1. Slimming Soap – You probably haven’t heard of anything more bizarre than this. Imagine a slimming soap that washes away fat! You read correct. These soaps were sold at $20 apiece and people were gullible enough to buy them, in the hope of losing excess fat. Manufacturers proclaimed the soap was made using a wonder ingredient that penetrated deep under the skin and helped melt fat, reduce cellulite and improve metabolism. In case you wonder what this magical ingredient was; well, it was seaweed used in ancient Chinese medicine! The next time you go fishing and catch a slim fish you’ll know it’s been bathing in seaweed.
2. Diet Cutlery – If this diet tip had really worked; fast food joints would have had to roll down their shutters shop long ago. Someone came up with the idea that the best way to eat less was to use a drab looking plastic forks; the kind you find in fast food establishments. These forks sold like hot cakes. It just goes to prove a point that there are always people out there who can be easily conned.
3. Cabbage Soup Diet – The cabbage soup diet was a seven-day diet plan that was supposed to help shed a few pounds. Wonder who could live through 7 days on plain cabbage soup interspersed with other equally boring foods. Just the thought of cabbage soup would have made people lose weight.
4. Bulimia or ox-hunger – It said by some that bulimia, also known as ox-hunger a long time ago, was first practiced in the Middle Ages. At celebrations, people would gorge on food and then they would vomit to induce purging. Like the Romans, the people of the Middle Ages were not motivated to practice bulimia for the sake of becoming slim. In the Middle Ages, eating a lot was a sign of status and wealth.
5. Feverless consumption or hysteria – During the second half of the 19th century, “hysteria” swept through the aristocracy and middle classes of North America and Western Europe. This hysteria has become known as a Victorian form of anorexia. People during that time, especially women, would literally starve themselves in order to look slim. At that time, people who had consumption or tuberculosis were romanticized by the aristocracy, which is the reason this form of anorexia has such a weird moniker.
6. The Mega-Bite Diet – Horace Fletcher, an art dealer in San Francisco, was the author of a best-selling diet book that earned him the title, “The Great Masticator”, referring to animals that “chew the cud”. In his book, he recommended that every mouthful should be chewed at least 32 times until it becomes a liquid paste. He also added that food had to be spat out if it could not be broken down to a mushy consistency. According to Fletcher’s claims, he lost 65 out of 217 pounds through his marvelous diet.
7. The Hollywood, 18-day Diet or Grapefruit Diet. In 1920s, the glamorous flappers became a symbol of ideal feminism. Thus, the women of the era tried the Grapefruit diet or the Hollywood, 18-day diet, as it was called during that time, in an effort to achieve that flat-chested, hipless, slim look. The prerequisite of the diet is to kick-start the metabolism of the body by barrels of grapefruits that add up to 800 calories a day to boost the body’s fat burning ability. A plus point is that drinking black coffee is allowed in this diet.
8. The Tapeworm Diet – This diet idea has to be one of the most amazingly weird – and even insane – diet ideas. The concept was that right after these dieters took the diet pill (the egg of a tapeworm!) then the parasite would hatch and commence to feed off the person’s meal in their stomach. Rapid weightloss! The problem was that having a long parasite in your intestines is clearly wrong, due to the fact there is little evidence that they help you throw off weight, but much evidence that this would cause you health complications and problems.
9. Blue Tinted Sunglasses – If there is one weight loss idea that can be described as ridiculous, this is it. Blue tinted sunglasses also known as diet sunglasses were supposed to make food appear less appetizing through the blue tint. The selling point of this weird concept was that people eat less when food appears unappetizing. The person who designed these glasses probably never heard of taste and smell.
10. Celery Diet – Another one of those diets that allows you to eat a particular food. The concept behind this diet is based on consumption of negative calories. Foods with negative calories burn more calories than they actually have, which is supposed to make weight loss possible. The problem though is thousands of celery stalks will need to be eaten plain to burn one pound of fat. Is that humanly possible? Perhaps not.
Epic! Pretty delighted we don’t have to endure that now. (Do we?) This is a modern page or two with a state of the art new belly shrinking method.
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