The keys to losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight are regular exercise and a balanced diet focused on moderation. Whether or not people know or understand this, they’ll always look for an easier solution.
Over the decades, humans have tried a wide array of strange and dangerous fad diets in an attempt to lose weight and feel slim. Some are less than ideal nutrient-wise, but others are fatal. We do not recommend trying any of these fad diets, especially those from the mid-20th century. From eating air to sustaining yourself on Jell-O, people will do crazy things to look thin.
1. The Eggs and Wine Diet
We love eggs and we love wine, but they don’t exactly go hand in hand. This weird diet from the ’60s has made a comeback for reasons that puzzle us. To follow this diet, people ate up to five eggs a day and a bottle of wine occasionally with a piece of steak. The lack of nutrients and high alcohol consumption make this an extremely dangerous diet.
2. The Hot Dog Diet
The hot dog diet was around in the ’70s and was pretty simple. Followers ate one or two hot dogs for each meal and almost nothing else. This low-calorie diet is almost completely devoid of nutrients. It results in unsustainable weight loss. You’re not even supposed to have a bun!
3. The Cabbage Soup Diet
This sad diet is just as bland as it sounds. It’s a crash diet where you eat mostly cabbage and cabbage soup for seven days. Fans of the diet say you can lose as much as 10 pounds in one week. Most gain the weight back immediately after, and the lack of nutrients can cause muscle loss and other issues. It’s simply not a sustainable or healthy way to lose weight.
4. The Grapefruit Diet
Contrary to what many assume, you can eat much more than grapefruit on this diet, but you eat grapefruit at every meal for 12 days. Supposedly, grapefruit has fat-burning enzymes, but there is no evidence to support this. Like many other fad diets, the weight loss is unsustainable, and grapefruit can cause issues with certain medications.
5. Drinking Man’s Diet
The Drinking Man’s Diet is a relatively simple, low-carb diet with an enticing name. It basically dictates that you can eat whatever you want as long as you avoid large amounts of calories. This diet gives you permission to gorge on things like steak, vegetables, whisky, vodka, and pork. Low-carb diets can help you lose weight, but replacing carbs with red meat, fat, and alcohol is awful for your heart and health in general.
6. The Carnivore Diet
This diet is exactly what it sounds like; you become a complete carnivore. People following this diet sustain themselves on meat alone, including seafood. You can also eat heavy cream and hard cheese. This diet is like a targeted attack on your heart, filling your body with saturated fat while eliminating other essential nutrients.
7. Kellogg’s Grape-Nuts Diet
John Harvey Kellogg was the physician who invented the Kellogg cereal brand. He ran a sanitarium where he fed patients Grape-Nuts almost exclusively. According to him, a bland and easily digestible diet was the key to good health. This was just one of his many misguided beliefs, and eating tasteless Grape-Nuts and nothing else is bad for your body and depressing.
8. The 3-Way Diet Program
The 3-way or 3-phase diet isn’t particularly bad for you, but it’s ineffective for most people. This fad diet involves eating food categories in a certain order, starting with the healthiest and ending with the least healthy items. The diet can be beneficial, but the lack of restriction can cause weight gain.
9. The Zone Diet
This fad diet emphasizes decreasing carbohydrates and increasing protein consumption. Sounds familiar, right? So many fad diets involve ditching carbs, but we love carbs! This diet can be an effective weight loss strategy, but it leads to kidney issues, among other health problems.
10. Sugar Busters Diet
The Sugar Busters diet eliminates refined carbs like refined sugar, white flour, and white rice. It also rejects natural carbohydrates like potatoes and carrots. The diet doesn’t sound awful, but its lack of scientific support and its restriction of nutrient-rich foods is problematic. It is also criticized for being toted as an indefinite diet, which can cause long-term health issues.
11. South Beach Diet
The South Beach diet is one of the most popular diets from the ’90s, but its aggressive moral associations with certain foods are unhealthy. It labels all food as good or bad, neglecting the importance of moderation and diverse nutrients. For example, it restricts many foods high in calcium, which lessens bone health.
