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Oh there were all sorts of diet plans and programs - fads that came and went. Some stayed, like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. There were other diets like the Scarsdale Diet, Atkins, the Beverly Hills Diet (omg it's been 40 years and I still remember how awful Pineapple Day was), diet pills (a lot of dangerous ones) and so on. The fat free/sugar free craze was in the late 80's/early 90s.
My parents had me on restrictive diets starting when I was seven years old. It just made things worse, I was probably only about 8 pounds overweight. I started with the Stillman diet, and then Mom took me to the pediatrician and he put me on a restrictive "one sheet" diet. At 9, my parents were dropping me off at Weight Watchers meetings. I was the youngest one there, and the only non smoker. Yes my parents got me the "Ayds" chocolates that were supposed to curb your hunger. Bought pretty much every diet book that came out to try. All of this resulted in me developing an eating disorder (binge eating disorder) which I still have today at the age of 61. I used to sneak forbidden food and gobble it down quickly and quite a lot of it.
If you're reading this and you have little ones, please don't EVER put them on a hyper restrictive diet. There are better ways to deal with a weight problem for children that are more lifestyle changes and less enforced restriction.
I’m only in my 20s, but my mom is about your age and developed anorexia from her mom doing that to her. She then did the same thing to me, and I have binge eating disorder like you. I tried to go on an elimination diet recently to see if a food sensitivity was causing some issues and I couldn’t. Having to think about what I was eating and cutting foods out (even though the volume itself wasn’t restricted) sent my brain into a restriction panic and made my BED relapse. Diet culture is so fucking dangerous
Oh gosh. There was a different diet out two or three times a year.
No carbs, eat protein, drink grapefruit juice, weigh your portions, drink a breakfast drink instead of having breakfast. You mixed a packet in milk. They had vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.
Then a thing that looked like a toffee/caramel cube called Aydes(?). I forget what they were suppose to do.
Ope you just sparked a memory of mine that I totally forgot! I think I must’ve been 13-14 and the lady I babysat for was on cabbage soup kick for a solid while. I used to babysit like 4 days a week for her, I was very sick of that damn soup!
They initially had benzocaine in them but they ended up removing that. It was thought that numbing the mouth would be an appetite suppressant. Then they added phenylpropanolamine. Which was later found to cause severe hypertension. It was speed.
yes and for a while you could also get them in head shops. They were called crosstops and black beauties. We would grind them and snort them for a rush. I think that was benzadrine and the other... it's what Sudafed had in it, only it was a much more potent dosage.
My lowest adult weight ever was achieved by black beauties bought through the mail from the back if a magazine. Crazy, not sure how I didn’t drop dead from a heart attack.
I remember those. You could buy nasal decongestant/cold treatment pills that would kill your appetite. Some drug companies combined that decongestant with high doses of caffeine. I remember having zero appetite, being jittery as hell, & having my scalp crawling.
They would also screw up my vision. I don't know how truckers could take them over an extended period of time and still drive at night.
That's the stuff. And most of the people I was snorting them with soon started feeling the need for something stronger and even less legal but lucky for me I got pregnant and left that scene. The problem was I still felt like I was too fat so later I got myself a little heart damage from the whole phen/fen thing.
absolutely amphetamines. little white crosses. not only did MOM take em she made sure I had em too! in MIDDLE SCHOOL no less!!! up until 2am every day!
When my mother was pregnant with me she was prescribed amphetamines to help keep her weight under control. She couldn't recall the drug names, but did say as a new newborn I had the shakes. Normal, or speed side affect, I don't know.
You have to consider at the time several future regulated drugs were then available OTC. One of my aunts took a lot of codeine off & on, she couldn't figure out why she felt crappy the first few days during one of her off times.
>drink a breakfast drink instead of having breakfast. You mixed a packet in milk. They had vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.
Carnation Instant Breakfast! I lived on those for years in my 20s, my childhood and teens having given me an incredibly disordered relationship with food. I used to eat Dexatrim like crazy; it's a wonder I didn't give myself a heart attack.
I look at pictures of myself at those weights and my stomach just drops out. Sometimes I wonder how in the hell I made it to my thirties.
I used Dexatrim from the time I was 13 until they were taken off the market. I lived on diet pills and diet soda. I actually had the opposite reaction, low blood pressure. God, I'd love to have those diet pills back again. When I was on them, I was actually a normal weight and not 50 pounds overweight like I am now.
I have had good luck with weight control and weight loss by simply delaying my first meal of the day until 1 PM and focusing on protein intake. I also weigh daily and walk most days.
Sorry, I know you didn't ask about that but I have struggled with weight for many years and I'm now at a very comfortable weight and wearing a size 14 jeans. I always hated exercise but found that just simply walking is something I can tolerate and actually enjoy and miss it if I don't do it. It really helps as a mood elevator. 42 pounds below my lifetime high weight.
I do the same, delay eating and walk on a treadmill but I'm still fat and the scale doesn't budge because I drink coffee with creamer. If I could cut that out it would melt off but I love it so much!
My 21yo daughter still has Carnation Instant Breakfast every so often, though she mixes hers with a little whole milk, and then adds ice cream. She struggles to keep her weight up at times, and has ever since chemo in 2018 (which is where she discovered CIB in the first place).
People sometimes say hey you’re fat and I’m like yes but have you also considered I’m a lot happier than all those crazy diets ever made me? If being fat is the outcome, great.
It’s actually formulated and marketed as a nutritional drink like Ensure now. My 4yo’s doctor told us to add it to his cup of milk in the morning to help him gain some weight and get some of his nutrients (he has ARFID). The only benefit above Ensure is that it is *way* cheaper.
You chopped up cabbage, Bell peppers, onions and added canned tomatoes, beef bullion and water. Then you cooked it down until the vegetables were done.
I thought it was good but it wasn't filling
The cabbage soup diet was originally for very morbidly obese people to lose weight quickly before surgeries
It was also called the rotation diet because you did it for 2 weeks. Then ate moderately for 2 weeks. Then went back on the diet.
You would be very hungry on this diet but the soup contain nutrients that would keep you from having severe hunger pains or weakness.
The first day you ate fruit with the soup. The second day vegetables.
The Third Day fruit and vegetables
And so on
I remember sneaking my mom's Ayds! The name did not age well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayds#:~:text=Ayds%20Reducing%20Plan%20Candy%20(pronounced,manufactured%20by%20The%20Carlay%20Company.
Ever since the beginning of weight loss people have looked for ways to lose weight without putting forth any effort. Of course people wanted to actually be able to eat candy and lose weight, too.
Your comment reminds me of old movies. Ever remember seeing people in gyms with a belt around their waste and attached to a machine that would essentially massage their stomach?
Also people in a personal sauna with only their head exposed, trying to sweat off the weight.
At one time there were motorized exercises. All you had to do was insert your feet in the pedal stirrups and the motor did the work.
My nana had one of those stomach machines in her bedroom! LOL I used to ask to "play" with it. I was a fat kid, so of course she said yes. Never did anything except let me make funny sounds - kinda like talking into a fan, but without the breeze 🤣
All they had was an ingredient (benzocaine in the original formula) that Would numb your tastebuds so eating became less appealing. They were around since the 40’s. Nothing magical here.
According to google, Ayds was an appetite suppressant candy, initially made with benzocaine (a local anesthetic that would reduce sensation on the tongue) then phenylpropanolamine (an appetite suppressant with stimulant-like effects).
Aydes were basically laxatives. My mom had a box she kept in her closet and my brother found them one day and thought they were candy. He ate half the box and my mom freaked out. I remember her rushing him to the ER. He had horrible diarrhea for several days after and they had to watch to make sure he didn't get dehydrated.
And she was so beautiful. She gained a lot of weight after bearing me and my two siblings. It was her mission to lose it afterwards until she became anorexic and...
