In this post, we will be talking about 10 weird diets that were used for weight loss.

Chewing Diet / Fletcher Diet

The first strange diet on this list was introduced by Horace Fletcher in the early 1990s. His diet plan recommended chewing each mouthful of food at least 32 times or until it became completely liquefied and anything that couldn’t be ingested by tilting your head back and letting it run down your throat, would be spat out.

Surprisingly, there are actually some proven scientific benefits behind using this diet as taking your time to eat will actually help satisfy your hunger and allow you to eat less, so the diet actually did help some people lose weight but I’m sure that the incessant chewing helped some people lose more annoying dinner partners than pounds.

Cabbage Soup Diet

The Cabbage Soup Diet involves eating lots of cabbage soup over the course of a week. Cabbage soup is very low in calories and can be high in salt, depending on the recipe.

The diet allows for a few fruits here and there but mostly you’d only be eating cabbage. Though this crash diet has helped some lose up to 10 pounds over the course of a week, most of it was lost from water weight and not fat, meaning that it’s a very temporary solution.

The cabbage soup diet comes with a list of side effects that include loss of energy, lightheadedness, and gas, as well as having to deal with eating soggy bland cabbage.

Caveman Diet

The Caveman Diet takes its name from our paleolithic human ancestors, who ate very simple meals more than 10,000 years ago. The diet consists of items that may be cooked like meats, fish, fruits, and nuts, but removes any foods that are produced or refined in any way like grains, oil, salt, sugars, or dairy products.

The diet was created to align us with the health of prehistoric humans and reduce the possibility of infection with sickness and disease by cutting out commonly eaten process foods, so if you love wheat products, this might not be the dieting evolution that you want to be a part of.

Shangri-La Diet

The Shangri-La Diet was introduced by psychologist Seth Roberts in 2006 as a way to help people control their urge to eat large portions of food. The method involves ingesting up to three tablespoons of extra lite olive oil and up to two tablespoons of sugar water.

This is to give your body calories that aren’t associated with any tasty and flavorful foods. Supposedly, the more you practice this, the more that your mind will disassociate calories with tasty food, therefore making you crave them less and less.

Essentially, drinking the oil and sugar water will just suppress your appetite and make you want to eat less at mealtimes which makes you lose weight.

Luigi Cornaro’s Diet

Luigi Cornaro was an Italian nobleman and writer in the late 1400s. He was in pretty bad health at the age of 40 until he met with doctors who advised him to end his life of drinking and binging on food.

They recommended he limit his diet down to 350 grams of food a day and 414 milliliters of wine, that’s very specific. After following the doctor’s advice, Carnaro began to actually feel better and within a year, he was back to a state of perfect health.

Apparently, his diet only consisted of a small portion of meat, a small tomato soup, bread, and egg yolk. But even with such little food, his body thrived until he lived until a very old age of 105. His small calorie diet has been taken up by many since then, but no one has quite been able to replicate Cornaro’s astounding results. Realistically though, who wants to live ’til 105.

Vision Diet

The Vision Diet was introduced in Japan in the late 2000s in the form of wearing a pair of sunglasses with blue-tinted lenses as a way to curb people’s appetites through changing the color of the food that they see.

The reason behind the change of color was that the foods that are in the yellow or red spectrum color are allegedly more appetizing, but if you change those colors to a cooler blue color, it would remove the desire because the blue food doesn’t look as good.

Yeah, there’s no real proof behind the weight loss benefits of this diet other than you may just think that you’re gorging yourself with food made by Smurfs, which kind of sounds amazing.

Cotton Ball Diet

The Cotton Ball Diet literally involves eating cotton balls. Apparently, cotton balls cause you to feel full but without the calories of actual food. Cotton balls are actually very high in fiber and low in calories, but eating them regularly while on this diet will cause big issues with your digestive system as well as deprive you of the nutrients that you need from, you know, real food.

Dieters would either swallow the cotton balls dry, (gags) or they would place them in gelatin and eat them. One benefit that isn’t mentioned is that you’ll always get a laugh after you eat a meal if you say that you’re stuffed.

Sleeping Beauty Diet

The Sleeping Beauty Diet is so easy to follow you can do it with your eyes closed.

Sleeping pills and other sedatives are the main ingredients to this diet, which recommends that you pretty much drug yourself to sleep and try not to wake up as often as possible so as to not eat, AKA coma diet.

Believe it or not, this diet was taken up by the rock and roll legend himself, Elvis Presley, during his later years in an effort to take off some of the pounds before his tour.

While the diet does allow you to catch up on all that missed sleep, it also forces your body to burn off some of your stored calories since you aren’t eating anything at all, ’cause you’re sleeping.

Sleeping the pounds away may sound like a dream but depriving your body of nutrients can cause some serious health nightmares.

The Sun Diet

This strange diet comes from China where a number of women stand outdoor with sunglasses, veils, and umbrellas while they stare at the sun for 44 minutes straight.

This may seem like an odd practice and it is, but according to the Sun Diet, staring at the sun for a prolonged period will help to restore nutrients to your body through the sun’s energy.

The diet also claims to improve eyesight and sleep quality. Using the sun as an entire meal replacement has helped some people shed pounds but at the cost of having massive sunspots in their vision and increasing their risk of developing skin cancer through exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

Tapeworm Diet

The Tapeworm Diet is a fairly easy diet to start and then maintains since the only real work involved is to eat meat infested with tapeworms. The tapeworm is ingested while it’s in its infancy and then it’s allowed to grow and attach itself to the inside of your intestines where it steals its nutrients from the food that you’re digesting.

The dangers of this diet include everything, but also the risk of the tapeworm producing its own waste inside of you causing nausea, diarrhea, and bloating. And if the tapeworm reproduces, it can lead to more serious effects like, I dunno, seizures.

The tapeworm diet has allegedly helped some people dropped one to two pounds a week, and it has actually created businesses in parts of Mexico and Africa where tapeworm farms are run for tourists looking to get some parasitic assistance for their caloric intake.