12. The Sexy Pineapple Diet
This funny-sounding diet promises rapid weight loss. Followers eat nothing but pineapple and pineapple juice two days a week and eat normally the other five days. The diet can put you in a calorie deficit, making you lose weight. It can also spike your sugar intake and deprive you of essential nutrients, leading to hunger, nausea, headaches, and other side effects.
13. Inuit Diet
While following the Mediterranean diet can be healthy, the Inuit diet is not as beneficial as people once thought. The traditional Inuit diet involves a lot of fatty meat, nuts, oils, and fish but seems to keep Inuit people very healthy. The issue is that Inuit people’s bodies adapted to this diet, but it can cause heart problems and health issues in people from other regions.
14. The Lemon Juice Diet
The lemon juice diet or lemon detox diet is one of the most toxic fad diets. All you drink for several weeks is a lemon juice and water concoction. It puts you in a drastic calorie deficit, which helps you lose weight but weakens your body. The diet is dangerous and is akin to an eating disorder.
15. The Sleeping Beauty Diet
This diet was around in the early and mid-20th century. Sadly, it seems to be coming back. It involves taking sleeping pills so you sleep more and eat less. You sleep at least 10 hours a day to avoid eating, depriving your body of fuel and nutrients while dosing it with harmful drugs.
16. The Cottage Cheese Diet
For this one, you just eat cottage cheese for every meal for a few days. It’s not the worst fad diet ever conceived, but it severely lacks nutrients and can initiate a negative dieting cycle. Ultimately, any fad diet that restricts you this dramatically is harmful.
17. The Cotton Ball Diet
Many fad diets can harm your body, but the cotton ball diet might be the deadliest. It involves dipping cotton balls — yes, the kind you use to remove nail polish — into sauces, juices, and smoothies and eating them. It’s an eating disorder masquerading as a diet and might be the most dangerous fad diet here.
18. The Baby Food Diet
This doesn’t sound too bad because baby food can be tasty! This calorie-deficit diet can lead to diarrhea, fatigue, and nutrient deficiencies. Plus, baby food is super expensive. The idea is to replace all but one meal a day with a jar of baby food, but baby food is meant for infants and cannot sustain adults.
19. The Cookie Diet
The cookie diet sounds like heaven, but it can lead to fatigue, weakened immunity, thyroid issues, and other imbalances. Followers replace every meal except for dinner with specially formulated cookies. Supposedly, the cookies can curb your appetite, deliver nutrients, and lower calorie intake. However, people complain about side effects indicative of nutrient deficiencies.
20. The Vinegar Diet
Many people use apple cider vinegar as a weight loss supplement, believing it can boost metabolism. Apple cider vinegar may help burn fat, but there is no solid evidence to support this. The diet isn’t horrific, but it can cause stomach distress, oral discomfort, and other minor problems.
21. The Fletcherizing Diet
Followers of this diet in the 1910s were also called the “chew chew cult,” which makes us giggle. You can eat anything you want on this diet, but you have to chew every bite at least 100 times or until it becomes a thin liquid. Extra chewing can be beneficial, aiding in weight loss and reducing choking risk, but some suggest it can lead to constipation, eating disorders, and calorie deficits.
22. The Banting Diet
The Banting diet is all about cutting out highly processed foods, which sounds great, but it’s a highly restrictive diet that many experts say is unsustainable and ineffective. The high amount of saturated fats and low amount of carbohydrates can deprive the body of essential nutrients.
23. The Air Diet
A ridiculous fad diet founded in the 1980s, the air diet is pure lunacy. It’s anorexia disguising itself as a spiritual and scientific diet (which it is not). Rather than eat any food at all, you simply pretend to eat foot, using cutlery and flatware and going through the motions.
24. The Military Diet
This popular fad diet is super strict. The 3-day crash diet has a specific 3-day meal plan you have to follow to a tee. The short-term diet provides no long-term results. It’s not the most unhealthy, as the meal plan offers an okay range of foods, but it’s only useful if you want to lose a few pounds quickly and temporarily, which is never safe.