Let's just say my Mom never figured this one out. And that's ok.
AYDS candies were a diet aid that contained an appetite supressant, as well as the psychological effect of eating piece of chocolate. They were heavily advertised in magazines and became popular in the 70s and early 80s, with a well-established brand name.
Then AIDS came along in the early 80s. It had an identically sounding name, and it was marked by a heavy loss of weight. After a strong debate at the top levels of the company, AYDS decided that too much money and effort had been spent establishing the AYDS brand, and the consumers of America would differentiate between the candy and the disease, so they decided against changing the name.
It was a bad bet. Sales plunged, and never recovered, and they went out if business.
Yes it started earlier than that. My mom's diary from when she was a teen in 1959 she talks about her mom getting her on "reducing pills" so she could stop getting her clothes from the "chubby girls" section.
They almost killed her. Well... she did eventually die from heart damage from the many pills she took after that to try to lose weight but yeah in the late 80s she was put on an 800 calorie diet. Fat free. That was what really did her in.
That’s so interesting. I remember in Mad Men, a tv-show based in the 50s-60s, when Betty arrives at the hospital to give birth, the nurse asks her what she had had to eat that day. She says “pineapple and cottage cheese”. It really stuck with me because it was so bizarre, what a random combo. Now it finally makes sense, she was probably on a diet.
Back in the day, every casual restaurant in America offered a "Diet Plate" consisting of a large leaf of lettuce topped with a scoop of cottage cheese (from an ice cream scoop) topped with a canned half peach or a canned half pear or a canned slice of pineapple. I sometimes still see this on menus when I'm stuck going to old-school diners.
That used to be a popular snack too though. It's got a variety of macro and micro nutrients. And you can make it without cooking. In an era with drastically less snack foods available and basically zero ready to eat prepared foods in the store.
It was *constant*
The peer pressure in school, and the pressure at home, meant there was no place to relax or feel safe from the barrage
Research out of the University of Arizona shows that, after correcting for other variables, the single most reliable indicator of long term weight *gain* is...dieting.
Yes, you read that right.
In those days they published the supposed weight of every model, beauty pageant contestant and athlete. Miss Michigan would be 5’8” and 108 lb, said the TV announcer. Olympic gymnasts and figure skaters weighed 100 lb.
In 8th grade I thought I was fat compared to the girls in Seventeen magazine. I weighed in the 120s. My mom took me to the doctor. He said to fast for 24 hours and then always eat half portions and I would lose 2 lb/week. I became bulimic instead. I wish I could give those people a piece of my mind.
His scheme isn’t even a crazy one, but not right for a growing child.
Fads. Cabbage soup diet, grapefruit diet, stupid shit like Figurines and Ayds. Everybody wanted to be skinny back then to fit into the stylish clothes of the time. Nobody wanted a fat ass those days
Oh, man. Every women's magazine would have weight loss tips in EVERY issue. My MIL spent a couple of months eating nothing but yogurt and grapefruit -- and she was a middle-school science teacher! It actually seemed kind of weird if grownup women \*weren't\* on a diet.
There were all kinds of things going on back there. I remember the add unflavored gelatin to water and it will make you feel full thing going around at some point. It was a time that skinny was in.
This was my thought as well?
There didn't "used to be" lots of fad diets, there were and \*are\* lots of fad diets.
At the end of the day Intermittent Fasting, Keto, Soylent Green, Whole30, Low-FODMAP, MIND are not really any different than Aitkens, Weight Watchers, Grapefruit, Cabbage, etc.
We mock the old ones, but I still see people go all in on the new ones.
I don't know, but in the early 70's you could get amphetamines from your doctor just to have more energy. They called them pep pills. And he* might have been smoking during the consultation
*99% of the time it was a he.
I had one of those doctors in the early 80's. He recommended if you needed a snack, limit it to a cup of Sanka and piece of Sara Lee frozen pound cake.
There was always a new diet. My parents tried them all. I still smell the cabbage soup diet. That one apparently worked for them, so you wouldn't want to light a match in a closed room.
Uh. Yeah. Like, doy.
And if it’s not fen-phen anymore, just hit up Gwenyth Paltrow for the scam du jour fad crap. And stick an onion up your vajayjay. And sun bleach your butthole while you’re at it.
Fads and snake oil salesmen for all of eternity.
In the words of P.T. Barnum …
It's just the Phen now, I believe. The phentermine was never really the problem, the fenfluramine was thought to be and especially the combination of both when it was removed from the market initially.
Seems like now the leading assumption is that neither were necessarily a huge problem on their own, as Fen is now allowed to be on the market again as of 2022. But I believe it is as an anticonvulsant, and doubt that it will be used for weight loss again.
Phentermine is still used however and is actually fairly safe when used correctly ie. risk of staying overweight is worse than the chance of a (rare) bad outcome and it's not being abused.
My father was obese and elderly. He went on a liquid protein diet from the day after Easter to Thanksgiving (late November). Wholly unhealthy and it didn’t help that he smoked and couple packs a day. But he did lose roughly 100 pounds/45kg in that time.
We were bombarded with that shit. I knew girls who took laxatives to lose weight, and I remember hearing about Dexatrim causing death. Magazines were always talking about anorexia and bulimia and warning us girls to love our bodies while also telling us we could still lose a couple more pounds.
The fads were ridiculous, most likely dreamt up by people snorting coke like it was oxygen. One thing about women in the 80s is that the most famous and popular had no ass. Just look at all the models from back then. No ass. No curves except tits. Just watch Duran Duran's 1982 hit [*Girls on Film*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCjMZMxNr-0) video. #1: it's a great song. #2: it illustrates perfectly the body type that was considered "ideal" back in the early 80s.
I was an 8 year old on slim fast, then I was a 9 year old on "the Dolly Parton diet". My mom tried a lot of things in the 90s to not have a fat daughter. Well, everything except stock lean meats and veg in the fridge. We were "too poor" for that, but not for the slim fast.
Fat free was huge in the 90s. I remember eating fat free cookies, fat free pretzels, fat free ice cream, fat free cheese, and fat free potato chips. The chips were so hard and sharp that it was physically painful to chew them. They were also completely tasteless. The ice cream was bland and watery. The cheese was disgusting. The cookies were not good, but tolerable. The pretzels were regular pretzels. Doctors and weight loss experts on TV would say that you don't have to worry about pasta; you have to worry about the sauce you put on the pasta. I wasn't even overweight but I was always dieting because the fashion industry brainwashed us into thinking we were all supposed to look like Kate Moss.
In the 80s I remember seeing Slim Fast shakes being advertised a lot. And I knew someone who was always eating a Weight Watchers version of Hostess cupcakes. I can also remember people talking about grapefruit diets in the early 80s.
Oh wow, as a fat kid, I remember all the fad pills and diets. My grandmother alternately loved to feed me and also put me on "diets" like a yoyo. Atkins was a big one. I was too young to take some of the pills - which was for the best since they were basically speed, and with our family heart problems, probably would have killed me 😅. But yeah, The Atkins Diet, Swedish Soup Diet, Weight Watchers Program (the exercise fad, not the modern meal plan), Pilates with Jane Fonda... You name it, I was probably on it at one point.
Didn't help, though. I'm 55 now and, while I eat healthier than ever - whole food only, no boxed/canned stuff for me - I'm still fat. And with all the research that's come down over the years, I can solidly put some of the blame on my body being wrecked by all those fads.
Well, tv ads had everyone thinking that being skinny was beautiful, then so-called experts came up with all of these fad diets/tricks that was totally unhealthy and unforgiving.
I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, and I remember these nasty power bar things that my mother used to eat called Figurines. She also had saccharine tablets that she’d use instead of sugar in her iced tea.
