice cream, and more beets. I hate beets.
3. The Three Day Dumb Ass Diet (not its real name). Three hardboiled eggs, three prunes and four oz. of cooked beef (no salt or seasonings). Nothing to drink except water. My one roommate quit after the first day, and lost no weight. I quit after the second day, and lost no weight. My other roommate quit on the third day, and lost some water weight (she was a big diet soda consumer and not a big fan of drinking water), which she gained back by the weekend.
I meant to post about it last night but didn’t get around to it. Yesterday I found this FABULOUS NEW DIET on Yahoo while I was checking my email. This FABULOUS NEW DIET involves a mathematical formula and some scientific mumbo jumbo about food densities and calories, and in the end, they recommend you *gasp* eat fruits and veggies and lean meats. People were FREAKING OUT because this FABULOUS NEW DIET sounded so EASY and EXCITING!
Worst diet I was ever on is the one I’m on now. It’s called near-poverty. heh An Easy Mac/Ramen and oatmeal diet is really, really not something I’d recommend.
I read about the FABULOUS NEW DIET too. It’s callec Volumetrics. Just a fancy name for the same crap everyone’s been spouting for years.
That beets and vanilla ice cream thing reminded me of this diet I was on back in high school. It was called the 3-day diet or something. It also involved other food like plain tuna and hot dogs, along with the beets and vanilla ice cream. Ugh!
That ties with Diet Center. I did that one summer with my sister when I was in college – you couldn’t have any kind of bread, and the only fruit you could have was bananas and oranges – and you had to start every morning out with a cup of hot water and lemon. I remember some of the horrid recipes they gave us like “French Toast” made with Wasa crackers. *gag*
Back when I was in college, the big diet trend was the “American Heart Association 3 Day Diet” … if you followed it EXACTLY you’d lose 10 pounds in 3 days due to some unexplained chemical reaction between these foods.
That’s the diet I mentioned above! The one with the canned tuna and raw cauliflower. I couldn’t remember what it was called. And yeah, I had a photocopy of the sheet too, heh.
Wasa-cracker “French Toast” is making me laugh out loud at its sheer…incompatibility? Just…there is nothing you can do to item A to make it at all like item B, you know?
Anyway, I recall some variant of the very suspicious “Some Heart Association Or Other” diet that my mom and I attempted when I was in junior high. It lasted a week, different foods on different days…one day it was browned ground beef, with veggies. The next, browned ground beef with veggies AND one-half baked potato, which I looked forward to with psychotic desperation. And then the third day was, inexplicably, bananas and skim milk. Just that, all damn day. I don’t know what days 4-7 were because this was as far as I lasted, heh.
Other clueless attempts of my own devising would have to include the “Nothing but Rice Cakes and Frozen Grapes” diet, a long stretch where I was pounding the Canfield’s Diet Chocolate Soda (bleaarrgh), and the “SlimFast/SlimFast/SlimFast/total-breakdown-Zarro’s-salt-bagel-with-butter” diet. Oy.
I forgot the Stewardess Diet. It ran for four days and supposedly, you could lose 10 pounds or more. It wasn’t wacky, just really bland and portion controlled. Broiled skinless chicken (3-4 oz.), string beans, broiled lean beef, lettuce and tomato “salad”, apples. No bread. Tea and coffee were ok, but I don’t think milk was allowed. Basically, low fat, low calorie, no sugar, low carbs. Boring boring boring. I did it in high school (one of my mom’s friends gave her a photocopy) and the longest I ever lasted was three days. I was also running about seven miles a day. I did lose weight on it (not ten pounds, though). And I was just very, very hungry for those three days.
I’m just kind of amused (in a sad way) by the name. Because it says so much about the whole diet culture.
I’ve never really gone on a diet, short of a couple weeks on the Richard Simmons Deal-a-Meal which isn’t really all that horrible and is exactly like the diabetic exchange diet.
But.. I wanna know where they get the pee?
The worst for me was Kay Sheppard’s plan. You had to eat a specific amount of grains, veggies/fruits, and lean protein – over all, not some horrid idea but you had to eat it all, full or not. If not, then you weren’t “abstinent”. Seasonings had to be measured, certain fruit wasn’t allowed, you had to eat by the clock, etc… I remember making myself feel sick several times because the amount of food required at a sitting. I quickly realized how dumb the whole thing was and left it. And that whole experience did teach me that I was not having a normal relationship with food (ya think?!).
