Remember the Diets Of Our Youth?

By Erica and Karen

Seems like from the time we were teenagers we were dieting. We hated dieting and diets. But we did it, and we still do. Diets and diet products are everywhere, still—even though we have been told for decades that you can never lose weight by dieting because the ultra-processed food industrial complex will always win. And even though some say that dieting is immoral.

We agree thinness is not a moral objective, and body positivity is a good thing, though we question whether you really have no obligation to society to try to be healthy. These are serious issues about which we could write a lot. But this post is not serious. This is a look back at some of the truly goofy diets of our youth. Why? Because we like goofy stuff.

We started thinking about dieting when we read a comprehensive history in Bon Appetit. The thesis of the article is that diets never really work, yet we keep thinking they will. The author discusses the repeated, and repeatedly flawed, governmental decrees about how diets should change in order to maintain health—and the presumably unintended consequences of those decrees.

In response to these reports, the same companies who’d sold us fat, sugar, and salt for decades quickly pivoted to selling such delicacies as Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice, Stouffer’s Right Course, The Budget Gourmet Slim Selects, Campbell’s Le Menu LightStyle, and Molly McButter (cholesterol-free butter-flavored sprinkles).

These names made us chuckle. Remember them from the diet glory days of the 1980s? With the Jane Fonda exercise tapes that would give us her body? Remember the Atkins and Scarsdale diets from the 1970s? Two of the greats were the South Beach diet and the Beverly Hills diet. (Talk about aspirational.) And there were lots in between. What Would Jesus Eat? (We missed that one.) The Cookie diet. Diets based on Jell-O, cottage cheese, and cabbage soup. In large quantities. The Sexy Pineapple Diet. Yikes.

Some diets from the 1960s sounded rather more appealing.

• Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s adopted this one, to make you feel “sexy, exuberant, full of the joie de vivre”: one egg any style, no butter, with one glass of white wine, for breakfast. For lunch, another egg and another glass of white wine. Dinner—eat one steak and finish that bottle of (white) wine. At least one person who tried this recently does not recommend it.

• And how about the Drinking Man’s Diet, from the same era? First, of all, a diet directed to men is a refreshing idea. Second, listen to this:

What makes this [diet] more enjoyable than calorie counting, ‘is that most of the things you like best don't have to be counted at all: steak and whisky, chicken and gin, ham, caviar, pâté de foie gras, rum and roast pheasant, veal cutlets and vodka, frogs legs and lobster claws--they all count as zero.’

We’re not sure why anyone needed any other diet.

Of course there are plenty of fad diets today as well. But they seem generally more serious. (We don’t mean more effective, we mean less entertaining.) The Keto Diet. The Military Diet. These do not lend themselves to fun, or humor. But then there is the Paleo diet. Really? We should erase centuries of cooking experience so we can eat like cavemen?

We still diet sometimes, but we have reached the annoying conclusion that gimmicks don’t do the trick. The only way to lose weight is to eat—and drink—less. Boring. But a look back at some of the crazier 20th century diets gives us some options if we want to take a vintage approach.

Do you diet? Do you have a favorite? Or a least favorite?