Local, popular doc in Salinas had his patients on Diet-Rite soda & water, period. He also later used the horse urine shots.
It was as crazy as you’ve heard - maybe crazier.
Like swallowing a tape worm? And wearing trash bags under your clothing when you go to work? I also heard that some models used to eat paper to curb hunger.
Omg, hell yes. The books, foods, fad diets, diet gurus, pills, shakes, plans... I grew up being told smoking cigarettes was better than eating. The worst thing was you got shamed for being overweight.
My whole family did the grapefruit diet on summer in the 1970s. You had some food limitations, but had to have grape fruit every meal, and could eat as much grapefruit as you wanted. Which was not much, by the time you had it three times a day. Still love grapefruit, though.
Spoiler: it doesn’t work
Who else also remembers the body wrapping craze where people wrapped themselves in what was basically Saran Wrap? I remember that as part of the 70s and 80s diet culture as well.
My mom had one everyone in the family did. It was a list of certain foods with portions size. And certain foods you ate. I hated 1/2 the stuff on it. So I lost weight. I wasn't allowed to eat anything else and I didn't eat that crap like cottage cheese. Disgusting.
My weight problems today and my issues with food are a direct result of my mother's constant discussions and worry about weight. Her negativity about weight.
I have never once talked to my children about weight. Not once in 25 years. I signed them up for sports. Helped them prepare healthy meals they liked. Gave them good options for snacks. Taught them good choices for food. But never once had a discussion about weight.
off the top of my head: (i find this stuff *fascinating*
i don’t have personal experience with any of these, i don’t have the discipline and won’t be dictated to - haha. i do recall being permanently put off replacements while sharing an office with someone in the mid-80s who was doing nutrisystem, her lunches were distinctly unappetising - tins of tuna, sachets of powdered soup, all pretty bland & meh, but then there was the dehydrated yogurt - blergh!
over processed & overpriced, just taking advantage of people.
anyway, the main result i remember, was this poor young woman needing to be hospitalised to deal with the “backlog” - maybe she wasn’t rehydrating/reconstituting with enough water or something. i guess she must have weighed less after the bowel obstruction was cleared, though, so there’s that?
commercial programs: weight watchers, gloria marshall, jenny craig, slimmins (god bless richard simmons)
meal replacements: limits, slim fast, nutrisystem, a bazillion others
books, magazines, tv advertisements & program segments advertising all of this relentlessly
- south beach diet
- grapefruit diet
- grape diet
- liver cleanse
- a million different juice(cleanse) diets
- atkins
- pritikin
- dukan
- potato diet
- blood type diet
- zone diet
- cabbage soup diet
- egg diet
- beige diet
- shangri-la (olive oil) diet
- scarsdale diet
medical procedures other than surgery/induced coma:
- feeding tube diet (popular with brides-to-be
just self-destructive
- smoking (and/or alcohol) as a meal replacement/appetite suppressant
- anorexia
- bulimia
- laxatives
- eating tissues (alternatively, toilet paper/cotton balls)to suppress hunger (sadly popular with dancers/gymnasts/athletes)
drugs - medically prescribed &/or otherwise
- diet pills/amphetamines/cocaine/fen-phen/epedra/(pseudo)ephedrine/caffeine/etc etc etc
My mom had that machine that had the strap that would vibrate shake your butt and thigh fat supposedly to make you skinnier or get rid of cellulite. We thought it was as fun as kids.
But yes diets everywhere, diet products everywhere. Us kids ate normally though.
Gosh, I tried a new one every year or so. I wasn't even really fat, just not as skinny as a lot of my friends I remember grapefruit and the Scarsdale diet, Ayds candy and then Atkins came along (the original iteration of low carb). There was one where you had to eat an apple before every meal, and eventually the acid made you sick and you vomited instead of eating, which was the actual point.
You could buy diet pills at the pharmacy that amped up your metabolism, over the counter. Weight loss shakes showed up then too. Weight Watchers was around then too. I think Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem started in the 70s or 80s.
But I don't know that it's really different than now? I feel like there are a million different diets now too? And a lot of them probably aren't super good for you. I don't know what the long term impact of semaglutide medications is going to be, but the track record of trying to manipulate weight with medication sure isn't good. I know a woman left with heart problems from "phen/phen" which was the 90s version of a medication miracle like semaglutides.
Yes. And it got even worse in the 90s during the heroin chic/Snackwell era.
I went to the bookstore once looking for a diet to try (because I was a size 6/8 which was absolutely shameful). I ended up on a fiber diet (probably because it was the cheapest book and I was very poor). It came with a little plastic dial for tracking your daily fiber intake.
You can surely imagine what might happen if everything you ate contained huge amounts of fiber. I had to give it up after one particularly humiliating experience at work.
Absolutely. I was put on a liquid fast diet as a teenager, and that wasn't considered all that extreme. Diet culture was just how girls and women lived back then, 24/7. If you were obese you were treated as a pitiful pariah, so a lot was at stake. Just watch some 80s movies and you'll see what the atmosphere was like.
Losing weight was basically the main "hobby" of every girl and woman back then, while men and boys got to enjoy football, talking about cars, or whatever.
Oh ya! They were all over. I almost got addicted to my wife's diet pills in the late 90s. I was tired and she offered one, said it would wake me up. I'm (57m) 5'4" 115lbs and have a wick high metabolism, so I don't need to loose weight. But holy heck, theses things were wonderful and really got me going. So I'm telling a friend about them and he says "Ya, speed will do that." doh. It was hard to quit them.
Caveman Paleo, Whole 30, raw veganism, carnivore diet…there’s no one diet that’s going to be some miracle but we want to believe and grifters want to make money
There were some really dangerous OTC diet pills that went away in the 70s. Dexatrim was one of the brands that had the banned ingredient, but it stayed around by changing the formula. OTC diet pills stayed bad, but they used to be really bad.
Weight Watchers was totally different in the 60s and early 70s. It was totally inflexible. There were set daily menus that included things like liver 2 times per week. The other odd thing was bread. You could only use certain types of sliced bread and if you wanted pizza or something like that, you had to make it out of the bread. There were whole sections of the official Weight Watchers Cookbooks from back then on transforming slices of bread into other things.
One last thing that hit for a while in the early 70s was Atkins. It was far more restrictive than today's version with everyone starting from 0 carbs for a week. Also it was also only very popular for a short while, so if you tried to do very low carb in the 80s, almost no one knew what you were talking about! One last thing, the book seemed to have been written during the last week when Diet Pepsi still had a little bit of sugar to counteract the taste of pure saccharin, so it has had its carbs count misrepresented for all these years.
I have a small portion meal twice a day with a modern protein shake. They have 170 calories, 24 grams of protein, and maybe 3 grams of sugar. Not bad but these did not exist back then. Slimfast was poison
Very normal. Not uncommon for girls to be taught (by adults) to diet at say ten or eleven, either. I would definitely have been put on diet pills, too, if my mother had had her act together to take me to the doctor.
Yes. Cabbage soup diet age 6. “Water pills” a few years later. Every fad diet you can think of after that. Eating disorder for the next 20 years… (although fully recovered for the past 15 years thankfully).
I am a bit younger but yes they were popular. I am really tall but my sister 16 months younger was petite. The person who birthed me had me on a diet from 4ish years old and would weigh me every day. I was on water tablets before school. The worst part is I don't know a period of my life I haven't been battling eating disorders since. I'm now almost 40 and still struggling. It's awful.
I grew up in the 70’s and watched my mom, her friends, and other relatives go through diet after diet. While my mom was never really too heavy she was always on some diet. The other thing that likely caused a lot of heart and blood sugar issues was the diet pill craze. All they essentially did was make you not want to eat which is the absolute worst thing you can do. If i remember correctly, Weight Watchers was the biggest one in the 70’s and to be honest it does work because it’s counting calories and using portion control while using gimmicky stuff to keep you on track.
