Deadly Diets

Lord Byron's vinegar diet

"Crazy, vicious and dangerous" Lord Byron was the most prominent cavalier of the 19th century. Most men wanted to be like him, and most women were in love with him, including his own half-sister, who was rumored to have given birth to an illegitimate child.

The archetype of the Byronic hero was described as “a man proud, sullen, cynical, with contempt on his brow and sorrow in his heart, unrelenting in revenge, but capable of loving deeply and strongly.” In other words, Byron was a rebel, and nothing good comes of it.

Byron took great care of his figure, so he “invented” his own diet to look thin and fragile, as befits a poet. His diet included tea and potatoes soaked in vinegar. And Byron deliberately wore several layers of clothing to drive excess calories with sweat. It will not be superfluous to say that he, in addition, suffered from bulimia - he could eat to the dump, and then cause vomiting and thus get rid of what he ate.

For many young people, Byron was an idol, so they tried to imitate him, including in gastronomic preferences. The older generation considered such behavior frivolous and believed that Byron had a bad influence on immature minds and their food preferences, which can lead to weakness and soreness.

The tapeworm diet

This diet may cause you to associate with Maria Callas, although some believe it’s just an urban legend. However, sometimes people resort to such radical ways of losing weight, although the sale of tapeworms for these purposes is considered illegal. You just need to swallow a pill that contains the head of a tapeworm, and then it will grow in your body (sometimes reaching 9 meters in length) and absorb the calories you eat.

Of course, formally, this method will help to lose weight, but at the same time, the worm will deprive your body of vital nutrients, and, ultimately, can kill you. Just imagine that in your intestines will live a nine-meter hideous worm.

Fletcherism

Horace Fletcher was considered a luminary in the world of dietetics of the Victorian era. His diet consisted of a thorough and long chewing of food (including liquids) - about 32 times per piece. Then the chewed food had to be spit out. Fletcher argued that this way our body will get all the necessary nutrients without any calories. You can imagine how annoying it was at the party. Henry James, Frank Kafka and Upton Sinclair practiced this method of weight loss. In support of his diet, Fletcher coined the slogan: “Nature will punish anyone who chews little.”

The diet became so popular that during Victorian parties, people would make sure they chewed their food long enough.

But the strangest thing about the story was that Fletcher carried a jar with him everywhere, where he spit the food he had chewed, to prove to others how magnificent his method was and that the contents of the jar smelled like “fresh buns.”

Was this diet really effective? Of course it was, given that you didn't actually eat anything.

"The Art of Living Long" (and Unhappy)

This is probably the first book in the history of dietetics about weight loss, written by the Venetian merchant Luigi Cornaro, who as a result of gluttony gained excess weight and developed his own system leading to "weight loss and longevity." To get rid of the hated kilograms, people had to eat only one egg yolk a day.

Today, such a diet would lead to anorexia. At that time, however, Luigi’s book was a great success. Luigi Cornaro lived until the age of 90, apparently eating one egg yolk.

Was this diet effective? In terms of weight loss - no doubt, but in terms of longevity - a controversial issue, because in the literal sense of the word to starve yourself - not the best solution for weight loss.

Diet "Cocktail of meat waste"

Back in the 70s of the last century, a doctor named Robert Lynn invented a diet that he called "Last Chance." The essence of this diet was to drink a liquid food supplement called Prolinn. The supplement contained only 400 calories and was consumed once a day. Such a cocktail consisted of ground hooves, horns, hides, bones, tendons and other tribunes from the slaughterhouse, flavored with artificial flavors, dyes and enzymes. This diet gained a lot of followers until, one day, people began to die of heart attacks.

Arsenic

Victorians were crazy about arsenic. They added it to almost everything – from face cream, and ending with pills for weight loss. Apparently, arsenic was designed to accelerate the metabolism in the body.

It is difficult to say whether this diet helped to lose weight, since the person sitting on it had every chance to play the box before he could feel the difference.

Source: cryua.livejournal.

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