Top 10 Strangest Diets – But Do They Work?

Top 10 Strangest Diets: But Do They Work?
Such is our obsession with losing weight it seems like we’ll try almost anything to slim down, no matter how strange the method in question is. Instead of eating sensibly and sticking to regular, healthy meals – examples of which are readily available to view online, provided by Kraft and many others – too many dieters embark on random missions.

Here, then, are some of the strangest diets in the world…

The Morning Banana Diet

First gaining traction in Japan through the actions of a man called Hitoshi Watanabe, the morning banana diet (as you might have guessed) was the act of having a breakfast loaded up with raw bananas and room temperature water. Over the course of six months, Watanabe lost 13 kg. He then went on to publish over 600,000 copies of his banana based diet books.

The Egg Diet

A number of celebs in recent years – including actor Adrien Brody – have lost a ton of belly fat by allegedly chomping down on nine eggs a day. There are a number of versions of the egg diet online, some of which also included meats and fish but others that are quite literally all about the eggs.

The Sleeping Beauty

Based on the idea that if you aren’t awake, you aren’t eating, the SB is focused around the idea of sleeping a great deal. Quality of sleep can also impact hormone levels, which in turn trigger our appetite. Again, the logic does sort of work, but as anyone who has slept for over 12 hours at a time will testify, that’s a lot of headaches to deal with.

The Cookie diet

Just the title of this diet reads like it should have the hallelujah chorus behind it. A diet?  Involving cookies? Not just any cookies, though: these are specially made in order to suppress hunger. One proper serving of chicken, turkey or seafood per day and at least six cookies per day make up this rather unique weight loss method.

The Monkey chow diet

A new diet unleashed by Adam Scott is based around nothing but the well known (and nutritionally complete) monkey food known as chow. It only took a few days for Mr Scott to report some ‘plumbing’ trouble as a result of his new eating habits.

The Breatharaianism Diet

The Breatharianism diet is based around the idea that humans can easily subsist on air, sunlight and life force alone. No less than renowned actress Michelle Pfeiffer noted that she was inducted into a Breatharaian cult in her early days, though she didn’t get too involved.  According to an article published by the Seattle Globalist, four people are known to have died attempting this diet.

Tapeworms

Fortunately, this diet is now well in the past! However, in the 1920s it was all the rage. Put simply, pills were sold containing a tapeworm, the idea being that the worm would attach itself to the stomach lining, and eat a lot of the food that came through. Bizarrely, it still occurs in some locations.

The Master Cleanse

This appeared in the new millennium, with celebrities such as Beyonce promoting it as a great way to lose bulk quickly. The cleanse involves taking laxatives in both the morning and the evening, and then drinking a mix of lemon juice, syrup and cayenne pepper during the day whenever hunger pangs strike. Cleanses tend to last between three and seven days.

The Freegan Diet

Whether or not this is a full ‘diet’ depends on your perspective, but it’s certainly unique.  ‘Freegans’ operate with the aim of reducing society’s waste by using second-hand products and discarded goods, and that goes for their food.  Essentially, they only eat vegan products they find for free.

Fletcherism

Perhaps the oddest diet on the list, Horace Fletcher promoted this self-titled diet in the early 1900s. Essentially, the idea was based around chewing foods 100 times per minute whilst only consuming the juices that resulted. Anything solid that remained was then spat out. Whilst the extremism of the diet is questionable, one bit of modern health advice actually originates from it: nearly all scientists recommend eating slowly as a way to minimise the amount of food taken in before hunger is sated.