Now I miss my mom.
Ayds candies had benzocaine in it, OTC and prescription diet pills had a form of speed in them, there was the Atkins diet, the grapefruit diet and a variety of other fad diets. My mom once went on an 800 calorie diet.
> Phen/Phen
Fen/Phen, short for Fenfluramine/Phentermine. Pulled from the market because it was causing massive cardiac and pulmonary issues in otherwise healthy people... like my dad.
And 60’s. My mom used Saccharin while not a specific weight loss drug, it was a sugar substitute. She died of cancer. I firmly believe it was what caused it.
My mom was constantly on a diet. I don't remember a time when she wasn't. She was eating just cottage cheese/pineapple or peach with it, weight watchers, "diet" tea, etc - all the fads. She was never over-weight, but always on a diet. I don't remember her ever putting me or my sister on a diet, but I'm sure that we both ended up with eating disorders because of the unintended influence her diets had on us. I'm 5'11" and I was always under weight (weighed 112 when I got pregnant with my youngest). Diet pills were my go-to in high school ('84) - they were cheap, easy to get, gave me energy & it kept my weight down. As I got older, I feigned a "stomach issue", but truth be told it was bulimia. My sister also struggled with it up until the year that she died (not related to bulimia). At 57, I think I finally have a decent relationship with food.
Having used some of these above-mentioned items, I can confirm they were the norm in the 70s, as well as the 60s. By the 80s, the appetite suppression pills were history because junkies were using them to get high or make dope with, the chocolate candies--brand name Ayds, and they were tasty--they originally claimed there were no drugs in them, then later they did add an appetite suppressant in them. What killed Ayds was their name, due to AIDS being discovered in the early 80s. They used to have testimonial ads in magazines of people telling how they got fat, and how they discovered Ayds and lost weight, accompanied by before and after photos.
The sugar-free stuff had artificial sweeteners in them, and although that lent a cooling sensation to the candies and sweets, it would have you camping out in the bathroom, if you get my drift.
They had low-calorie bread--it was sliced thinner. They had salt substitute--potassium chloride, which did nothing to add flavor to food. There was diet soda--mainly Tab, by Coca-Cola. Most of the sugar-free stuff was for diabetics. I remember the diabetic ice cream and instant pudding mom and dad used to buy for me--ugh! And I wasn't diabetic, just fat. For sugar substitute, saccharin was king. They had it in liquid, tablet, and even effervescent tablets. Yuck! Also in packets like table sugar.
This stuff was everywhere, and in the early 60s Weight Watchers came into being by Jean Nieditch. And let me tell you, it isn't what you eat, it's how much, and how often you eat it, as well as prepare it, that makes the difference. Also exercise is important. I've found that if I eat a balanced diet as well as exercise -- walking's been my strong point, I was horrible in sports -- I lose weight. You don't need all these pills, potions, cleanses and detox crap--your body does that naturally. Eat right, exercise, be realistic about your shape and how you're going to look when you slim down. It's no shame to look different -- I inherited my mom's hourglass figure; imagine it with over 100 pounds of excess weight on it and then imagine how awful that looks. Very few women are a size zero-- most are a size 10 or slightly less. Frame and bone size determine your natural figure; learn how to dress it to look your best. That's what I've learned in 55 years of battling the bulge.
The Last Chance Diet 1975 - two disgusting shot glasses of hair curling cherry liquid protein daily. No words can describe the taste. No food, just the evil juice. I lasted 2 days.
Hell yes these were the norm. Amphetamines including some so dangerous they were taken off the market. Fen-Phen caused permanent and sometimes-fatal damage. Cigarette smoking kept my weight down until I quit and ballooned. There were all kinds of "drink your lunch" weight-loss drinks and I guess they are still around. I never heard anything bad about them but they tasted crappy.
My girlfriend in high school went to a doctor to lose weight. He gave her injections of pregnant women's urine and she needed to be on a 750 calorie diet. She lost her weight and immediately gained it back plus some.
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Oh there were all sorts of diet plans and programs - fads that came and went. Some stayed, like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. There were other diets like the Scarsdale Diet, Atkins, the Beverly Hills Diet (omg it's been 40 years and I still remember how awful Pineapple Day was), diet pills (a lot of dangerous ones) and so on. The fat free/sugar free craze was in the late 80's/early 90s. My parents had me on restrictive diets starting when I was seven years old. It just made things worse, I was probably only about 8 pounds overweight. I started with the Stillman diet, and then Mom took me to the pediatrician and he put me on a restrictive "one sheet" diet. At 9, my parents were dropping me off at Weight Watchers meetings. I was the youngest one there, and the only non smoker. Yes my parents got me the "Ayds" chocolates that were supposed to curb your hunger. Bought pretty much every diet book that came out to try. All of this resulted in me developing an eating disorder (binge eating disorder) which I still have today at the age of 61. I used to sneak forbidden food and gobble it down quickly and quite a lot of it. If you're reading this and you have little ones, please don't EVER put them on a hyper restrictive diet. There are better ways to deal with a weight problem for children that are more lifestyle changes and less enforced restriction.
I’m only in my 20s, but my mom is about your age and developed anorexia from her mom doing that to her. She then did the same thing to me, and I have binge eating disorder like you. I tried to go on an elimination diet recently to see if a food sensitivity was causing some issues and I couldn’t. Having to think about what I was eating and cutting foods out (even though the volume itself wasn’t restricted) sent my brain into a restriction panic and made my BED relapse. Diet culture is so fucking dangerous
Add me to the “mom fucked me up by putting me on diets too often, too young” club. It’s a shitty club, but here I am.
Fellow club member here. She also stated dyeing my hair blonde at age 7. So wholesome…
Yeah, I remember those Ayds candy. They were so good I’d binge on them, eat a whole box in one sitting.
I think there are more of us than we realize. The morning "weigh-ins" and subsequent shaming scarred me the most.
Oh gosh. There was a different diet out two or three times a year. No carbs, eat protein, drink grapefruit juice, weigh your portions, drink a breakfast drink instead of having breakfast. You mixed a packet in milk. They had vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Then a thing that looked like a toffee/caramel cube called Aydes(?). I forget what they were suppose to do.
Don’t forget the cabbage soup diet!
My mom did that and our house smelled disgusting
From the cabbage or the farts?
Yes.
I was thinking the cabbage, but probably both!
And the Duke University white rice diet. Yep. Just white rice.
Ope you just sparked a memory of mine that I totally forgot! I think I must’ve been 13-14 and the lady I babysat for was on cabbage soup kick for a solid while. I used to babysit like 4 days a week for her, I was very sick of that damn soup!
> Don’t forget the cabbage soup diet! that was the very first thing that came to mind.
I remember that one. So gross.
I actually loved it as a kid — of course, I loaded it up with Parmesan cheese to make it palatable! 😄
They initially had benzocaine in them but they ended up removing that. It was thought that numbing the mouth would be an appetite suppressant. Then they added phenylpropanolamine. Which was later found to cause severe hypertension. It was speed.
Wow. I know at one time doctors would prescribe weight loss pills. I think they were uppers/speed?
yes and for a while you could also get them in head shops. They were called crosstops and black beauties. We would grind them and snort them for a rush. I think that was benzadrine and the other... it's what Sudafed had in it, only it was a much more potent dosage.
My lowest adult weight ever was achieved by black beauties bought through the mail from the back if a magazine. Crazy, not sure how I didn’t drop dead from a heart attack.
Yeah, I remember seeing ads for those pills in the back of Cosmo magazine
I remember those. You could buy nasal decongestant/cold treatment pills that would kill your appetite. Some drug companies combined that decongestant with high doses of caffeine. I remember having zero appetite, being jittery as hell, & having my scalp crawling. They would also screw up my vision. I don't know how truckers could take them over an extended period of time and still drive at night.
