THE TAPEWORM DIET

And a few other odd ways people try to lose those extra pounds they’ve been lugging around.

NAME: The Original Grapefruit Diet

BACKGROUND: The granddaddy of modern fad diets, it was known as the Hollywood Diet when it first caught on back in the 1930s. How’d it work? Through the supposed fat-burning power of the enzymes in grapefruit.

DESCRIPTION: Breakfast was half a grapefruit and tea or coffee. Coffee drinking was encouraged, probably to pep up the food-deprived dieter, who was allowed very few calories—only 800 per day in some versions of the diet (the typical person eats about 2,000 calories per day). Every lunch and dinner started with half a grapefruit and ended with either coffee or tea. The rest of lunch might be two eggs, a tomato salad with vinegar and herbs (no oil), and a piece of melba toast. Dinner, after the grapefruit, might be six ounces of chicken or lean meat and half a head of lettuce with a tomato. The diet lasted for 12 days. Strangely, the rapid weight loss caused by the diet was attributed to the magic of grapefruit…rather than to the lack of food.

NAME: The Cabbage Soup Diet

BACKGROUND: The exact origin of this fad diet is unknown, but it became popular in the 1980s when it was passed around via fax machines (much like similar e-mail fads today).

DESCRIPTION: A seven-day diet (it’s so boring that seven days is probably all anyone could stand), it consists of homemade cabbage soup—as much of it as you like on any day of the diet. There are numerous recipes in circulation, but here’s the basic one: cabbage (and other fresh vegetables), canned tomatoes, onion soup mix, and V8 juice. On Day 1 you eat cabbage soup, plus any fruit except bananas. Day 2: same soup, vegetables (no bananas), baked potato with butter. Day 3: more soup, fruits, and vegetables (no potatoes, no bananas). Day 4: still more soup, as many as six bananas, fat-free milk. Well, you get the idea. The obvious drawback of the cabbage diet: flatulence.

NAME: The Caveman Diet

BACKGROUND: Also called the Stone Age Diet, the Paleolithic Diet, or the Hunter-Gatherer Diet. Proponents are a little vague about the actual time frame to which it refers, but the idea is that cavemen were thin and healthy from eating the animals and plants they hunted and gathered. So if we emulate their diet, we’ll avoid modern illnesses like heart disease and diabetes.

DESCRIPTION: Lean meats, eggs, and seafood are a big part of the Caveman Diet, as are raw fruits and vegetables (although you’re allowed to cook the vegetables). But you can’t have any grains (or grain products, like pasta), legumes, potatoes, dairy products, yeast, vinegar, sugar, or salt. Good news for Neanderthals: Some paleo diets allow diet soda, coffee, wine, and beer.

NAME: The Cookie Diet

BACKGROUND: In 1975, Dr. Sanford Siegal, a Florida author and “weight loss specialist,” introduced the Cookie Diet. Sounds yummy, right?

DESCRIPTION: You eat six of Dr. Siegal’s special cookies— “made under his personal supervision in his private bakery”—followed by a high-protein, low-carb dinner of six ounces of meat or fish and one cup of green vegetables. That’s it for the day, a total of about 800 calories. The cookies, with a “secret protein blend” that supposedly suppresses hunger, come in five flavors: chocolate, oatmeal raisin, coconut, blueberry, and banana. The Cookie Diet made big news when Madonna complained that while her husband Guy Ritchie was on the diet he lost interest in sex.

NAME: Tapeworm Diet Pills

BACKGROUND: This one almost lands in the urban legend category. But it’s true, and it goes back to the craze for quack diets between 1900 and 1920.

DESCRIPTION: The pills contained live tapeworms, which, according to the plan, would infest your gut (just as they do when dogs get them) and mess with your intestines, making you lose weight. There are a number of problems with this diet: Tapeworm infestation causes, among other things, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, flatulence, nausea…and pieces of worm passing through your system.

Funk legend George Clinton’s first job: foreman of a Hula Hoop factory.