Word: diets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Despite its dubious beginnings, fad dieting gained mass appeal in the 19th century. In 1829, Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham touted the Graham diet - centered on caffeine-free drinks and vegetarian cuisine and supplemented by the eponymous graham cracker - as a cure for not just obesity but masturbation (and the subsequent blindness it was thought to cause). The diet became so popular that the students of Oberlin College were forced onto it for a brief period in the 1830s before they successfully rebelled through mass dissent in 1841. Thirty-five years later, an English casketmaker named William Banting became famous...
...holidays are upon us, which means 'tis the season to overindulge. But once the calendar turns, we'll have to shed some of those pounds, which is why Dr. Sanford Siegel appeared on the Today show on Dec. 14 to tout a mouthwatering diet plan: eat six cookies a day as part of a limited-calorie diet, and watch that extra weight melt away...
...Forgive our skepticism, as these aren't snickerdoodles or chocolate-chip cookies but rather protein- and nutrient-packed biscuits that stretch the definition of cookie. The cookie-meal plan has actually been around since 1975, but the quest for the magic diet solution goes back much further. There's a (possibly apocryphal) story that after becoming too fat to ride his horse, William the Conqueror devised an alcohol-only diet in 1087. The monarch didn't grow thinner; instead, he died later that year after falling from his beleaguered steed, leaving his subjects to struggle with finding a coffin...
...Great Masticator for advancing the notion that one should chew food exactly 32 times before spitting it out completely. (Pleasant dinner guests, Fletcher's acolytes were not.) In 1928 dieters could choose between eating only meat and fat (sometimes in trimmings bought directly from the butcher) on the Inuit diet, or skim milk and bananas on Dr. George Harrop's aptly named bananas-and-skim-milk diet. As late as the 1960s, Dr. Herman Taller was touting the Calories Don't Count diet, which held that the quantity of food consumed was unimportant provided that you chased it with vegetable...
...snort at the word--but ultimately, she can't deny it. Lit chronicles her finding first her higher power, then cautiously calling that God and finally embracing Catholicism. She adopts prayer grudgingly and often hilariously ("I'll keep at this perfunctory gratitude the way a stout girl drinks diet sodas while stuffing her face with cheese fries") but is so convincing of her need for it that even an atheist would have trouble arguing her out of her Sunday pilgrimages...