25. The Tapeworm Diet
When we first happened upon this, we thought, “It can’t be what we think it is.” Sadly, it is. You swallow a pill containing a tapeworm egg, the tapeworm lives inside you and eats your calories, and you lose weight. We shouldn’t have to explain how dangerous this is, so let’s just say it’s not ideal to voluntarily take on a parasitic creature.
26. Werewolf Diet
Sadly, this diet won’t turn you into a werewolf. We’re bummed about it too. Instead, it involves fasting according to lunar phases and drinking only water, vegetables, and juice during the full moon, new moon, and phase changes. You can lose up to six pounds in a single day, so it puts you in a dramatic calorie deficit that is not healthy long term.
27. Wheatgrass Diet
The wheatgrass diet involves replacing some or most meals with a glass of wheatgrass. Wheatgrass can be very beneficial, reducing inflammation, delivering antioxidants, and providing essential vitamins. However, overconsumption and a lack of other foods can lead to nausea, stomach cramps, fevers, headaches, and other side effects.
28. Activated Charcoal Diet
Activated charcoal is just another ingredient that can aid in weight loss, but people turned it into an unhealthy fad diet. This diet involves mixing activated charcoal into almost everything you eat and replacing meals with it. It can detox your body and boost metabolism, but it can also lead to stomach pain and similar problems. Ultimately, there is no scientific evidence to support this fad diet.
29. The Twinkie Diet
You probably know where this is going. For this fad diet, you don’t eat anything except Twinkies for two full weeks. Twinkies are basically absent of nutrients, so while you may be losing weight in the calorie deficit, your organs are screaming for vitamins and minerals.
30. The Cambridge Diet
This 1960s fad diet delivers rapid weight loss through intense calorie deficits. Also called the 1:1 diet, it allows you to eat specific bars, soups, shakes, and grains. Originally designed for the morbidly obese, it puts your body into starvation mode, relying on your fat stores. Certain plans have a daily calorie cap of 330, which is absurd.
31. The Rice Diet
The rice diet is not awful, but many feel it is unsustainable. It requires you to eat specific calorie and nutrient amounts, restricting your food intake and what you can eat. It lacks some essential nutrients but is mostly frowned upon because of its strictness, which causes people to yo-yo diet.
32. The F-Plan Diet
The F-Plan diet was popular in the early 1980s, promoting high-fiber and lean protein foods. It’s been revamped as the F-Factor diet, but both lack important nutrients and can cause severe gastrointestinal issues. While fat can cause weight gain and heart issues, healthy fats are necessary for a balanced diet.
33. The Rhubarb Diet
This weight loss plan requires people to consume rhubarb every day. It has to be fresh rhubarb, which can be raw or cooked. In moderation, consuming rhubarb can be highly beneficial, but excess can cause stomach issues like cramps and diarrhea. Many people take this fad diet too far, making 75% of their diet rhubarb.
34. The Lamb Chop and Pineapple Diet
This strange diet was popular in the 1920s. People ate lamb chops and cut pineapple for every meal every day. They believed the lamb gave them sufficient protein, the sugary pineapple gave them energy, and the pineapple’s acid dissolved the lamb’s fat. This weird routine isn’t the worst, but you’d still miss out on important nutrients.
35. Mucusless Diet
The mucusless diet involves eating foods that do not create mucus in the body. In some ways, this is an extreme diet, allowing followers to only eat fruits, nuts, and leafy green vegetables. It can make people feel clearer as they rid their bodies of toxins, but they can also experience fatigue and weakness due to the lack of protein and fats.
36. The Subway Diet
We all remember the Subway diet! In the early aughts, Jared Fogle made the Subway diet popular, saying you can lose substantial weight by only eating sandwiches from the Subway restaurant chain. This diet can work and be safe if you choose balanced, nutrient-rich sandwiches — but you probably can’t have three meatball subs a day and lose weight.
37. Beverly Hills Diet
This diet came out in the early 1980s and uses a complicated meal plan system. It strongly dictates when you eat food and what foods you can eat together. Ultimately, it’s just another calorie-deficit diet that helps you lose weight by starving your body. Despite all its complexity, it’s a classic example of a fad diet that promotes unhealthy eating.