I bought these granules from a tabloid ad once – supposedly from China. You sprinkle them on your food or mix them with water and take it with the food. It’s supposed to make the food pass through undigested (uh – like that’s a good thing.) By the second day I’d forgotten and mixed the granules in water and left it overnight…they had turned the water into a semi-solid, gelatinous mass. By day four of waking at the same time with a hard knot in my abdomen (you could feel it from the outside) that hurt like hell and ending up in pain on the toilet for a while, I figured out that it was the granules. Back to 1000 calories a day and working out. I weighed about 130 lbs.
The worst diet I was ever on? I went on a diet in the 70’s (ouch) where I had to test my urine for keytones (sic) every morning. I lost 12 pounds, was sick for 8 weeks with walking pneumonia. My husband tried desperately not to say “I told you so” … he was a medic. I actually lost the most weight when he was in Korea and I ‘batch’d it for a year. I ran every day (stress reducer) and was down to 135 when he came back. He came back weighing 185 (he left at 225). I ate everything and ran every day.
Hint: I tried this recently and can assure you that THINKING about running every day you lose … NOTHING (sigh).
Annie McPhee – that’s terrible!!
I think the goofiest diet I was ever on was the ‘chopstick diet’. I assumed that if I ate everything with chopsticks, I would slow down, etc. etc., bla bla bla. I actually just got really good at eating with chopsticks, which also makes this the only diet I ever went on that yielded a good result. Pounds lost: 0
The saddest, sorriest diet was the one where you are supposed to ‘make every meal a feast.’ You’re supposed to use your best china, silverware, candles – – eat at the table, no book, no distractions and really OBSERVE that food intake. Horrible when you are single and living alone. I think I lasted one night. Pounds lost: 0
Most genuinely awful, distressing diet – as a little girl, I was counseled by some diet counselor to think of ‘bad foods,’ whenever I found myself craving one of them, as crawling with maggots, or made of spider eggs or human organs. Since I had a good imagination, this one stayed with me for years, and still sometimes pops up to bite me. Worse, from the diet counselor’s standpoint, it also applied to ‘good foods.’ I wouldn’t eat green grapes for about 5 years because I thought of them as green boobs.
How can you eat without a book or tv? Hehe – well, conversation works too, I guess, but I prefer to eat alone. And, er, good china doesn’t do it for me – I prefer my Corelle, thanks.
Someone above said that they were angry the South Beach diet was on the list, and I’m wondering why. I saw a documentary on a guy embarking on it and what with the complicated and weird stages, it sounded completely outlandish and absurd to me.
Hey, am I missing something? Is there supposed to be a link to the list?
I can’t see it…
What’s the most ridiculous diet you’ve ever been on?
Does Weight Watchers count?
Early eighties iteration of WW. Pay lots of money to be browbeaten in public, and to borrow a scale. (Also pay if you don’t go to meetings, sort of like Freudian therapy.) Weigh and measure everything, until you are completely obsessed with your food.
Mary, that last one’s horrible.
Becky – http://www.rncentral.com/nursing-library/careplans/25-of-the-most-ridiculous-and-ineffective-popular-diets
At the suggestion of my doctor I went on an “eating plan” to try and help me gain weight, as I have a digestive disorder that causes me to absorb way less calories than a normal person. Sounds great, but trust me, it isn’t.
Anyhow that plan was to eat absolutely NO grain at all. No wheat, rice, potatoes, etc. Also, no sugar, nothing processed, no artificial anything. All I could eat was this yogurt that I had to make myself, certain veggies, fruits, and uncured meat, and hard cheese. It required a tremendous amount of cooking, not to mention self-control.
I stay on it religiously for 4 months until I cracked and ate a ton of Easter candy. At this point I had gotten so thin, that I had to go to the hospital to receive nutrients and fluids. Awesome “eating plan”, huh?
The craziest one was a diet my mom was on when I was a kid. She got injection of pregnant horse’s urine and was not allowed to touch or eat fat or it would go through her pores! I swear!!!!!!
