The 3 Worst Crash Diets

The 3 Worst Crash Diets

Apr 29, 2010

1. The Elvis Diet

fat elvis 300x300I’m going to come out and say it right now: Elvis was a fatty-fat-fatcakes. That’s not how he always was but his weight-gain and subsequent girth soon became a defining feature of the singer. Forget his golden voice or blue-suede shoes, sister. He got faaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. And rightfully so. Elvis’ weight gain isn’t much of a surprise when you look at what the guy considered a healthy human diet:

Breakfast – 5,000 calories
six large eggs cooked in butter with extra salt, 1lb of bacon, half a pound of sausages, 12 buttermilk biscuits

Dinner – 84,000 calories
Two “Fool’s Gold” sandwiches (one jar of peanut butter, one jar of strawberry jam, one pound of crisp-fried bacon on a baguette)

Supper – 5,000 calories
5 double-hamburgers and deep-fried peanut butter, mashed banana sandwiches.

Misc. – other snacks as required between meals

Just for reference, the recommended calorie intake per day is only 2,000. I imagine this wouldn’t have killed him if he had managed to burn all that excessive energy but I’m also sure that the number of jumping jacks required to burn 92,000 calories is twice as lethal as the dude’s breakfast.

But the artery clogging was only part one of Elvis’ diet. Known as the “Sleeping Beauty” diet, step two is sleeping. Like, a lot. According to the diet after eating an absurd amount of food one just needs to sleep their way to a sexy bikini body. And while it’s true that sleeping does burn calories, I doubt it really does much to combat that pound of fried bacon that you just ate for dinner.

2. Fletcherizing

250px Horace Fletcher 1 210x300Horace Fletcher managed to sell himself as a health advocate during a time when anyone could claim to be anything and no one would call their bluff. Using the same qualifications he could also just as easily be a doctor, a mechanic and a cyborg. That’s the wonder of the Victorian era: everyone lies.

Fletcher’s claim to fame is “fletcherizing,” or chewing food at least 32 times before swallowing. According to out scientist/cyborg, this allowed the saliva to better soften the food, allowing to digest better later on. He also advocated chewing some liquids in the same way and only eating when you felt hunger pains. Given this information I’d rather not know what a drink consisted of in Victorian England, because that’s just odd.

Fletcher’s diet ultimately boiled down to chewing until something was practically a liquid. This was problematic for certain foods, so things like fiber had to be cut. That by itself causes all sorts of problems. Despite this, Fletcher managed to maintain a solid base of practicing Fletchheads until his death, after which a new diet, counting calories, dethroned the reigning champion.

3. The Alcohol Diet

11126021 300x269The theory behind the alcohol diet is simple: don’t eat food and drink a whole bunch. And while that might sound like awesome times to some of you, it should also be very, very obvious that it will corpse you in record time. For one, you need various nutrients not found in booze to survive, and for two, massive consumption of alcohol is going to murder many of your vital organs which, as noted, are vital. So yeah, alcohol diet is a no-go.

Supposedly the idea started with William the Conqueror. Near the end of his life he had put on quite a bit of weight and rather than work it off like you might expect someone claiming to be a conqueror to do, he instead thought he could drink it off. He stopped eating altogether in favor of sweet lady liquor. True, the alcohol isn’t what did the man in, but it certainly couldn’t have helped to have a fat drunk guy wandering around the streets.

While the alcohol diet never saw mainstream attention like other diets, it occasionally sees resurgences in people who don’t know any better. If you think I’m joking, just spend five minutes on Yahoo! Answers. In fact, don’t bother looking.