New diet trends pop up every year as people look for a magic bullet for their holiday-induced weight problems. We love to grab on to every snake oil salesman singing the praises of a quick fix. Take the keto diet, with its high-fat, low-carb parameters. It seems like a great option…until you weigh in the increased likelihood of a heart attack. There are many more terrible trends from the last few decades that haven’t really stood the test of time. That’s why we decided to rank the weirdest, worst diet trends of all time.
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Weirdest Diet Trends
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11. Paleo Diet
The theory with paleo is that cavemen weren’t fat, so you follow their diet of nuts, meat, vegetables, and fish, while avoiding carbs and chemicals. That sounds all well and good, but we have to have a Twinkie every now and then.
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10. Atkins Diet
Around the same time people were pretending to diet while they munched on Subway subs, the Atkins diet was all the craze. The simple rules were: eat high-fat, low-carb foods. People are still mixed on whether or not this diet works, but some studies said the diet could cause kidney problems and other maladies.
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9. South Beach Diet
If you weren’t doing Atkins, you were probably trying the South Beach diet. With a name referencing the popular beach in Miami, how could this diet not work? It was a high-protein, low-carb diet that was never really proven by science to actually work at all.
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8. Low-Fat Foods Diet
In the '90s, dieters were told to reach for low-fat foods if they wanted to lose weight. This is when we were introduced to the likes of Snackwells and other low-fat options. The biggest problem was that all of these low-fat options were loaded with sugar.
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7. Subway Diet
In the early aughts, Subway had a spokesman who shall remain nameless that supposedly lost a lot of weight eating only Subway subs. This led to many people trying to lose weight by eating $5 footlongs loaded with meat, cheese, and mayo, to obviously mixed results.
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6. Ornish Diet
When someone says that something is too good to be true, it probably is. That was the case with the Ornish diet. The gist was that you could literally eat anything you wanted as long as it was low in fat and full of fiber. In fact, you were only supposed to get 10 percent of your diet from fat. The problem is that your body needs fat to function and all that fiber couldn’t possibly be good for you.
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5. Raw Food Diet
This one is pretty self-explanatory. This diet consists of eating nothing but raw foods. Whether or not it works, it sounds pretty awful to us. Not only are vegetables an afterthought for us, but we enjoy our food at least warm if not hot. Room temperature and cold foods really don’t interest us.
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4. Apple Cider Vinegar Diet
There are those among us who believe that apple cider vinegar can cure any ailment. This diet uses this idea and implements it by having dieters take an awful, sour shot of the stuff every morning in order to suppress your appetite. That's fine momentarily, but what happens when your stomach starts rumbling 10 minutes later?
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3. Blood Type Diet
In the late '90s, some brainiacs believed that your diet should be based on your blood type. You would find out your blood type and then eat a diet based on it, whatever that means. It was proven (like many fads) to be complete nonsense.
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2. Water Diet
This is a pretty extreme diet where you drink a lot of water (and nothing else for a few days). Later, you can eat certain fruits and vegetables along with said water. It sounds like pure torture and is probably not endorsed by any doctors.
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1. Master Cleanse
Oh boy, now we’re getting into risky territory. A lot of celebrities tried this "cleanse" that literally consisted of drinking a mixture of water, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup (and nothing else) for 10 straight days. We don’t know about you, but one whiff of a cheeseburger cooking and we’d be done with this cleanse faster than you can say “Do you want fries with that?”
