WEIGHT LOSS

It’s amazing what people have done over the years to avoid just exercising and laying off the cheese puffs.

The history of humanity, or at least a few hundred years of it, is the inspiring story of our people trying to find ways of dropping pounds while avoiding better eating habits and exercise. “There just has to be an easy way that works for everyone!” we’ve told ourselves for generations, and even though we haven’t found it yet, we have never and likely will never stop searching.

In the early days of human history, staying fit was pretty easy. When you’ve got to hunt and gather all of your sustenance, the idea of working to lose weight was largely unheard of. However, as time went on and people had regular access to plentiful food sources, the necessity to balance intake and expenditure of calories arose. What follows are some of the most notable, outrageous, tragically ill-advised, and just plain weird ways we’ve tried to slim down without, you know, trying too hard.

DRAIN THE SWAMP

The theories behind weight gain have been as strange as the dieting methods themselves. One proposed by Dr. Thomas Short in his 1727 book, The Causes and Effects of Corpulence, was that obese people often lived near swamps. An odd leap in logic? You bet. But also deeply offensive to marshy guardian Swamp Thing, who we can all agree is pretty swole for a guy who lives off chlorophyll.

On the bright side, Short’s hypothesis lead to perhaps history’s simplest diet plan: Don’t live near a swamp.

DEPRIVATION CHIC

In the 1800s, people got less creative but more direct in their battle of the bulge. The prevailing wisdom was simply not to eat anything if you wanted to lose weight. Lord Byron became a diet icon of the period, weighing himself often and working hard to maintain a slim figure. At times this meant only consuming vinegar and potatoes, or perhaps soda water and biscuits. He also wore heavy clothing to promote excess sweating and would take laxatives frequently. It really throws his lovely work into a new light when you imagine how frequently the crafting of it must have been interrupted by bathroom breaks.

This fad became popular among men and women alike, depriving themselves of most nutrients and trying to subsist on as little as possible while maintaining the waifish look that had become trendy at the time.

LOW-CARB’S DEBUT

The first mention of an Atkins-like high-protein and carbohydrate-control diet actually dates back to 1863 in a Letter on Corpulence: Addressed to the Public by former undertaker William Banting. Dieting had become pretty popular at this point, but many people were relying on simply decreasing the amount of food they ate in their attempts to lose weight. Banting, obese yet unwilling to starve himself, cooked up his own plan. He advised eating mainly meat with the occasional glass of sherry, and completely eliminating potatoes, bread, milk, sugar, champagne, and beer. It worked for him—he managed to lose fifty pounds with this strategy, and he built a significant following. In fact, his pamphlet is still available online, and the term “banting” was used to mean “dieting” for over a century.

CHEW YOUR WAY SKINNY

When Horace Fletcher, a 19th-century American art dealer, was denied life insurance due to his weight he was struck with the idea for one of the strangest diet fads, later known as Fletcherism. The big secret? Just chew! No, no, chew a lot . . . okay, now keep chewing . . .

Before you wear out your jaw, you should know Fletcher advised chewing food one hundred times before swallowing. Even liquids. Somehow.

The way Fletcher saw it, you’d eat less because you’d run out of time to eat, and burn a bunch of jaw-exercise calories in the process. Fletcher became known as The Great Masticator, and roped in plenty of the time period’s luminaries like Upton Sinclair, Henry James, and John D. Rockefeller.

It got weirder. Fletcher claimed his program had benefits beyond just weight loss. He insisted, most notably, that followers of Fletcherism would need a bowel movement just twice a month and furthermore, that this bimonthly deposit would smell like warm biscuits.

Perhaps the most surprising element of Fletcherism? It may not be totally bogus. One study (with a small sample size that necessitates further study) suggests that he may have been on to something. Well, not the biscuit part. Obviously.

OH RIGHT, CALORIES

Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters introduced the concept of calorie counting in her book Diet & Health: With Key to the Calories. Her book was largely aimed at women, and revolved around the idea that dieting not only lead to a thin figure, which was by then very popular, but also better self-control, health, and well-being. In a shocking about-face in the history of dieting to this point, she based her calorie recommendations and formulas on actual research (alongside her own anecdotal results).

She tried to inspire women by insisting that this was even a patriotic duty. Her book was published during World War I, a time of rationing. Her argument was that every bite of food of which a woman deprived herself was another bite for her hungry children. To ease the pain of sticking it to Fritz via cookie deprivation, she also advised that women start “Watch Your Weight Anti-Kaiser Classes.”

PUFF THE MAGIC DIET

If women found they couldn’t stick with Peters’ plan, they were offered a far easier-to-follow diet secret by . . . cigarettes. Lucky Strike launched an advertising campaign in 1928 aimed specifically at women who were struggling to achieve whatever was deemed an “ideal figure” at the time.

Referencing the widely held belief that smoking would help one lose weight, they began to run the tagline, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Sweet.” The campaign was, heartbreakingly, very effective—and was thwarted only when the candy industry began to threaten litigation.

As a bonus fun fact, this catchy slogan was almost certainly inspired by “Reach for a Vegetable instead of a Sweet,” a tagline for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, an 1870s herb-and-alcohol-based tonic for menstrual pain, some variation of which is still sold to this day. Although with less alcohol (the Prohibition-era tonic was a bracing 40 proof), and no unicorn root at all.

GET A PARASITIC PAL

After observing that tapeworms are very good at stealing nutrients from their hosts, some folks theorized that maybe it would be good at taking away those unwanted pounds too. Tapeworms, if ingested, do indeed attach to the wall of your intestine and just sort of hang out, eating what you eat, for maybe your whole life.

