5 Strangest Weight Loss Diet Fads That We’re Glad Are Over

The start of every year is always the most popular time for people to adopt new fitness and health resolutions. While their goals in theory are entirely disjointed from how they are in implementation, we are never really without novel sets of tricks to lose weight and tone up. We’ve seen so many effective and ineffective diet trends come and go, and then come back again. Happily, some of the strangest fad diets known to man are just too weird for anybody to revive. Here are five of them.

1. The “Twinkie” Diet

This diet is basically all junk food. In 2010, nutrition professor Mark Haub tried eating only Oreos, Doritos and all sorts of junk snacks for 10 weeks but made sure to limit his intake to just 1,500 calories, or 800 calories below his daily needs. He lost 27 pounds during this experience, but it cannot be denied that while the calories and weight loss tell a positive story, his real health will take a hit in the future. The "Twinkie diet" was more of an experiment than an actual program, but people took a liking to it for a while because of Haub’s results.

2. The “Ayds” Diet Candy

“Ayds” was extremely popular in the 1950s and taken as a fudge-like candy form before meals to help curb one’s appetite. Its primary model was a very thin woman who boasted being a size 10, which is today’s sizing language is equivalent to a tiny size 4. It gained support at the beginning but was then shunned when health experts found that it contained the oral anesthetic benzocaine. Presumably, the effect of the medicine was to numb one’s tastebuds so you have no interest to eat. Then when the AIDS crisis emerged in the 1980s, the product had to be taken out of the market entirely.

3. The Hollywood 18-Day Diet

In this program, dieters were to consume only grapefruit throughout the days and weeks, with some boiled egg from time to time. This diet brought calorie consumption down to 400 to 800 per day. It did help people lose lots of weight, all right, but it also made them very hungry, leading them to binge-eat in the end and gain more pounds that what they had at the beginning.

4. Smoking, Not Snacking

In 1928, a print ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes encouraged the public to reach for a smoke every time they feel like munching on something sweet. It caught on for a while, as technically nicotine and smoke affected the body by curbing cravings and stopping overindulgence. However, smoking is never a healthy option to anything. The trend continued with some hardcore smokers who wanted to “lose weight” and justify their smoking habits at the same time, but because that campaign was going down so hard on the sweets industry, the latter eventually threatened to file a lawsuit for tainting the image of the confection business.

5. The Tapeworm Cure

Remember when Khloe Kardashian said she hoped she had a tapeworm so could lose weight? This idea purportedly came from the concept that tapeworms that live in one’s intestines consume the calories that would have otherwise sated the human host. Of course, hosting a parasite in your insides will do plenty more harm and that the little good it does.

While obesity continues to be a problem in the United States and new diet trends do emerge every so often, the key to eating healthy and staying fit is really to eat the right food and put in the right amount of physical activity to balance it out. There are diets that work and those that do not, so before jumping on the first trend that your favorite actress is adopting, consult with your physician first to determine the best and safety strategy for you.