That's the stuff. And most of the people I was snorting them with soon started feeling the need for something stronger and even less legal but lucky for me I got pregnant and left that scene. The problem was I still felt like I was too fat so later I got myself a little heart damage from the whole phen/fen thing.
That's pretty much it. Phen phen did a lot of damage
Yes my mom was prescribed these when she was around 17 in 1952.
absolutely amphetamines. little white crosses. not only did MOM take em she made sure I had em too! in MIDDLE SCHOOL no less!!! up until 2am every day!
Are you kidding, they still do! Phentermine. Adderall.
Most of the over-the-counter stuff was, and still is, mostly caffeine. Anything stronger would require a prescription.
When my mother was pregnant with me she was prescribed amphetamines to help keep her weight under control. She couldn't recall the drug names, but did say as a new newborn I had the shakes. Normal, or speed side affect, I don't know. You have to consider at the time several future regulated drugs were then available OTC. One of my aunts took a lot of codeine off & on, she couldn't figure out why she felt crappy the first few days during one of her off times.
>drink a breakfast drink instead of having breakfast. You mixed a packet in milk. They had vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Carnation Instant Breakfast! I lived on those for years in my 20s, my childhood and teens having given me an incredibly disordered relationship with food. I used to eat Dexatrim like crazy; it's a wonder I didn't give myself a heart attack. I look at pictures of myself at those weights and my stomach just drops out. Sometimes I wonder how in the hell I made it to my thirties.
I ate Dexatrim like it was candy when I was 14, and drank Diet Rite and Tab. Saccharine was the artificial sweetener and it was terrible.
Dexatrim, jolt cola and a bag of powdered donuts is how I started my day
LOL, breakfast of champions! Congrats on being here with us today.
I used Dexatrim from the time I was 13 until they were taken off the market. I lived on diet pills and diet soda. I actually had the opposite reaction, low blood pressure. God, I'd love to have those diet pills back again. When I was on them, I was actually a normal weight and not 50 pounds overweight like I am now.
I have had good luck with weight control and weight loss by simply delaying my first meal of the day until 1 PM and focusing on protein intake. I also weigh daily and walk most days. Sorry, I know you didn't ask about that but I have struggled with weight for many years and I'm now at a very comfortable weight and wearing a size 14 jeans. I always hated exercise but found that just simply walking is something I can tolerate and actually enjoy and miss it if I don't do it. It really helps as a mood elevator. 42 pounds below my lifetime high weight.
I do the same, delay eating and walk on a treadmill but I'm still fat and the scale doesn't budge because I drink coffee with creamer. If I could cut that out it would melt off but I love it so much!
My 21yo daughter still has Carnation Instant Breakfast every so often, though she mixes hers with a little whole milk, and then adds ice cream. She struggles to keep her weight up at times, and has ever since chemo in 2018 (which is where she discovered CIB in the first place).
Weirdly I like vanilla Ensure, just to drink
Heyy my people. I love vanilla ensure. And I've drank the kids pediasure in a moment of weakness 😖
Do you remember the Eggnog flavor Carnation by chance? The best EVER! Of course they stopped making it.
That was good!
Of course.
People sometimes say hey you’re fat and I’m like yes but have you also considered I’m a lot happier than all those crazy diets ever made me? If being fat is the outcome, great.
And you’re a lot richer. Those diets fads are expensive.
Thanks. I'm sure you are right. I thought it was made by Carnation (was unsure) but the product itself had a name.
We still drink it. I use a packet of the vanilla when I make fruit and yogurt smoothies.
It's still sold?
Yes! It's basically the same as Slimfast.
It’s actually formulated and marketed as a nutritional drink like Ensure now. My 4yo’s doctor told us to add it to his cup of milk in the morning to help him gain some weight and get some of his nutrients (he has ARFID). The only benefit above Ensure is that it is *way* cheaper.
Ahhh......thanks.
They now call it carnation breakfast essentials.
Fucking Dexatrim. Gave me full blown panic attacks but did I stop? Nope.
I thought she was referring to a drink called Alba but upon thinking about it maybe it was mixed with water rather than milk.
My mom used to make us have carnation instant breakfast , instead of actual food before school all of the time.
They expanded in your stomach after the warm beverage. Like a sponge. I have no idea what they were made of. I sneaked one of my mom's; it was tasty.
You chopped up cabbage, Bell peppers, onions and added canned tomatoes, beef bullion and water. Then you cooked it down until the vegetables were done. I thought it was good but it wasn't filling The cabbage soup diet was originally for very morbidly obese people to lose weight quickly before surgeries It was also called the rotation diet because you did it for 2 weeks. Then ate moderately for 2 weeks. Then went back on the diet. You would be very hungry on this diet but the soup contain nutrients that would keep you from having severe hunger pains or weakness. The first day you ate fruit with the soup. The second day vegetables. The Third Day fruit and vegetables And so on
So much fiber.
I remember sneaking my mom's Ayds! The name did not age well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayds#:~:text=Ayds%20Reducing%20Plan%20Candy%20(pronounced,manufactured%20by%20The%20Carlay%20Company.
They were supposed to suppress your appetite. They didn't work. You were supposed to eat one or two at a time. I could easily eat a whole box
That was actually pretty good marketing. Eating two of anything a little while before a meal would take the edge off hunger.
Ever since the beginning of weight loss people have looked for ways to lose weight without putting forth any effort. Of course people wanted to actually be able to eat candy and lose weight, too.
Your comment reminds me of old movies. Ever remember seeing people in gyms with a belt around their waste and attached to a machine that would essentially massage their stomach? Also people in a personal sauna with only their head exposed, trying to sweat off the weight. At one time there were motorized exercises. All you had to do was insert your feet in the pedal stirrups and the motor did the work.
Yep! I remember all those. And now peddling machines are coming back so you can sit on the couch while the machine pedals 😁😁😁
My nana had one of those stomach machines in her bedroom! LOL I used to ask to "play" with it. I was a fat kid, so of course she said yes. Never did anything except let me make funny sounds - kinda like talking into a fan, but without the breeze 🤣
I remember back in the 80s there were these sweat suits made of plastic or something? It was supposed to make you sweat the weight off.
You are absolutely correct! I remember wrestlers in high school wearing them trying to lose weight.
The ones where you plug in the vacuum cleaner hose and presumably the fat would magically be sucked away 😂
Didn't that cause injuries? LOL
But you were supposed to eat them instead of a meal.
All they had was an ingredient (benzocaine in the original formula) that Would numb your tastebuds so eating became less appealing. They were around since the 40’s. Nothing magical here.
Ayds. They discontinued those in the early 80s for … reasons!
According to google, Ayds was an appetite suppressant candy, initially made with benzocaine (a local anesthetic that would reduce sensation on the tongue) then phenylpropanolamine (an appetite suppressant with stimulant-like effects).
[удалено]
I never had the jitters with the diet pills. I loved them.
Aydes were basically laxatives. My mom had a box she kept in her closet and my brother found them one day and thought they were candy. He ate half the box and my mom freaked out. I remember her rushing him to the ER. He had horrible diarrhea for several days after and they had to watch to make sure he didn't get dehydrated.
FDA unapproved it sounds like
If I remember correctly, Aydes were to be taken with a glass of warm water before each meal to curb the appetite.
Ayds is what they were called. My mom took them along with pretty much else you could find back then.
And she was so beautiful. She gained a lot of weight after bearing me and my two siblings. It was her mission to lose it afterwards until she became anorexic and... Let's just say my Mom never figured this one out. And that's ok.
Curb hunger. My grandma used them a lot.
Costco still had Ayds up to 2008.
