Fads Diets

This Time It's Gonna Work!

He just has to drink a capful of this before he eats anything…

In fairness, I don’t think the electro-magnetized water craze ever really took off. But when I was ten or eleven, I was put on it. Easily the most absurd diet I was ever subjected to.

We went into a woman’s guesthouse, though “lab” might’ve been her preferred term. It looked like a set from a bad 1950s sci-fi movie. The place was packed with out of date machinery. Blinking screens, pulsing lights, a tangle of wires. I swear there was a Tesla coil somewhere in the corner.

The woman, because that’s all I remember of her, took a Polaroid of me, smeared some of the “charged” water on the black backside, and “read” the iridescence. Based on her reading, she placed a metal rod into a generic plastic bottle of water, fiddled with some knobs and switches, and presto, my cure.

I was to take a capful before eating anything. But the instructions didn’t stop there. Nothing could touch the water. No contact with the cap, no contact with the bottle. It had to be poured carefully: bottle to cap, cap to mouth. My lips were never to graze either surface. This point was made strenuously, as if the success of the whole enterprise hinged on it.

If I followed the protocol, I’d be fixed.

She gave no dietary guidelines beyond the water. And now that I had her magical elixir, I saw no need to change anything. I kept stealing pocket change from my mom’s purse, ordering $5 Domino’s pizzas to the neighbor’s house, meeting the delivery guy on the curb. I’d eat them in the narrow gap between our houses, an alley-like dead zone full of abandoned five-gallon paint cans, and dump the boxes in the neighbor’s trash.

Suffice it to say, I never lost weight. By the time my mom stopped reminding me to take my daily dose, I’d long since started swigging straight from the bottle.

Surely, I figured, my lips had rendered the pH magic inert.

There were so many diets, each cloaked in just enough science-y sounding language to make you pause and think, Well, if they know all those fancy words, maybe they’re onto something.

I still avoid pineapple because of The Beverly Hills Diet.

At least Atkins tried to ease you toward balance eventually. There was a Phase 1, sure, but there was also a Phase 2 and a Phase 3, a reintroduction of sanity. Now we live in the age of extremes. Society’s weight is extreme, so the diets have followed suit. Atkins has all but disappeared, and in its place we’ve embraced keto: Atkins Phase 1, but forever.

Do you think they knew that simple slogan would spark a movement?

Was that just clever marketing, or the opening salvo in a holy war against the rising tide of veganism?

Now it’s beef for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And if you’re still hungry? Beef again, but raw this time.

The Carnivore crowd had us there for a minute, until the guy who wrote the book on it quietly admitted he had to add honey and fruit to his diet because he was literally malnourished. And their next spokesperson? A guy best known for eating raw testicles and steroids.

The last gasps of a dying dynasty always get weird. Caligula, anyone?

We thought maybe we’d get a breather. A turn toward moderation. Some fleeting cultural consensus that balance was the answer.

But no—there’s a new kid in town.

His name? SUGAR.

The Sugar Maxing Diet has arrived. Diabetics, rejoice.

It’s simple: eat sugar. No fat. Limit protein to a modest serving in the evening, poach some egg-whites, if you’re feeling fancy. Just pure, uncut glucose for every meal. Stabilize your blood sugar by never letting it drop. Feel tired? Have more sugar. Feel wired? Good. Have more sugar.

I genuinely hope people don’t get hurt trying this out. But it’s out there now. Rational-seeming people are talking about it, dressing it up in science-y sounding language, touting increased fibroblast growth factor 21, or FGF21.

Who knew? Turns out we’ve all been under-consuming sugar.

In my experience, it’s not the seed oils, or the Red Dye 40, or the sugar, whether from cane or corn. It’s my relationship with them.

Working on my relationship with food has served me a million times more than any of these radical extremes ever did.

It took me many years, and a lot of hard work, to discover a way of eating rooted in curiosity instead of fear. To become more interested in fueling myself than in soothing a vacancy within, or constantly entertaining myself with every bite.

Only once I stopped looking for a magic fix was I able to escape my own cyclical trends.

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