My mom actually gave me a little booklet about dieting that she got back in the 60s or something. It said things like "eat 1 soft boiled egg, no salt for breakfast"... The diet it recommended was atrocious and lacked any flavor. You couldn't have cream or sugar in your coffee, no butter (i guess they didn't have magarine), no salt... basically nothing tasty.

Granted, sure these things aren't good for you, but no one in their right mind could stick to that diet and stay sane.

Of course it never mentions anything about exercise.

My Dad always thought that people were fat because of all the parasites in their body. Only way to get them out was to fast until you started to hallucinate or take the miracle wormwood pill that he created.

Or there was the juicer diet of '81. Everything green (including a handfull of grassclippings) all juiced up into a green froth. Gag.

At least it wasn't pee.

How about "just eat less"? If it were that simple, no one would be overweight.

OMG!!! HAHAHA!!

These are just great! Thanks for the laughs!

Atkins... lol! That was the worst month ever... the first two weeks were okay, but after that I just wanted some bread and lots of fruit!

I've lost 5lbs reading this thread laughing. I remember taking Dexatrim in high school after staying up all night studying,not for weight loss. My favorite diet advice- drink grapefruit juice before every meal and never eat any white food.

My mom had a special "amazing diet" written in the front of a health book she had. You HAD to eat EXACTLY what was on the list. NO subtitutions and you would lose like 10 pounds in 3 days. It included a lunch of hot dogs without buns, a bunch of boiled cabbage, eggs, cans of tuna with nothing else on it, and vanilla ice cream. BIZARRE. Even more bizarre? She and I both tried to do this diet several times when I was a kid but it made us too SICK to finish it!

Lyn, I tried the hotdog, boiled egg, and banana diet when I was much younger. Sounds similar to yours. I got VERY sick on the boiled egg day. I lost quiet a bit of weight, mostly because I spent an entire day vomiting.

The things we will try to lose weight. LOL!!!

I remember those machines!!!

I'm sure some of you wore the rubber band on your wrist and popped it everytime you thought about eating? Cause I did.

I've only tried one bizarre fad diet - and of course it came with the title "sacred heart best life diet" orsomething so you thought "oh well a hospital put it out so it must be ok" LOL and it was the same weird food idea as listed above, one day you ate nothing but meat and bananas (!) and then one day of veg and there was a vile soup you could eat all the time LOL yah that lasted 4 days I think The secretary in my office eats a frozen dinner and 100 cal pack of cookies EVERY DAY for about 2 years. I asked one time, how about a sandwich or an apple or something? and she looked at me like I was crazy. She said everything she eats is pre-made so she knows exactly what's in it by reading the label -- i cautiously asked "what if you make your own food so you realllllly know what's in it" again, she just shook her head at me. Basically, she's eaten nothing 'real' in 4 years she said!!!

Remember the cabbage soup diet? I had the runs for days!

I was one of those "start smoking to lose weight" gals. The first time, I did lose 15 pounds. I quit for a year and re-started...again, to lose weight. That time, I actually kept gaining weight. Fat plus 1 1/2 packs a day. So not worth it!

I personally haven't been given any bad advice like these ones (though they are hilarious!! ) but what I have experienced is lots of people seeing my success and trying to capitalize on it by latching on to some totally random aspect of my plan that they seem to think is responsible for all of my weight loss! And then they do it completely differently, but expect to see the same results!

For example, a very typical breakfast for me is 1 cup of Total cereal with 1/2 cup light vanilla soy milk and 1/2 a sliced banana, right? Well, my mom claims that she is trying to eat healthier, and right after I finish my breakfast I'll often see her eating a huge gallon-sized bowl of some sugar-packed/nutritionally empty granola cereal with 2% milk and a whole sliced banana - not terrible choices I guess, but definitely not as healthy, and HUGE portions - and she'll give me this smug look, like "See? It's not so hard; *I* can do it too!" As if all of my weight loss has come just from eating a bowl of cereal!

Oooh, or another one of my friends who is very overweight recently became a vegetarian, and I swear he only did it because I am one, and he's seen the success I've had losing weight, and he thinks that that *must* be why I've lost weight. He freely admits that he didn't do it for ethical reasons (like I did), and indeed he'll still eat meat every once in a while for a "splurge" (or if he's just drunk and "forgets" that he's supposed to be a vegetarian), and it's so frustrating to me that he thinks he's going to lose weight just by giving up meat. I've been a vegetarian for 4 years, and I was still fat for most of it because I didn't replace the meat with healthier stuff; I just ate meatless junk! Which is exactly what he's doing, which is why he's not going to lose any weight from it, either... Yet at our dining hall he'll load up his plate with mac n' cheese, mashed potatoes, a bowl of cream of broccoli soup, etc and talk about "how hard it is being a vegetarian." Sheesh.

This is the same friend who seems to have noticed that I eat Luna Bars a lot, so he started buying them, too... In addition to the sodas and candy bars he buys every day. Ugh, all the "copycats" just kill me! I mean, I would never try to belittle someone else's efforts if I thought they were sincerely trying, but to me it seems more like they're looking for the same thing that all the previous entries in this thread are looking for--a quick fix! An "all you have to do is ____ and you'll lose weight!" When will people realize that it's not that easy?!

Oh yeah, and the time someone told us in college that we could do aversion therapy on ourselves to make us hate sweets, by mixing a sweet thing with something we hated and forcing ourselves to eat it. My roommate and I both HATED cottage cheese so we mixed it with honey and on the count of 3 shoved a huge spoonful in our mouths and tried to eat it. I gagged, and she vomited. All it did was make us hate cottage cheese even more.