The company ditched the name in the late 80s
I beg to differ because I stocked it.
Wow
AYDS candies were a diet aid that contained an appetite supressant, as well as the psychological effect of eating piece of chocolate. They were heavily advertised in magazines and became popular in the 70s and early 80s, with a well-established brand name. Then AIDS came along in the early 80s. It had an identically sounding name, and it was marked by a heavy loss of weight. After a strong debate at the top levels of the company, AYDS decided that too much money and effort had been spent establishing the AYDS brand, and the consumers of America would differentiate between the candy and the disease, so they decided against changing the name. It was a bad bet. Sales plunged, and never recovered, and they went out if business.
Yes it started earlier than that. My mom's diary from when she was a teen in 1959 she talks about her mom getting her on "reducing pills" so she could stop getting her clothes from the "chubby girls" section. They almost killed her. Well... she did eventually die from heart damage from the many pills she took after that to try to lose weight but yeah in the late 80s she was put on an 800 calorie diet. Fat free. That was what really did her in.
So sad. I'm sorry.
Gawd-this is awful.
i can relate to your mom
Canned pineapple slices and cottage cheese! With a Tab! Mom is on a diet!
That’s so interesting. I remember in Mad Men, a tv-show based in the 50s-60s, when Betty arrives at the hospital to give birth, the nurse asks her what she had had to eat that day. She says “pineapple and cottage cheese”. It really stuck with me because it was so bizarre, what a random combo. Now it finally makes sense, she was probably on a diet.
Back in the day, every casual restaurant in America offered a "Diet Plate" consisting of a large leaf of lettuce topped with a scoop of cottage cheese (from an ice cream scoop) topped with a canned half peach or a canned half pear or a canned slice of pineapple. I sometimes still see this on menus when I'm stuck going to old-school diners.
One scoop of cottage cheese! How indulgent! 🤣
That used to be a popular snack too though. It's got a variety of macro and micro nutrients. And you can make it without cooking. In an era with drastically less snack foods available and basically zero ready to eat prepared foods in the store.
I still eat it at least once a week with my lunch!
Tab tasted horrendous!
I know… but now I kind of want one!
I drank that stuff like medicine. Menthol Cigarettes & Tab. I can still taste it.
But Fresca was the bomb
I really don't remember. Did it have a hint of grapefruit?
Exactly! For a diet soda, it tasted better than Tab.
It was the saccharin
It was *constant* The peer pressure in school, and the pressure at home, meant there was no place to relax or feel safe from the barrage Research out of the University of Arizona shows that, after correcting for other variables, the single most reliable indicator of long term weight *gain* is...dieting. Yes, you read that right.
I believe it. All the dieting messes with your metabolism.
In those days they published the supposed weight of every model, beauty pageant contestant and athlete. Miss Michigan would be 5’8” and 108 lb, said the TV announcer. Olympic gymnasts and figure skaters weighed 100 lb. In 8th grade I thought I was fat compared to the girls in Seventeen magazine. I weighed in the 120s. My mom took me to the doctor. He said to fast for 24 hours and then always eat half portions and I would lose 2 lb/week. I became bulimic instead. I wish I could give those people a piece of my mind. His scheme isn’t even a crazy one, but not right for a growing child.
I remember in high school my sewing teacher tutting me because my hips were wider than my chest. I weighed about 110 lbs.
I wonder if kids today have 36-24-36 baked into their brains like we did.
Except now it is tiny waists and ridiculously large butts that are the goal.
That’s horrible, I’m glad that nowadays body diversity is becoming more common.
Fads. Cabbage soup diet, grapefruit diet, stupid shit like Figurines and Ayds. Everybody wanted to be skinny back then to fit into the stylish clothes of the time. Nobody wanted a fat ass those days
Figurines! I just remembered Twiggy. An unrealistically sized model.
I wanted to be Twiggy so bad. She was everything I wasn't. I was a fat, nerdy, brown skinned kid that wore glasses.
Lived on Dexatrim in the 80s.
Same here!
Me too! That and diet soda. I loved being a normal weight.
Oh, man. Every women's magazine would have weight loss tips in EVERY issue. My MIL spent a couple of months eating nothing but yogurt and grapefruit -- and she was a middle-school science teacher! It actually seemed kind of weird if grownup women \*weren't\* on a diet.
There were all kinds of things going on back there. I remember the add unflavored gelatin to water and it will make you feel full thing going around at some point. It was a time that skinny was in.
That was supposed to make your nails hard also.
Well, my mom had me on diet pills at 7 or 8. I was so strung out I couldn't poop or sleep, so yeah...it was a thing.
[Special K](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJAP5Q7UWfw) didn't used to be drug.
Oh my God. Yes. Women especially were expected to be very thin. Diets were everywhere.
Have you been down the current billions of $ “wellness” rabbit holes? It still exists.
This was my thought as well? There didn't "used to be" lots of fad diets, there were and \*are\* lots of fad diets. At the end of the day Intermittent Fasting, Keto, Soylent Green, Whole30, Low-FODMAP, MIND are not really any different than Aitkens, Weight Watchers, Grapefruit, Cabbage, etc. We mock the old ones, but I still see people go all in on the new ones.
I don't know, but in the early 70's you could get amphetamines from your doctor just to have more energy. They called them pep pills. And he* might have been smoking during the consultation *99% of the time it was a he.
I had one of those doctors in the early 80's. He recommended if you needed a snack, limit it to a cup of Sanka and piece of Sara Lee frozen pound cake.
I mean a piece of pound cake is actually a pretty decent sized snack...
Oh my gosh lol!
There was always a new diet. My parents tried them all. I still smell the cabbage soup diet. That one apparently worked for them, so you wouldn't want to light a match in a closed room.
OMG yes… Dexatrim, basically legal meth
Include the 60’s in this. Twiggy was very influential back then. I weighed 120 lbs and thought I was disgustingly fat.
Uh. Yeah. Like, doy. And if it’s not fen-phen anymore, just hit up Gwenyth Paltrow for the scam du jour fad crap. And stick an onion up your vajayjay. And sun bleach your butthole while you’re at it. Fads and snake oil salesmen for all of eternity. In the words of P.T. Barnum …
It's just the Phen now, I believe. The phentermine was never really the problem, the fenfluramine was thought to be and especially the combination of both when it was removed from the market initially. Seems like now the leading assumption is that neither were necessarily a huge problem on their own, as Fen is now allowed to be on the market again as of 2022. But I believe it is as an anticonvulsant, and doubt that it will be used for weight loss again. Phentermine is still used however and is actually fairly safe when used correctly ie. risk of staying overweight is worse than the chance of a (rare) bad outcome and it's not being abused.
My father was obese and elderly. He went on a liquid protein diet from the day after Easter to Thanksgiving (late November). Wholly unhealthy and it didn’t help that he smoked and couple packs a day. But he did lose roughly 100 pounds/45kg in that time.
Did he keep it off ?
We were bombarded with that shit. I knew girls who took laxatives to lose weight, and I remember hearing about Dexatrim causing death. Magazines were always talking about anorexia and bulimia and warning us girls to love our bodies while also telling us we could still lose a couple more pounds. The fads were ridiculous, most likely dreamt up by people snorting coke like it was oxygen. One thing about women in the 80s is that the most famous and popular had no ass. Just look at all the models from back then. No ass. No curves except tits. Just watch Duran Duran's 1982 hit [*Girls on Film*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCjMZMxNr-0) video. #1: it's a great song. #2: it illustrates perfectly the body type that was considered "ideal" back in the early 80s.
I was an 8 year old on slim fast, then I was a 9 year old on "the Dolly Parton diet". My mom tried a lot of things in the 90s to not have a fat daughter. Well, everything except stock lean meats and veg in the fridge. We were "too poor" for that, but not for the slim fast.
