IT’S A FAD, FAD WORLD!
Retro diets seem crazy — whipped cream & martinis, anyone? — but still reflect how we lose weight today
Afew weeks ago, the Internet had a good chuckle over a bizarre diet unearthed from a 1977 issue of Vogue.
The three-day regimen, which was first published in Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 handbook “Sex and the Single Girl,” consisted of little more than three hardboiled eggs (poached, “if necessary”), a paltry 5 ounces of steak, a bottle of white wine a day — including a glass at breakfast! — and lots of black coffee. As one Twitter user pointed out about the “crash diet”: “I think I’d crash about 20 minutes after lunch.”
But according to food historian Adrienne Rose Bitar, author of “Diet and the Disease of Civilization,” Brown’s wine-and-egg diet isn’t an anomaly. In fact, when you break it down to its elements — a caloriedeprived plan starring a superfood (here, eggs) — it’s just a few chia seeds away from today’s “clean eating.”
“We’ve been going back and forth on the same diets for the last 160 years,” she tells The Post.
Dieting in general dates back well before that. Louise Foxcroft’s “Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years” tracks our cultural obsession with food and the physique all the way back to ancient Greece. But crash diets — often insane weight-loss programs designed for fast results — really exploded in the 1920s and ’30s, thanks to the movies.
“Hollywood promoted new beauty ideals, which then created cross-promotional efforts between branded diet foods . . . and beautiful, glamorous starlets,” says Bitar. Magazines showcased the eating regimens of the era’s hottest stars, and companies pushed products, such as fruit juice or crackers, that could help fans achieve their favorite actors’ svelte figures. “Companies would take out full-page ads in national magazines touting these diets,” Bitar says.
A lot of these get-thin-quick schemes are laughable, if not downright gross — like Marilyn Monroe’s slimming breakfast drink of raw eggs mixed with milk. But an astonishing number of today’s ostensibly more enlightened approaches to wellness have their roots in similarly spurious trends.
“Dieting responds to social movements,” says Bitar. And many of those movements — globalization, industrialization, the rise of technology, the proliferation of mass media — are the very same issues we grapple with today. That’s why we keep going back to counting calories, or shunning carbs or fat or solid food, over and over again. Read on to see where our modern crash crazes got their sketchy starts.
The original juice cleanse
The idea of using fluids to flush out toxins existed long before BluePrint began peddling its green-juice cleanse in 2000. Victorians, for example, turned
liquid diets into an art form, swearing off solid foods in favor of seltzer waters and vinegar tonics. “The idea back in the 19th century was that you had to cleanse the body, because your thoughts were dirty,” says Bitar. “There were all these ways to punish the body that got wrapped up in moral purity.”
Later, the Industrial Revolution revived “cleansing” for another reason — as a reaction against environmental toxins. “Say there’s DDT and pesticides, and our environment is really polluted: It makes sense that we need to cleanse our bodies to get these ugly toxins out,” Bitar says.
The apex of all these detox diets was the Master Cleanse, which was all the rage in the 1970s. Its adherents consumed nothing except tea and water spiked with lemon, maple syrup and cayenne pepper for 10 days. Beyoncé famously turned to it to shed 20 pounds for her role in the movie “Dreamgirls.” The original ice-cream cleanse
Remember when two LA hipsters tried to market a coconut-ice-cream cleanse in 2014? They were actually onto something.
“Dieting is an industry, so a lot of times, people come up with crazy ideas just to sell products or some books,” says Bitar. “That’s where indulgence diets come in.” In 1950, Domino began marketing sugar as a weight-loss aid, running ads proclaiming that 3 tablespoons of the pure sweet stuff contained fewer calories than a half a grapefruit. (It also lacked the fiber and other nutrients you’d find in a grapefruit, but they didn’t mention that.)
But it was cosmetics executive Robert Cameron who came up with the ultimate indulgence diet. His “Drinking Man’s Diet,” self-published in 1964, espoused red meat, creamed spinach and lots and lots of booze. (Lunch included a martini or whiskey-soda, plus two glasses of wine; Dean Martin, unsurprisingly, was a devotee.) A slew of counterintuitive diet books followed, such as 1966’s “Martinis and Whipped Cream,” which showed dieters how to lose weight eating junk food. The original potato diet
Kevin Smith, Penn Jillette and other male celebs have recently extolled the virtues of the potato diet, but the spud has been a weight-loss superfood for more than a century.
Lord Byron, the Gwyneth Paltrow of his day, for a time ate nothing but these root veggies doused in vinegar. The 1930s saw the rise of the potato-and-milk diet. And Jackie Kennedy reportedly subsisted on one baked potato stuffed with beluga caviar and sour cream a day.
As far as one-ingredient diets go, this isn’t the worst: Potatoes have fiber, carbs and a good amount of vitamins and min- erals, so one could conceivably survive on tubers and milk (which adds calcium and protein). As for the most recent obsession with taters, you can blame “The Martian,” the sci-fi movie in which Matt Damon survives life on Mars by growing his own potatoes. The original 5:2 diet
The 5:2 diet, which has you feast for five days a week and starve for two, is based on a simpler weight-loss strategy: calorie slashing.
The 1930s, spurred on by Hollywood, saw a bevy of three-, five- or 10day calorie-deprived regimens promising quick fixes to unwanted extra pounds. The book “Calories and Corsets” reproduces an early example from 1932, with menus consisting of just 500 to 800 calories a day (sample lunch: six slices of cucumber!). Hollywood starlets were called upon to share their punishing diets for magazines such as Photoplay, where Monroe showcased her disgusting raw-egg-and-milk breakfast and admitted that she skipped lunch. The ’60s and ’70s saw the rise of caloriecounting programs like Weight Watchers, and the ’80s brought us the glamor- ously titled Beverly Hills Diet — a fatburning program that had you eating only fruit for the first 10 days. The original paleo diet
The paleo diet — which limits meals to foods that would have been available during the Stone Age, such as lean meats, veggies and seeds — is basically a low-carb diet with a macho twist.
It’s part of a long history of shunning gluten for health: In 1825, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin published the first antibread screed, “The Physiology of Taste: Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy.” The book cautions readers against starches, sugars and flour-based foods, all of which make you “become ugly, and thick, and asthmatic, and finally die in your own melted grease.”
And the first truly viral diet book was a low-carb one, too. “Letter on Corpulence,” published by William Banting in 1863, was so popular that “banting,” which became a euphemism for “dieting,” was mentioned in an Agatha Christie thriller.
The idea of eating like Fred Flintstone, however, took hold in the 1970s, with the Stone Age Diet. The meat-heavy plan was designed to appeal to men, in an era when Weight Watchers meetings abounded and dieting was seen as “very feminine and persnickety,” says Bitar. In contrast, the meat-heavy plan allowed dieters to “assert their masculinity while still losing weight.”