Everybody is always on the lookout for the next big health trend. That new quick fix to lose 10 pounds in a week or the diet that allows you to eat as much food as you want but still lose weight. The search for a magic elixir for a healthy human body has caused people to scour the ends of the Earth and has produced some extremely strange and wacky solutions.
Here are the five weirdest:
The Tapeworm Diet
No matter how far back in history you go people are always looking for easy ways to keep a nice, trim figure. Back at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some people got the bright idea that a fantastic way to lose weight would be to simply have a tapeworm in your stomach. All you had to do was take a pill that had a tapeworm in it, and then it would simply eat the food that you deposited into your stomach. Only problem was, the tapeworms would cause cysts on the brain, eyes, and spinal cord, in addition to seizures and dementia.
The Drinking Man’s Diet
Boy, were the 60s a different time. It was in 1964 that a pamphlet titled The Drinking Man’s Diet by Robert Cameron appeared in the marketplace for only $1. The idea of the diet was to limit a man’s intake of carbohydrates by eating mainly steak, chicken, and fish. However, the diet also recommended that a man have a drink with every meal, be it whiskey or gin, because neither have any carbohydrates. The pamphlet sold over 2 million copies until Dr. Frederick Stare, the man who founded Harvard’s School of Public Health, decried the diet as unhealthful and insisted that nobody should follow it.
The Sleeping Beauty diet
A diet that reportedly Elvis was a fan of. It is not so much of a diet as it is a lifestyle. Essentially, the idea of the diet is to limit the amount you eat by just sleeping for days at a time. So, instead of just watching what you eat or making sure you eat the right things, you’ll just sleep for a few days which ensures you’ll lose weight because you are, essentially, eating nothing at all.
The Fletcher Diet
Coming from Horace Fletcher, the diet does not change what you eat, just how you eat it. Fletcher theorized that if one tilts their head forward and chews every mouthful of food 32 times exactly, then tilts their head back and only swallows the food that naturally slides down, the rest would be spat back out. Although strange, many people followed the diet making Fletcher an extremely wealthy man.
Breatharianism Diet
What this diet is, says right in the name. For this fad, you do nothing but breath. You eat nothing, drink nothing, and consume nothing. Practitioners of the diet claim they are given vital energy through the sun and through a force they call prana. So far, three people have died while on this diet.
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