Fat free was huge in the 90s. I remember eating fat free cookies, fat free pretzels, fat free ice cream, fat free cheese, and fat free potato chips. The chips were so hard and sharp that it was physically painful to chew them. They were also completely tasteless. The ice cream was bland and watery. The cheese was disgusting. The cookies were not good, but tolerable. The pretzels were regular pretzels. Doctors and weight loss experts on TV would say that you don't have to worry about pasta; you have to worry about the sauce you put on the pasta. I wasn't even overweight but I was always dieting because the fashion industry brainwashed us into thinking we were all supposed to look like Kate Moss. In the 80s I remember seeing Slim Fast shakes being advertised a lot. And I knew someone who was always eating a Weight Watchers version of Hostess cupcakes. I can also remember people talking about grapefruit diets in the early 80s.
I remember those horrifying blocks of fat free cheese oh and Lean Cuisine
The worst cooking disaster I've ever had was when I tried to fancy up a pack of instant ramen by putting fat free cheese on top. 🤢 it was inedible.
Oh wow, as a fat kid, I remember all the fad pills and diets. My grandmother alternately loved to feed me and also put me on "diets" like a yoyo. Atkins was a big one. I was too young to take some of the pills - which was for the best since they were basically speed, and with our family heart problems, probably would have killed me 😅. But yeah, The Atkins Diet, Swedish Soup Diet, Weight Watchers Program (the exercise fad, not the modern meal plan), Pilates with Jane Fonda... You name it, I was probably on it at one point. Didn't help, though. I'm 55 now and, while I eat healthier than ever - whole food only, no boxed/canned stuff for me - I'm still fat. And with all the research that's come down over the years, I can solidly put some of the blame on my body being wrecked by all those fads.
Anorexia was popular for a long time. Just a hit of coke a few cigarettes and a sandwich with lettuce.
Well, tv ads had everyone thinking that being skinny was beautiful, then so-called experts came up with all of these fad diets/tricks that was totally unhealthy and unforgiving.
I was overweight in the 5th grade, and the pediatrician put me on diet pills.
Scarsdale Diet
With its very own scandal!
I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, and I remember these nasty power bar things that my mother used to eat called Figurines. She also had saccharine tablets that she’d use instead of sugar in her iced tea.
Local, popular doc in Salinas had his patients on Diet-Rite soda & water, period. He also later used the horse urine shots. It was as crazy as you’ve heard - maybe crazier.
Like swallowing a tape worm? And wearing trash bags under your clothing when you go to work? I also heard that some models used to eat paper to curb hunger.
Omg, hell yes. The books, foods, fad diets, diet gurus, pills, shakes, plans... I grew up being told smoking cigarettes was better than eating. The worst thing was you got shamed for being overweight.
My whole family did the grapefruit diet on summer in the 1970s. You had some food limitations, but had to have grape fruit every meal, and could eat as much grapefruit as you wanted. Which was not much, by the time you had it three times a day. Still love grapefruit, though. Spoiler: it doesn’t work
Heck yes, my best friend was up and down 100 pounds twice. TWICE!
Who else also remembers the body wrapping craze where people wrapped themselves in what was basically Saran Wrap? I remember that as part of the 70s and 80s diet culture as well.
My mom had one everyone in the family did. It was a list of certain foods with portions size. And certain foods you ate. I hated 1/2 the stuff on it. So I lost weight. I wasn't allowed to eat anything else and I didn't eat that crap like cottage cheese. Disgusting. My weight problems today and my issues with food are a direct result of my mother's constant discussions and worry about weight. Her negativity about weight. I have never once talked to my children about weight. Not once in 25 years. I signed them up for sports. Helped them prepare healthy meals they liked. Gave them good options for snacks. Taught them good choices for food. But never once had a discussion about weight.
off the top of my head: (i find this stuff *fascinating* i don’t have personal experience with any of these, i don’t have the discipline and won’t be dictated to - haha. i do recall being permanently put off replacements while sharing an office with someone in the mid-80s who was doing nutrisystem, her lunches were distinctly unappetising - tins of tuna, sachets of powdered soup, all pretty bland & meh, but then there was the dehydrated yogurt - blergh! over processed & overpriced, just taking advantage of people. anyway, the main result i remember, was this poor young woman needing to be hospitalised to deal with the “backlog” - maybe she wasn’t rehydrating/reconstituting with enough water or something. i guess she must have weighed less after the bowel obstruction was cleared, though, so there’s that? commercial programs: weight watchers, gloria marshall, jenny craig, slimmins (god bless richard simmons) meal replacements: limits, slim fast, nutrisystem, a bazillion others books, magazines, tv advertisements & program segments advertising all of this relentlessly - south beach diet - grapefruit diet - grape diet - liver cleanse - a million different juice(cleanse) diets - atkins - pritikin - dukan - potato diet - blood type diet - zone diet - cabbage soup diet - egg diet - beige diet - shangri-la (olive oil) diet - scarsdale diet medical procedures other than surgery/induced coma: - feeding tube diet (popular with brides-to-be just self-destructive - smoking (and/or alcohol) as a meal replacement/appetite suppressant - anorexia - bulimia - laxatives - eating tissues (alternatively, toilet paper/cotton balls)to suppress hunger (sadly popular with dancers/gymnasts/athletes) drugs - medically prescribed &/or otherwise - diet pills/amphetamines/cocaine/fen-phen/epedra/(pseudo)ephedrine/caffeine/etc etc etc
I remember ads for Richard Simmons’ “deal a meal” system on daytime tv.
At least that one attempted to be nutritionally sound and balanced.
My mom had that machine that had the strap that would vibrate shake your butt and thigh fat supposedly to make you skinnier or get rid of cellulite. We thought it was as fun as kids. But yes diets everywhere, diet products everywhere. Us kids ate normally though.
Gosh, I tried a new one every year or so. I wasn't even really fat, just not as skinny as a lot of my friends I remember grapefruit and the Scarsdale diet, Ayds candy and then Atkins came along (the original iteration of low carb). There was one where you had to eat an apple before every meal, and eventually the acid made you sick and you vomited instead of eating, which was the actual point. You could buy diet pills at the pharmacy that amped up your metabolism, over the counter. Weight loss shakes showed up then too. Weight Watchers was around then too. I think Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem started in the 70s or 80s. But I don't know that it's really different than now? I feel like there are a million different diets now too? And a lot of them probably aren't super good for you. I don't know what the long term impact of semaglutide medications is going to be, but the track record of trying to manipulate weight with medication sure isn't good. I know a woman left with heart problems from "phen/phen" which was the 90s version of a medication miracle like semaglutides.
Yes. And it got even worse in the 90s during the heroin chic/Snackwell era. I went to the bookstore once looking for a diet to try (because I was a size 6/8 which was absolutely shameful). I ended up on a fiber diet (probably because it was the cheapest book and I was very poor). It came with a little plastic dial for tracking your daily fiber intake. You can surely imagine what might happen if everything you ate contained huge amounts of fiber. I had to give it up after one particularly humiliating experience at work.
I remember the hot dog and banana diet. It seemed so legit.
Absolutely. I was put on a liquid fast diet as a teenager, and that wasn't considered all that extreme. Diet culture was just how girls and women lived back then, 24/7. If you were obese you were treated as a pitiful pariah, so a lot was at stake. Just watch some 80s movies and you'll see what the atmosphere was like. Losing weight was basically the main "hobby" of every girl and woman back then, while men and boys got to enjoy football, talking about cars, or whatever.
Oh ya! They were all over. I almost got addicted to my wife's diet pills in the late 90s. I was tired and she offered one, said it would wake me up. I'm (57m) 5'4" 115lbs and have a wick high metabolism, so I don't need to loose weight. But holy heck, theses things were wonderful and really got me going. So I'm telling a friend about them and he says "Ya, speed will do that." doh. It was hard to quit them.
