1800’s: Feverless consumption or hysteria
Thought to be a Victorian form of anorexia, ‘hysteria’ swept through the middle classes and the Aristocracy of Western Europe and North America during the second half of the nineteenth century. Literally starving oneself was believed to be the fastest way to embody the Victorian fad of frailty, which was associated with spiritual purity and femininity. At that time, the aristocracy romanticised people who had tuberculosis, or consumption – this may explain the strange moniker of this form of anorexia.

1910’s: The Mega-Bite Diet
San Francisco art dealer, Horace Fletcher, earned his title, ‘The Great Masticator’ – a reference to animals that ‘chew the cud’ – through his publication of a best-selling diet book. In it, he recommended chewing each mouthful at least 32 times until it became a thin, liquid paste, and that any food that couldn’t be broken down to a gruel consistency had to be spat out. Fletcher claimed to lose 65 of his 217 pounds through his remarkable method.

1920’s-2000s: The Hollywood, 18-day Diet or Grapefruit Diet
The 1920s saw the emergence of glamorous flappers as the feminine ideal. In an effort to achieve this slim, hipless, flat-chested look, women tried the Hollywood, 18-day, or Grapefruit diet (which is still around today). The premise is to consume only 800 calories a day through eating barrels of ‘fat-burning’ grapefruits so as to kick-start your metabolism. The only plus: you can have as much black coffee as you like.

1920s-2000: The Tapeworm Diet
Advertisements for tapeworm pills first emerged in the 1920s. Since then, a number of famous women, from opera singer Maria Callas to supermodel Claudia Schiffer, are alleged to have tried this revolting eating plan. Here’s how it works: the tiny parasite lives in the intestine of the host, helping to consume her food. The result: you are hungry all the time but still able to remain rail thin , however much you eat. One urban myth that circulated during the early eighties claimed that a woman taking a ‘miracle diet pill’ lost such an alarming amount of weight in just a few weeks that her doctors decided to get to the bottom of things. When they opened these mysterious pills to investigate the contents, they were greeted by the head of a tapeworm.

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The thin line