The 10 Whackiest Diets Of The World

There are almost no limits to what people will subject themselves to to lose weight. Here are ten of the craziest diets out there.

10. Fletcherism

Let’s start with a harmless one: Fletcherism. Horace Fletcher, a Victorian art dealer who found his true call was being a nutritionist, came up with the idea that chewing your food until it turns liquid reduces consumed calories. Which may well be, if you chewed each bite of ham up to 100 times and the rest on the plate develops sentience and walks away out of boredom.

9. The Baby Food Diet

Do you like mushy carrots and pear puree? Well, you better get used to it if you want to try the Baby Food Diet, which claims that eating a glass of baby food instead of a regular meal will get you used to smaller portions. We could also call it “the broken jaw surgery diet”, but that would be much less appealing, wouldn’t it?

8. The Vision Diet

Ever ate blue spaghetti? With blue sauce? Me neither. The idea behind the Vision Diet basically is that if your food looks disgusting, you will eat less of it. You’ll just have to walk around wearing some weird cool blue sunglasses. Even indoors.

7. The Cotton Ball Diet

Supposedly a way by which models control their anorexia weight, the Cotton Ball Diet does exactly what the name implies: you eat cotton balls. Dipped in orange juice.

6. The Apple Cider Vinegar Diet

A bit of apple cider vinegar before each meal supposedly increases your metabolism and curbs your appetite. Just be prepared to turn into a pickled cucumber at some point, as having all that acid is over time a bit like eating a car battery.

If spilling acid works that greats in a car, it must work even better in your stomach!

5. The Drinking Man’s Diet

The Atkins Diet isn’t hardcore enough for you? Then try the Drinking Man’s Diet, as it combines all the goodness of Atkins with ample helpings of alcohol. It’s only a rumor that buying a copy of the book automatically signs you up with Alcoholics Anonymous.

4. The Air Diet

Eat whatever you like – as long as you are only imagining eating it. Yes, the Air Diet wants you to sit down at a table with an empty plate, a fork and a knife, and imagine that you are eating. The only “food” air dieters are allowed is “water soup”, which consists of salt and water. Ah, did you have the air truffles yesterday? As light as …air.

2. The K-E Diet

Too weird? You may instead opt for having a nasogastric tube forced down your throat. “Forced” as in “voluntarily”. Because the K-E Diet argues that dripfeeding nutrients right into your stomach controls how much you eat without feeling hungry. Who cares that getting one of these tubes inserted is so bad that since 1975 the World Medical Association doesn’t allow doctors to participate in force-feedings of prisoners if they are capable of rational judgment?

1. The Tapeworm Diet

If you are more ecologically minded, why not do your part in protecting the world’s endangered wildlife while trying to lose weight? Just swallow a tapeworm cyst. The little bugger will grow in your intestine and in order to grow will eat a bunch of the food you eat. Nobody knows if this diet was really ever done, but given places ten to two on this list, who couldn’t imagine it?

Seriously…

How about eating less and exercising more? Proven to work countless times, has just about no side effects and is as cheap as in free. I know, but I sometimes can’t help having these really crazy ideas.

Pictures courtesy of “jencu” and Alisha Vargas.