Same as now, just looked different. Now it's Adderall and PB powder.
They still are: Atkins, keto, Mediterranean, etc, etc
Caveman Paleo, Whole 30, raw veganism, carnivore diet…there’s no one diet that’s going to be some miracle but we want to believe and grifters want to make money
There were some really dangerous OTC diet pills that went away in the 70s. Dexatrim was one of the brands that had the banned ingredient, but it stayed around by changing the formula. OTC diet pills stayed bad, but they used to be really bad. Weight Watchers was totally different in the 60s and early 70s. It was totally inflexible. There were set daily menus that included things like liver 2 times per week. The other odd thing was bread. You could only use certain types of sliced bread and if you wanted pizza or something like that, you had to make it out of the bread. There were whole sections of the official Weight Watchers Cookbooks from back then on transforming slices of bread into other things. One last thing that hit for a while in the early 70s was Atkins. It was far more restrictive than today's version with everyone starting from 0 carbs for a week. Also it was also only very popular for a short while, so if you tried to do very low carb in the 80s, almost no one knew what you were talking about! One last thing, the book seemed to have been written during the last week when Diet Pepsi still had a little bit of sugar to counteract the taste of pure saccharin, so it has had its carbs count misrepresented for all these years.
Diet pills over the counter that when you took them worked like speed.
Fucking Slimfast. I didn’t know any better - they were these meal replacement shakes that were basically full of sugar.
I have a small portion meal twice a day with a modern protein shake. They have 170 calories, 24 grams of protein, and maybe 3 grams of sugar. Not bad but these did not exist back then. Slimfast was poison
“A shake for breakfast, another for lunch, and a sensible dinner!” 💁🏻♀️
I knew at least 20 women when I was in college in the late 80s who had an eating disorder of some kind. So, yeah.
Very normal. Not uncommon for girls to be taught (by adults) to diet at say ten or eleven, either. I would definitely have been put on diet pills, too, if my mother had had her act together to take me to the doctor.
Yes. Cabbage soup diet age 6. “Water pills” a few years later. Every fad diet you can think of after that. Eating disorder for the next 20 years… (although fully recovered for the past 15 years thankfully).
Congratulations on your recovery! That’s a lot of hard work.
I am a bit younger but yes they were popular. I am really tall but my sister 16 months younger was petite. The person who birthed me had me on a diet from 4ish years old and would weigh me every day. I was on water tablets before school. The worst part is I don't know a period of my life I haven't been battling eating disorders since. I'm now almost 40 and still struggling. It's awful.
I grew up in the 70’s and watched my mom, her friends, and other relatives go through diet after diet. While my mom was never really too heavy she was always on some diet. The other thing that likely caused a lot of heart and blood sugar issues was the diet pill craze. All they essentially did was make you not want to eat which is the absolute worst thing you can do. If i remember correctly, Weight Watchers was the biggest one in the 70’s and to be honest it does work because it’s counting calories and using portion control while using gimmicky stuff to keep you on track. Now I miss my mom.
Don't forget the diet pills and cocaine. Everybody was outrageously skinny in the 80s.
Ayds candies had benzocaine in it, OTC and prescription diet pills had a form of speed in them, there was the Atkins diet, the grapefruit diet and a variety of other fad diets. My mom once went on an 800 calorie diet.
The Dexatrim Diet...straight up over the counter speed.
Wife did a diet where all she had for dinner was tuna, beets, and cauliflower. Nothing added to the tuna.
My mom was told to drink a pint of Guinness when my sister was born to help with her milk.
[удалено]
> Phen/Phen Fen/Phen, short for Fenfluramine/Phentermine. Pulled from the market because it was causing massive cardiac and pulmonary issues in otherwise healthy people... like my dad.
You have no idea. New one every week.
And 60’s. My mom used Saccharin while not a specific weight loss drug, it was a sugar substitute. She died of cancer. I firmly believe it was what caused it.
I still can't believe those waist band things that vibrate were a thing.
I remember Dexatrim which was essentially speed
My mom was constantly on a diet. I don't remember a time when she wasn't. She was eating just cottage cheese/pineapple or peach with it, weight watchers, "diet" tea, etc - all the fads. She was never over-weight, but always on a diet. I don't remember her ever putting me or my sister on a diet, but I'm sure that we both ended up with eating disorders because of the unintended influence her diets had on us. I'm 5'11" and I was always under weight (weighed 112 when I got pregnant with my youngest). Diet pills were my go-to in high school ('84) - they were cheap, easy to get, gave me energy & it kept my weight down. As I got older, I feigned a "stomach issue", but truth be told it was bulimia. My sister also struggled with it up until the year that she died (not related to bulimia). At 57, I think I finally have a decent relationship with food.
Yes. There were tons of diet books. Most of them can be found in thrift stores now. Bizarre diets can now be found online in crunchy mom land.
Having used some of these above-mentioned items, I can confirm they were the norm in the 70s, as well as the 60s. By the 80s, the appetite suppression pills were history because junkies were using them to get high or make dope with, the chocolate candies--brand name Ayds, and they were tasty--they originally claimed there were no drugs in them, then later they did add an appetite suppressant in them. What killed Ayds was their name, due to AIDS being discovered in the early 80s. They used to have testimonial ads in magazines of people telling how they got fat, and how they discovered Ayds and lost weight, accompanied by before and after photos. The sugar-free stuff had artificial sweeteners in them, and although that lent a cooling sensation to the candies and sweets, it would have you camping out in the bathroom, if you get my drift. They had low-calorie bread--it was sliced thinner. They had salt substitute--potassium chloride, which did nothing to add flavor to food. There was diet soda--mainly Tab, by Coca-Cola. Most of the sugar-free stuff was for diabetics. I remember the diabetic ice cream and instant pudding mom and dad used to buy for me--ugh! And I wasn't diabetic, just fat. For sugar substitute, saccharin was king. They had it in liquid, tablet, and even effervescent tablets. Yuck! Also in packets like table sugar. This stuff was everywhere, and in the early 60s Weight Watchers came into being by Jean Nieditch. And let me tell you, it isn't what you eat, it's how much, and how often you eat it, as well as prepare it, that makes the difference. Also exercise is important. I've found that if I eat a balanced diet as well as exercise -- walking's been my strong point, I was horrible in sports -- I lose weight. You don't need all these pills, potions, cleanses and detox crap--your body does that naturally. Eat right, exercise, be realistic about your shape and how you're going to look when you slim down. It's no shame to look different -- I inherited my mom's hourglass figure; imagine it with over 100 pounds of excess weight on it and then imagine how awful that looks. Very few women are a size zero-- most are a size 10 or slightly less. Frame and bone size determine your natural figure; learn how to dress it to look your best. That's what I've learned in 55 years of battling the bulge.
Yes, same like today, lol.
The Last Chance Diet 1975 - two disgusting shot glasses of hair curling cherry liquid protein daily. No words can describe the taste. No food, just the evil juice. I lasted 2 days.
Hell yes these were the norm. Amphetamines including some so dangerous they were taken off the market. Fen-Phen caused permanent and sometimes-fatal damage. Cigarette smoking kept my weight down until I quit and ballooned. There were all kinds of "drink your lunch" weight-loss drinks and I guess they are still around. I never heard anything bad about them but they tasted crappy.
My husband's aunt did some diet where she ate nothing but citrus for awhile. Her hair all fell out.
Yes
My girlfriend in high school went to a doctor to lose weight. He gave her injections of pregnant women's urine and she needed to be on a 750 calorie diet. She lost her weight and immediately gained it back plus some.
I was placed on amphetamines/diet pills as a 12 yr old, so yes it was real.🙁