There have been some pretty bizarre diets over the last 100 years or so, and I wanted to share some of the craziest with you!

Have you heard of the tapeworm diet? This diet involves swallowing a tapeworm egg, which would then hatch and live in someone’s intestines. The idea was that the tapeworm would consume some of the food that the person ate, leading to weight loss. This diet was popular in the early 20th century, but it’s definitely not recommended any more, as it can lead to serious health problems and probably didn’t work anyway!!

The air diet was another crazy diet. It involved imagining that you’re eating food and even preparing the food, so that you get the whole experience, and then chewing and swallowing air as if you were actually eating. The claim was that you would lose weight by detoxifying your body, but in reality, you were just not eating anything!

Then came the cigarette diet. This diet was popular in the 1920s and 1930s and involved smoking as many cigarettes as you needed to to suppress your appetite. Needless to say, that was an incredibly dangerous way to lose weight.

Another diet was the baby food diet. You could eat as much as you wanted, but you could only eat jars of baby food throughout the day. They claimed that this was an easy way of managing your portion sizes and calorie intake, but it’s not sustainable and quite boring. What happens when you eat out? Do you ask the restaurant to warm up a jar of baby food? I don’t know…..but it didn’t seem to last very long!

Do you remember the grapefruit diet? It was popular in the 1930s and the 1970s and involved eating a grapefruit with every meal. The idea was that the grapefruit contains an enzyme that helps to burn fat, but there was never any scientific evidence that it could happen from just eating one grapefruit!

Have you tried any other crazy diets? Which ones have worked for you? And what do you mean by “worked”?

For me, things that have ‘worked’ are things like Weight Watchers, Slimming World, sickness bugs, stress, nerves, Cambridge Diet, Herbal Life, and so on. Those kinds of things work if we’re just talking about weight loss, and any of us could take a diet off the shelf and follow it, and we would lose weight. But that’s not the point, is it?

To follow a diet, it needs to be something that we can follow for life. Otherwise, what happens when you come off it? Therefore, by definition, it can’t really be a diet; it’s just a way of eating. And it’s your way of eating that is the only thing that will work for you. The ultimate aim would be to eat a mainly whole-food diet most of the time. That means whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean meats, fish, and a few other things some of the time.

But how do you get there?

Well, step by step, slowly, and by hanging around people and surrounding yourself with things that will help you with that. But it’s so much more complicated, isn’t it? We’ve got to look at our motivations, some of the things we’ve gone through in the past, and why we crave food when we’re emotional. There are so many different things that we need to manoeuvre through, and that’s why it’s not as simple as it sounds. It’s not just a case of eating less and moving more. It’s not just a case of eating healthily….

Well, it is, but it isn’t. We need to go through a bit of a process, and I specialise in helping people with that. I’m passionate about helping people to lose weight, feel great, stop dieting, and find freedom in this area. So, if you would love to feel great, eat in a healthy way most of the time, lose weight, and make it feel natural, consider our Healthy, Whole, and Free course. It’s a six-step process:

Firstly, we set the right foundations. We look at what’s going on in our lives and make sure that we’re in the best place possible to move forward to eat healthily and lose weight.

Secondly, we get rid of any dieting mentality that’s gone before. So, any of those kinds of wacky diets you’ve tried and think you might be believing, such as carbohydrates make you fat or don’t eat peas, sweetcorn, avocados or nuts, whatever it is that you might have learned in the past, then we get rid of all those lies. And we teach that food is not inherently bad at all; food can serve a healthy purpose, and it’s just your choice at that time.

Thirdly, we deal with any external environmental considerations or anything that’s going on in your body that makes you crave certain foods. So, that could be really physical cravings, or you could be stuck in the sugar cycle, or it could be hormonal. We look at all those kinds of things and what’s going on in our bodies and also in the environment around us.

Fourthly, we look at changing habits. We look at developing new healthy habits and getting rid of some of the habits we don’t like.

Fifth comes overcoming self-sabotage where we get in the way of what we actually want.

And then finally we look at ending emotional eating in the forms of stress, reward, harmony or negative emotion eating.

I would love you to come and grab a place on our course. It’s just £29 per month, much cheaper than doing the dieting thing AGAIN…You get so much teaching, so much information, live sessions you can come to if you want to, or you can just do it at your own pace.

We’ve got such a supportive community and people find freedom in this area for life.

So do you want to eat what you want, have a healthy whole-food diet most of the time and still be able to do all these ‘normal’ things such as eating out and having an ice cream on holiday? You know, just living normally but healthier, wholer, and freer.

If so, click on the link below to find out more. I’d love to hear from you.

bit.ly/HWFCourse