10 Ridiculous Fad Diets And Why They Bit The Dust

Everyone approaches food in his or her own way. We have our own opinions on what constitutes healthy eating, and we're sure that you do, too. Sometimes, however, everyone falls off of the healthy eating train and looks to the internet for a quick way to lose weight. The tactic of the week varies but, regardless of the current trend, the fads tend to fade as quickly as they pop up. Why do fad diets exit the public mind as quickly as they enter? 

If you expect that The Baby Food Diet will have you eating baby food, you're in for a treat. This methodology argues that replacing one or two meals a day with a 20- to 100-calorie baby food snack will result in weight loss. And it will, but users usually find that the limited flavors of baby food (there's no chicken and waffles baby food, folks) and the lack of chewing turn them off of the diet quickly.

Also known as Fletcherism, this diet was popularized by Horace "the Great Masticator" Fletcher. The premise (an absurd one at that) was that you should chew your food incessantly until it fully liquefied. Then chewers were to spit the remaining liquid out, consuming fewer calories than regular eaters in the process. Not only was this diet ineffective, but no one wants to go to a restaurant and watch someone spew liquefied food out into... wait. Where did they even spit it?

Please don't eat cotton balls. Even if they're soaked in juice, as The Cotton Ball Diet suggests, eating cotton balls can result in some hairy complications, among them maybe death. Do you want to add "proficient at self-inducing bezoars" to your resume? We didn't think so.

Some people, such as proponents of ear stapling, feel that a physical manipulation of one's body is the key to dietary triumphs. In an instance of pseudo-acupuncture ear alteration, stapling is believed to hit an area that controls appetite. It turns out, however, that stapling your ear is more likely to result in infection than weight loss.

The Five Bite Diet is exactly what it sounds like. This diet allows for no breakfast, with five bites of food each allowed at lunch and dinner. Any calorie-free drink can be consumed. This fad diet crashed because no matter what the food or how large the bites, 10 bites of food a day can't sustain life.

A steady diet of 500 calories per day along with a daily injection of human choriogonadotropin, a hormone produced during early pregnancy, was proven to not only be ineffective, but also dangerous in many instances. While the hormone proves effective as a fertility treatment, it's not the best way to get back into the jeans you wore in college.

In 1929, the premise of this dietary campaign by tobacco company Lucky Strike was for women to reach for a cigarette instead of unhealthy food, and it was highly successful. By doing this, women would "keep a slender figure no one can deny," but after the candy industry brought the law into the issue, the campaign was derailed. Why hasn't it come back? We think you know the answer to that.

If Elvis did it, you should, too. Right? Wrong. While the King may have been a fan of sedating himself for a few days in order to sleep off weight, there is no evidence to suggest that this dietary practice is safe or effective. Plus, who has the time to sleep for days at a time whenever they eat too much pad Thai?

The Tapeworm Diet seems ideal for those that want to lose weight without exercising, and that's because swallowing a tapeworm supplement allows for your food to be split between you and, well, a worm. The worm stuck to various places along your digestive tract, but the diet didn't. Apparently, expelling a live tapeworm from the body is quite unpleasant. Plus, a tapeworm's presence can bloat its host's belly. Count us out.

The Vision Diet's creator(s) firmly believed that red and yellow foods were appetizing and that they were eaten (often in excess) because they looked so darn appealing. To counteract this, followers of the diet were to wear blue-tinted glasses in order to make their meals look worse. Although potentially stylish, the blue shades method does quite literally nothing to prevent you from eating a slice of red velvet cake. Bummer.