Worst Diets of the Decade

Worst Diets of the Decade

Also known as the "lemonade diet," Master Cleanse has been around for decades. But it has seen a resurgence with stars, such as Beyonce, who told Oprah she used the liquid diet to drop pounds fast for "Dreamgirls." It's not so much a diet as a starvation plan, swapping food for a concoction of lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper mixed with water. Neither sustainable nor healthy, it's continued appeal is proof of America's obsession with quick fixes.

Kate Moss aside, the super-skinny waif look continued well into the new millennium with reality TV stars such as Nicole Ritchie carrying the banner. She wasn't alone, as the Olsen Twins, Linsday Lohan and others showed off their scary-thin frames. There is no one eating plan to get there, although if you asked Kate Moss, cocaine certainly helps. The tragedy is not just how unhealthy these women let themselves get, but that their pictures are splashed across magazines and the Internet, sending the message that this is normal, and beautiful, to young girls everywhere.

Diet endorsements are nothing new. In the early 19th Century, a popular preacher hocked his vegetarian diet and Graham cookies to prevent against carnal desire. Fast forward to the train-wreck, reality TV obsessed society of today, and crazy diets continue to be pushed by the "celebrities" of the day. Before the Kardashians graced the cover of Quick Trim boxes, Anna Nicole Smith endorsed Trim Spa, but she was also taking a cocktail of prescription drugs that eventually took her life. Any pills that have faux (or real) celebrities promising you can "lose weight fast" should make you run for a bag of carrots, not the pharmacy.

Having your jaw wired shut is so 1990s. Today you can actually cause yourself pain and suffering while trying to lose weight. The desire to lose weight pushes people to try just about anything, including a surgically-implanted tongue patch that makes eating not only unpleasant but painful. The patch stays on for about a month, promising you can drop 15 to 30 pounds. Although it pales in popularity to diet pills and cleanses, it is typical of the more absurd methods people will try to whittle their waistlines instead of the non-surgical method: Moving more and eating less.

As noted earlier, cookie diets have been around in various forms for centuries. It sounds so perfect, losing weight while eating something delicious. Stars such as Jennifer Hudson and Kelly Clarkson have reportedly tried one of the most popular incarnations, Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet. While small meals all day long can be part of a sensible diet, eating a single food for calorie control is almost never a sustainable path to weight loss.

This over-the-counter supplement promised to help you build muscle and lose fat. What it also offered was kidney failure, according to the FDA. In May of 2009, the FDA issued an advisory that lead to a recall of 23 Hydroxycut products after multiple cases of liver damage, one fatal, were linked to the supplement. "Good riddance," said Jonny Bowden, nutrition expert and columnist for That's Fit. "If these over-the-counter pills 'work' at all, it's usually due to stimulants like bitter orange or ephedra which are like a mild form of legal speed. Often, as we're seeing, they also contain other ingredients we'd be better off without."

Eating low-calorie soup before dinner is a great way to fill up before the main course arrives. The Cabbage Soup Diet, however, is another starvation plan. The diet isn't entirely new, although it's origins are unknown. But with stars such as Jaime Pressly touting its benefits, it stays in the mainstream. While seven days of only cabbage soup will probably help you lose a few pounds, they're sure to come back as soon as you get back to your regular diet. And since that much cabbage is known to cause a lot of gas, it's one diet you definitely want to skip.

The Kimkins diet, caught on in 2007, after being featured on the cover of Women's World. The website was not backed by a doctor or even a celebrity, but rather a person known as "Kimmer." The publicity led to more than $1 million in membership fees in June 2007 alone. Any plan that answers this question, "Do I need to exercise?" by saying "Absolutely not!" should be a major red flag. The plan essentially involves serious calorie cutting, averaging about 800 calories a day for some plans. The diet is similar to Atkins, although it never moves out of the extremely low-carb phase that is only meant to last for two weeks on Atkins. Critics, including Consumers Affairs, argue that the diet is dangerous and breeds a cult like atmosphere, although the website says it's "a healthy weight loss diet." It received a warning from the FDA and is the target of a class-action lawsuit.