Worst Fad Diets

This is the most disturbing idea for a diet. Dieters purposefully ingest tapeworm eggs, and then once they have lost enough weight, they take a medicine to kill the tapeworm. Of course, once the tapeworm is killed, the dieter will most likely gain back all of the weight that they lost. You know, if they're lucky enough to rid their body of the parasite. This must be the most disgusting diet ever thought of, and there is evidence that “tapeworm diet pills” were marketed from 1900 – 1920’s. Basically, you ingest beef tapeworm eggs (beef tapeworm is supposedly the best choice), and then you take medicine to kill the tapeworm after you’ve lost the desired amount of weight. It doesn’t take a genius to know this diet is both ineffective and unhealthy. You’re not changing your eating habits with this “diet,” so all the weight will come back once the worm is gone, and it’s extremely unhealthy to have a parasite living in your body sucking all of the nutrition out you.

Seriously? Did anyone actually think this could possibly work? Of course, there's a catch ... With this diet, you can’t drink anything but water, and the only chocolate you get is up to 1-ounce at the end of the day as an evening snack, but you do get to eat pasta for lunch and dinner. Prohibited foods include sugar, alcohol, carbonated drinks, coffee, tea, nuts, junk food, fried foods, dairy products, salt, and red meat. Not sure if it's worth it for that one ounce of chocolate.

As you might have already guessed, this diet revolves around trying to recreate the diet of the caveman. Allowed foods include lean meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts. Cavemen are not allowed to eat grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils. The idea is that all the foods you're eating are those that can be hunted and gathered. Of course, given the fact that the average lifespan of a caveman was probably about 15-20 years, I'm not sure if we should be trying to emulate their diets.

The idea here is that dieters can eat snack foods in small 100-calorie packets. This wouldn't be a bad idea, if you were only eating one or two packs a day, which would be a reasonable snack. However, if you are eating a thousand calories in snacks, neatly divided into 100-calorie packs, the effect is lost.

Remember Snackwell cookies, and other fat-free products? The idea was that you could gorge yourself on junk food as long as it didn't have any fat in it. The problem is, that in order to make a fat-free cake or cookie taste good, it needs to be loaded with calories. So instead of eating fattening foods, dieters eat foods that are loaded with empty calories.

Many types of soup have a similar diet devoted to them. The basic idea is that you are allowed to eat a healthy breakfast, and then for the rest of the day you can eat nothing but soup. It doesn't seem like you'll be getting enough nutrients or protein, and don't even think about how much sodium you'll be ingesting each day.

Obviously too good to be true.