So many of these ‘diets’ sound like thinly veiled eating disorders. I put myself on one at the end of my junior year in high school that consisted of nothing but a cup of dry cheerios for lunch, and a bowl of campbell’s tomato soup and half a grapefruit for dinner. I lasted about a week (unbelievable to me now that I lasted that long on that little sustenance and virtually no protein) but had to give it up when I began fainting each time I stood up. And of course I gained back all the weight I’d lost the following week.
I think this is the list Mo was referring to:
http://www.rncentral.com/nursing-library/careplans/25-of-the-most-ridiculous-and-ineffective-popular-diets
Frankly, I was kind of disappointed. Aside from the tapeworm and the pee, I think a lot of the diets listed here are a LOT more colorfully terrible than the ones on the original list.
In my life, I’ve been put on a couple of really awful diets–both inflicted by my mother. When I was about 12 (back in the mid 1970’s), I stood 5’6″ weighed 135 pounds and my mother put me on the Herbalife Diet. This diet consisted of 4 cans of powdered stuff that was mixed in with water or diet soda and that, 4 times a day, was your entire caloric intake for the day. She kept me on that for several months and several trips to the hospital. (I’m T1 diabetic and it wrecked serious havoc with my blood sugars.) I lost no weight overall since every time I lost 5 pounds or so I’d end up back in the hospital where they fed me real food until my blood sugars stabilized again. About 5 years later, Mom apparently hadn’t learned anything from the great Herbalife experience and she put me on some goofy diet where I had to eat certain foods at certain times in certain amounts and some kind of magic was supposed to happen when you combined 2 cups of pickled beets, 1/2 a can of tuna and half a banana to make you lose weight. I lost a lot of weight on this one because all I have to do is look at a pickled beet and start vomiting.
how about the fat free diet?? loaded with calories…but no fat! sure to be a crowd pleaser…all the bread you want!!
Now that I think about it, since childhood I’ve been on quite a few diets – not one of them has worked.
I was put on these particular diets mostly by my mother, who has some major body issues herself. (She’s lost a huge amount of weight, but she’s still not happy with herself.)
With her, I’ve been on everything from a form of the Atkins diet, all the way to the incredibly dangerous Phen Fen (or however that’s spelled).
I’ve even been on the Slim Fast “diet” that a previous poster had talked about earlier in this thread, and it’s one of the many diets that have left me so freaking hungry I had no idea what to do except to eat something with the shakes!
As for the diet that I think is most idiotic, I’d have to say that pretty much all of them are – none of them are the “magical cure”. None.
I’ve even bought the subject up with my own mother. Whenever I bring up the fact that the diet industry pulls in over 2.4 billion dollars per year, she gets this blank stare like she doesn’t have any idea what I’m talking about. When the light bulb goes off, she gives me this tries to give me this head-buried-in-the-sand answers that absolutely make no sense.
Especially when I tell her about about how much her beloved Weight Watchers rakes in per year, she pretty much sits there and says that I’m full of b.s. (Which, I’m not.) I only tell her because I care. That, and I want her to be happy with her body.
Okay, enough ranting for now. Bye.
One year, my mother and I went on the grapefruit diet. You eat half a grapefruit for breakfast, a hard boiled egg and half a grape fruit for lunch, and a boneless skinless chicken breast and (you guessed it) half a grapefruit for dinner.
I lasted two days before freaking out and consuming an entire medium pizza while my mother was out with her friends. I tried desperately to hide the box and destroy all evidence, until she came home and confessed to eating an enchilada dinner at a Mexican place. We were both crazed with hunger!
I’ve done Weight Watchers. Yeah, you get totally obsessed with food, and it’s really expensive.
South Beach – I lasted about a week and a half, until one day I blanked out on the drive home from work and couldn’t remember what street to turn on to get to my house! Guess what? The brain needs carbs to function properly!
I dunno, I did really well with the South Beach diet – it was the thing that got me into eating real food, rather than processed crap. I ate a ton of fruit and veggies, so I wasn’t starved for carbs, and allowed myself whole-grain bread and red wine (both ok in the plan).
I’m doing a similar thing now, since being on South Beach was the healthiest-feeling time of my life. I think it’s all in how you approach it… if you use any diet as a way to yo-yo or get rid of your good carbohydrates and fats, that’s going to feel terrible.