Good deal right? Not so fast! First: Eww, gross. Second, and more important: Though they may well cause some appetite suppression or diarrhea, which could lead to weight loss, they are fairly small and not up to the task of absorbing a typical human’s daily caloric intake. So don’t expect big results.

Besides, while pills containing tapeworms were certainly advertised for the purpose of losing weight, it is not clear that these capsules actually contained any parasites. That sounds shocking, but consider the diet pills you’ve seen advertised in the last week and it’ll seem distinctly less nutty.

We’re sort of burying the lede here: This is a very dumb thing to do. While, yes, you can buy tapeworm pills in some parts of the world, it is extremely dangerous. You can’t be certain what kind of parasite you may be ingesting and some of these infections can be fatal.

This wasn’t advice we expected to offer in our very first published book, but here we are: Don’t eat tapeworms.

THE MIRACLE FRUIT

Have you ever wondered why all those people in ’80s movies are always eating grapefruits for breakfast? Sure, it could just be because they liked to eat grapefruit, but we refuse to believe that anybody on the planet really likes grapefruit, so that strikes us as profoundly unlikely.

Much more probable is that they were inspired by a fad diet that actually dates back to the 1930s. It originated among the stars of Hollywood and was based on a belief that grapefruits contain special enzymes that would help burn fat faster. When the diet was unfortunately resuscitated in the ’70s, it was often called The Mayo Clinic Diet, despite no connection whatsoever with Mayo Clinic. In hindsight, that should have been a pretty good tip-off of the plan’s bogusosity.

Variations of the diet ranged from eating half a grapefruit with every meal, to eating essentially only grapefruit with an occasional side of some sort of meat. Proponents claimed you could lose ten pounds in ten days. What an amazing result! (Psst: Did we mention that you also need to limit yourself to 800 calories a day?)

CABBAGE TAKE THE WHEEL

While the grapefruit diet lay dormant for a few decades, a new and possibly even less appealing plan took center stage in the 1950s: The cabbage soup diet. Instead of a grapefruit, you eat at least two bowls of cabbage soup a day—along with various fruits—vegetables, and meats for a week.

Each day involves a slight variation in what you can take in with the soup, just to keep things interesting. For example, on day four of the diet, you can eat six to eight bananas and all the skim milk you want in addition to your soup. Presumably, that would be followed up with pooping forever and ever.

The diet only lasts seven days and obviously has some drawbacks, including being very hungry and smelling like a fart collection that had been stored for a month in a gym teacher’s trunk. You will almost certainly slim down though . . . since you’re restricted to 800 to 1,000 calories a day.

ME GENERATION WANT COOKIE

Dr. Sanford Siegal introduced The Cookie Diet in 1975. We know, we were tempted to enroll based on the name alone, but maybe hold off for a paragraph or two.

Siegal was already working as a weight loss physician when he came up with a blend of amino acids that he thought would help keep his patients feeling full. He put them into a cookie that patients could eat six of (good for a total of around 500 calories) throughout the day followed by a 300 calorie “sensible dinner” (read: skinless chicken and vegetables). Though Siegal is no longer in the game, he spawned many copycats and you can now find health food stores littered with versions of the cookie diet, along with celebrities and athletes willing to endorse them.

If you do a little math in the last paragraph, you’ve probably figured out that cookie dieters are limited to 800 calories a day, a dangerous amount no matter how many cookies you get to eat.

MYSTERY MEAT

The Last Chance Diet was unveiled in 1976 by Dr. Roger Linn in a book by the same name. It was arguably the most dangerous plan we’ve covered yet (and that’s saying something). At its core was a proprietary drink of Linn’s own creation called Prolinn (get it?). Though he referred to it only as a “protein blend,” investigation of the liquid revealed that it was made out of hooves, bones, horns, hides, tendons, and other slaughterhouse byproducts.

Okay, that’s very gross and bad, but hey, you’ve probably eaten a hot dog, so let’s maybe simmer down a bit. No, the real problem was that dieters were restricted to 400 calories a day and Prolinn was essentially devoid of major nutrients and vitamins. The Last Chance Diet proved to have an eerily prophetic name. After around 60 of its adherents died suddenly while attempting the diet, it fell out of favor.

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE

No one takes calorie restriction to the extreme, though, like the Breatharians. A fad that originated in the 1980s, Breatharians believed that once you attain harmony with the universe, you only need air—no food, no water, just air.

Many have claimed that they have gone for extended periods of time without any actual sustenance, some up to seventy years. However, proving that on camera or in person has been . . . challenging. One advocate attempted to demonstrate it on 60 Minutes, but almost died of dehydration after four days.

Tragically, at least five people have died trying to follow Bretharian teachings, which are so obviously nonsensical we hope you don’t need us to walk you through it. The short version: Food good. Eat to live.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

Don’t get too smug, present-day readers; a lot of the strangest diets were still to come. Consider, for example Dr. Peter D’Adamo’s 1997 book The Blood Type Diet, which features eating plans for each blood type and . . . not a whole lot of science. The 2000s brought The Vision Diet, which advised dieters to don blue glasses so that food looked less appealing. You can even buy a seaweed soap on Amazon that makes you lose weight! (It does not.)

Here’s the skinny: Fad diets may work for a little while, but they’re almost never sustainable, and occasionally also pretty dangerous. If you want a surefire way to lose weight, make better food choices, get more exercise, and smoke as many cigarettes as you can get your hands on.

We’re kidding, obviously. A couple packs a day should be plenty.

Okay, Sydnee looks pretty mad at me at this point, so I’m going to stop the chapter here.