The Most Mental Diets
If, like me, you tend to roll your eyes at the January deluge of detox, diet and fitness features that promise to be the one and only regime that will work (apart from the one they mentioned last week) then gird yourself, for more insanity is heading your way. Or are you a serial dieter? Done the cabbage soup diet? The grapefruit one? Intermittent fasting? Then castigate yourself, for these are truly tame compared to some of the insane things people have been prepared to do to lose weight. Because going to certifiably extreme lengths is of course a lot easier than just eating less and exercising more, no? (Clue: no, it’s really not). Here are five of the more bonkers diets, from the familiar to the downright deranged.
‘Congratulations. You’re blood type A+. You get to have poached salmon for lunch.’
The blood type diet
The Eat Right for your Blood Type book series was big a few years ago. But if you stop to think about it for more than a nano-second, then you will realise that it’s just eye-rollingly silly. It is basically horoscopes with a thin veneer of science you could scrape off with a baby’s fingernail. The idea that your blood type, shared by probably 40% of the population if you are O positive, dictates what food you should eat is just… well, come on people. Still got the book? Charity shop, please, and buy a copy of Bad Science while you are at it.
Would you really want this inside your intestines if it aided you going down a jeans size?
The tapeworm diet
Then again, at least avoiding grains or whatever you are supposed to do on the previous diet is unlikely to result in a hospital trip. Deliberately inserting a parasite into your body to shed inches from your jeans size may one day be used as proof that the human race collectively lost the plot. Around the turn of the century you could buy them in the form of a pill – rumour has it that some jockeys still use them. The kicker? They aren’t even proven to help you lose weight.
‘OMG I’m so depressed because I have water wrinkles and a caffeine migrane’
The OMG diet
A new discovery to your correspondent, this apparently consists of taking cold baths and drinking a lot of coffee. So basically, get yourself totally wired on caffeine and then plunge yourself into ice. Not sure whether the worst aspect of this is the potential health damage or the name. I propose the next future fad diet should consist of eating only banana skins, falling over a lot and should be called the LOL diet.
Maybe they call it the ‘last supper’ because the food was so awful they never did it again
The Halleujah diet
Discovering this actually made my day, so I can’t be mean about it. I’ll just quote from the site: “The Hallelujah Diet is based on the physical nourishment as intended from our Provider in Genesis 1:29.” Where can you even begin with that? Other than pointing out that it brilliantly overlooks the fact that eight chapters later, God changes his mind.
‘What do you mean we can’t have truffle oil macaroni cheese for dinner? I’ve been looking forward to it all week’
The Paleo diet
Another current fab, participants in this diet to my mind actually just lack commitment. Don’t eat anything that wasn’t around in Paleolithic era? Fine, ditch the bread (yeast is a no-no) and trans-fats. However, if you are going to do this properly, then you really ought to foreswear modern technology and start using stone tools and grunting at your friends. Plus, according to all the latest research (oh ok, Wikipedia) they didn’t even have FIRE for most of the Paleolithic era. So you’ll need to eat that meat raw. And live in a cave. As for the fact that there is an iPhone app for the Paleolithic diet? Satire is really redundant.