38. The GM Diet
The GM diet promises to help you lose 15 pounds in one week, but it’s not sustainable. It makes lots of claims about improving digestion and burning fat, but there is no evidence to support these statements. It involves drinking 8-12 glasses of water daily and replacing many meals with “GM Wonder Soup,” a combination of cabbage, celery, onions, and other low-calorie vegetables.
39. The Grahamite Diet
This diet isn’t so much retro as it is antique. It was popular in the 1830s, encouraging people to avoid meat and only eat unprocessed fruits, vegetables, and grains. It also told followers to avoid spices and condiments, leading to some very bland dinners, and most people couldn’t follow the diet for more than a few weeks.
40. The New 7-Day Milk Diet
This insane 1970s diet told people to replace every meal with a glass of milk for an entire week. Milk is high in calcium and has a few other benefits, but it is not nutrient-rich enough to sustain someone. This fad weight loss diet was just a scheme to sell more milk.
41. The Tobacco Diet
Tobacco products can do wonders to suppress your appetite, so people in the 19th and 20th centuries often used tobacco to lose weight. This might be one of the most effective and sustainable fad diets, but it comes with a high price: your respiratory system. Tobacco can definitely help people be thin, but their lungs suffer in the process.
42. Master Cleanse Diet
Image Credit: New Africa/Shutterstock.
The Master Cleanse diet is a doozy. It involves having a watered-down lemon drink multiple times daily and a laxative tea at night. This horrific diet will deplete your body of most essential nutrients, irritate your digestive tract, and likely cause you to eventually give in and binge eat.
43. The Israeli Army Diet
This crash diet requires followers to eat only four foods over eight days. The first two days, you eat apples, the next two, you eat cheese, then chicken, then salad. The diet came about in the 1970s and can help you lose weight, but like so many fad crash diets, it promotes unhealthy eating patterns and nutrient deficiencies.
44. The Last Chance Diet
The Last Chance diet emerged in the mid-1970s, promising overnight weight loss, and it delivered. People lost 10-30% of their body weight quickly by consuming only one low-calorie protein drink a day. This diet led to the death of several people, proving its danger.
45. Sugar Diet
In the mid-20th century, sugar companies marketed their products as weight loss aids that could suppress appetites. They touted sugar as a filling, energizing, and clever solution to hunger. Some took these claims very seriously, switching to an almost all-sugar diet, and we all know what a steady diet of pure sugar will do.
46. The Ayds Diet
In the 1970s, people consumed Ayds, a type of candy with the active ingredient phenylpropanolamine. This active ingredient, combined with the act of eating the candy, diminishes the appetite, helping people lose weight. Ayds candies are like the original diet pill, promoting calorie-deficit diets and causing people to skip necessary, nutritious meals.
47. The Scarsdale Diet
The Scarsdale diet, popular in the late 1970s, promoted a healthy balance of protein and veggies at every meal. So far, so good. But it also restricts calorie consumption to 1,000 calories daily, regardless of age, gender, height, weight, or exercise level. It also banned healthy foods like beans and sweet potatoes, which was misguided.
48. The Jell-O Diet
The Jell-O diet has been around almost as long as Jell-O itself. This jiggly snack is low in fat and calories, making it an enticing meal replacement. Sadly, some still promote this diet, which is 20 days of eating nothing but Jell-O. Aside from the dangerous calorie deficit, the high sugar content in Jell-O can lead to spikes in blood sugar. On the other hand, the sugar-free versions can cause stomach distress.
49. The Ice Cream Diet
Honestly, we would love to eat ice cream all day, every day, and watch the pounds fall off. This early aughts diet says you can eat ice cream daily if you follow this meal plan and stay under your calorie limit. It sounds wonderful, but the calorie limits are very low, and eating too much ice cream can cause a nutrient imbalance.
50. The Bean Diet
Also called the Bean Protocol, this diet is centered around beans. Beans are somewhat of a superfood, so we recommend eating them often, but this diet is a little intense. You eat up to six servings of beans a day, along with some lean meat and leafy greens. This diet has a few notable benefits but still puts you at risk of nutrient deficiencies and uses a calorie deficit to help you shed pounds.
