From eating tapeworm eggs to consuming cotton balls to sticking plastic on your tongue…these diet fads are enough to make your stomach turn.
Do you have a constant battle with your bulges? A lot of online resources and “weight experts” out there urge you to try new diet plans, promising great results. Unfortunately. some of them are so dangerous (not to mention seriously crazy), you shouldn’t even have the stomach to try them.
Drug diet
Using drugs (legal or illegal) that aren’t meant for weight loss may lead to kidney, heart, and lung problems. You may have a smaller waistline, but you’ll also have to deal with anxiety, addiction, and financial and relationship problems.
Cleansing and Detox diets
Feeling toxic about your weight? This diet tells you to detoxify. The thing is, your body is already designed to cleanse itself, making diets such as these quite unnecessary. While cleaning and detox diets sound healthy, they can actually lead to electrolyte imbalance and dehydration. If you really want to rid your body of toxins, drink more water and eat food rich in fiber.
Cotton Ball Diet
This is something that’s admittedly kind of hard to swallow. Cotton balls are soaked in orange juice and consumed in place of food. It sounds so crazy and “shareable”, it must be true. Seriously and needless to say, this diet is a health hazard. Cotton balls, like anything that isn’t supposed to be eaten, can cause intestine blockages and serious complications.
Tapeworm Diet
Cotton balls not really to your taste? Then try tapeworms. Desperate dieters prey on tapeworm eggs. Once hatched, happy tapeworms eat the food in your intestines. When you’ve reached your desired weight, ask your doctor for some anti-worm meds. Sounds so logical, you can do a facepalm now.
Plastic Tongue Patch Diet
No pain, no gain is often the battlecry of dieters. This weight loss method takes the concept of pain a million steps further, forcing you to go on a liquid diet. What happens is a surgeon stitches a plastic mesh to your tongue (a mesh intended for hernia surgery), so eating becomes an unsavory and extremely painful experience. This might help you lose weight, but you’ll also lose all the nutrients your body needs. Besides, would you really want to live with a hernia patch stitched on your mouth?
Baby Food Diet
The sad news is you only get to eat 2 jars of baby food during the day. The good news is, you can have a regular dinner. The bad news is, you’d most likely compensate by overeating during dinner, which is supposed to be your lightest meal of the day. Call us pessimists, but the danger here is that you’d really just end up fatter than when you started dieting.
Excessive Exercise Diet
Pit 15 overweight people against each other and force them to perspire and sweat every day, followed by a weigh-in at the end of the week to check who lost more weight. Reality TV has fed us with the idea that extreme exercise is healthy, safe, and effective. The sad reality is that it can lead to injuries, dehydration, and muscle damage. If you want a healthy exercise regimen, sweat it out with a thirty-minute cardio workout 3 days a week coupled with strength-training two to three times a week.
Purging Diet
Don’t even consider this method to lose weight. Abusing laxatives, forcing yourself to vomit, and chewing food then spitting them out are the first steps to developing eating disorders and serious health complications. The acid in your tummy is strong; when you regurgitate food, extremely acidic stomach contents can injure your mouth, esophagus, and tooth enamel. Constant purging also increases the risk of cancer and causes serious dehydration.
Smoker’s Diet
Since nicotine is known to suppress appetite, some people think smoking would be an effective way to lose weight. But just as any health professional would tell you, the risks associated with smoking — cardiovascular, respiratory, and other types of diseases — far outweigh any of its weight-loss benefits.
Sleeping Beauty Diet
You can’t eat when you’re sleeping, says the Sleeping Beauty Diet expert. True, but you’re also setting yourself up for muscle deterioration and starvation. In bedtime stories, the wicked fairy puts you to sleep for one hundred years, and you awaken all beautiful and ready for your dream wedding. In reality, you take sedatives to force yourself sleep for days and you might not wake up at all.
Nobody wants to die while on a diet. If you want to lose weight, do it the traditional way — eat healthy food, exercise regularly, and sleep right. It may not sound as interesting as these fads, but at least you’ll be alive to enjoy the benefits of a healthier body.
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