Dog House Blog, Our Top Ten Desperate Diets!

Molly The Wallys’ Top Ten Desperate Diets!

After the Christmas and New Year festivities are over we always feel we should start eating more healthily and maybe drop a bit of weight. So we thought we’d take a look at some of the more bizarre diets that have been and gone through history.

The gut wrenching awful diet.

Favoured by the opera singer Maria Callas you’d need some guts to swallow the tape-worm pill. You’d swallow the pill, gorge yourself silly and once your weight had reached the desired goal you’d take another pill to kill of the worm. No thank you!

Something to chew on.

Try Flecherism! This was an Edwardian hit and was favoured by the likes of Franz Kafka and J D Rockefeller. You chewed each morsel of food a certain number of times. For example a shallot took 700 chews and flake of cereal a little less. When you had reduced your mouthful to nothing more than a woody fibrous remnant, having swallowed all the juice, you simply spat out what was left. Not recommended when eating in public.

In a pickle.

Lord Byron when not being a great romantic stuck to a diet of biscuits and soda water or potatoes soaked in vinegar. This he would follow with a binge meal and a large dose of milk of magnesia. He was an obsessive dieter but despite the fact that he knew it made him ill he continued with this regime until he died pickle no doubt. We give this one a big paws down.

Arsenic and old lace.

The Victorians were into their drugs in a big way and diet pills were all the rage. Many were harmless made of lard and soap but some were lethal. Arsenic and strychnine were known to speed up the metabolism and were frequently used with tragic results. Dead stupid if you ask me.

A Sleeping Beauty.

You can’t eat while you sleep. So if you sedate yourself for days and do not eat, this starvation diet may actually work. Elvis was a proponent of this weight loss. I sleep all day and night and I can tell  you no it doesn’t work.

Would you wool?

The cotton ball diet lets you eat as many cotton balls as you like. You can eat them dry or soaked in gelatin. Low in calories but very filling you won’t want to eat anything after one of these meals. The cotton balls are also high in fiber, which should be good for you until you realize it’s not the right kind of fiber you need. Yep, not the right kind of balls for us too. Anyone for tennis?

One grunt or two?

This diet is also called the caveman or Paleolithic diet because it is based on food available to this  era, 10,000 years ago. The foods are those available to gatherers and hunters at the time. Food can be cooked. Most participants will be limited to lean meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, roots and nuts. Anyone for a dinosaur burger?

Go to Spec Savers.

The theory is if your food looks disgusting, you will be less likely to eat it. So why not buy a pair of vision-dieter glasses? Johnny Depp is a big fan of these blue glasses, but we think he just likes the look. We think you will have the blues if you try this one.

Booze to loose.

The logic followed that it was food that made you fat, and what better way to curb your appetite for food than with loads of booze. In the 1950′s books such as ‘The Drinking Mans’ Diet’ and ‘Drink, Eat, and be Thin’ encouraged people to drink alcohol to lose weight. Opps we think this will only work in conjunction with the sleeping beauty diet.

Smoke gets in your eyes.

Lastly we bring you the cigarette diet which was all the rage in the 1920s. Smoke yourself silly as these were supposed to suppress the appetite. It is still popular with models and Hollywood celebrities. However it is bad for your health and you’d probably get pneumonia from having to stand outside in bad weather.

Would you try any of those? I will stick to chasing squirrels, thank you.