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Marilyn Monroe’s prizefighter-style diet is all protein and fat
02.02.2015
01:04 pm
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While I loathe the popular tendency to obsess over what women eat, this 1952 Marilyn Monroe interview from Pageant Magazine is probably the only celebrity diet I’ve ever found to be interesting. A 26-year-old Norma Jean lists off her meals and she sounds like she was eating like a prizefighter—complete with a Rocky Balboa-style raw egg concoction.

I’ve been told that my eating habits are absolutely bizarre, but I don’t think so. Before I take my morning shower, I start warming a cup of milk on the hot plate I keep in my hotel room. When it’s hot, I break two raw eggs into the milk, whip them up with a fork, and drink them while I’m dressing. I supplement this with a multi-vitamin pill, and I doubt if any doctor could recommend a more nourishing breakfast for a working girl in a hurry.

Dinner. My dinners at home are startlingly simple. Every night I stop at the market near my hotel and pick up a steak, lamb chops or some liver, which I broil in the electric oven in my room. I usually eat four or five raw carrots with my meat, and that is all. I must be part rabbit; I never get bored with raw carrots.

P.S. It’s a good thing, I suppose, that I eat simply during the day, for in recent months I have developed the habit of stopping off at Wil Wright’s ice cream parlor for a hot fudge sundae on my way home from my evening drama classes. I’m sure that I couldn’t allow myself this indulgence were it not that my normal diet is composed almost totally of protein foods.”

High-protein, some vegetables and the odd hot fudge sundae—sounds pretty consistent with what a doctor might prescribe today, but really out of the ordinary for 1952, when America was very much in love with starches, but dieters were mostly fearful of fat. The only thing I find truly weird is the raw eggs and warm milk mixture. I guess whatever it takes to get those guns and those gams, right?
 
Via Eater

Posted by Amber Frost
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02.02.2015
01:04 pm
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Proto-Atkins, suction & ‘the rack’: Weight-loss fads in 50s Britain were as stupid as they are now
07.25.2014
11:01 am
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Nothing is quite so reassuring as proof that the neuroses of humanity remain historically unchanged. Despite the prevailing myth that at some magical point in time, people were both naturally healthy and naturally hot, diet and exercise fads have always existed. This 1958 footage from British Pathé—which leads with “Take heart, girls, you can reduce without starvation diet!”—has a couple of super-weird “human interest” features on how to keep skinny.

There is a sort of pre-Paleo, proto-Atkins diet from a doctor who guesses that we were way healthier before the advent of agriculture gave us delicious, wonderful potatoes and bread (if you can’t tell, I have no patience for such chicanery). There are models doing what looks like the most genteel, ladylike, and totally ineffectual exercise ever. There’s a terrifying suction machine, and my favorite... “the rack,” which stretches out your body to “tone muscles” and is named after a popular pre-Enlightenment torture device.

You laugh, but I’m sure you’ll see at least five ads for a purportedly magical diet food on the Internet today—at least the old fashioned rack doesn’t preclude mashed potatoes. Just beware of the Spanish Inquisition when you’re using it, okay?
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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07.25.2014
11:01 am
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Trendy celebrity diets photographed like stately still lifes from the Renaissance
06.05.2014
03:08 pm
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Celebrity fad diet
The Beyoncé Cleanse
 
Italian photographer Dan Bannino has recently completed a cheeky art project, to translate a bunch of celebrity fad diets from our own time (as well as a couple from a few centuries ago) and depict them in the form of a magnificent still life by a great master, perhaps an inspired 17th-century “daubster” (hey, I had to look it up too) from Holland, Flanders, or some place like that. I can’t remember who said it, possibly someone from Monty Python, that the essence of comedy is to elevate the humble and bring down the lofty, and this series of photographs (which are quite pretty in their own right) certainly fits that paradigm.

Here’s Bannino’s comment on the series:
 

With this series my aim was to capture the beauty that lies in this terrible constriction of diets and deprivation, giving them the importance of an old master’s painting. I wanted to make them significant, like classic works of arts that are becoming more and more weighty as they grow older. My aim was to show how this weirdness hasn’t changed even since the 15th century.

 
I don’t think I knew that the “Cleanse” is so closely associated with Beyoncé. In fact, the Cleanse has been around for much longer than Beyoncé has been alive. It was originally called the Master Cleanse, as I believe it still is, and was developed by Stanley Burroughs in the 1940s and, decades later, promoted in his books The Master Cleanser and Healing for the Age of Enlightenment (both 1976)—by the bye, isn’t that second title just totally spot-on for a book that would come out today? Burroughs was, at least in that sense, way ahead of his time.
 
Celebrity fad diet
Charles Saatchi, Eggs diet
 
Celebrity fad diet
Gwyneth Paltrow, Strict detox diet
 
Celebrity fad diet
Bill Clinton, Cabbage soup diet
 
Celebrity fad diet
Kate Moss, Hollywood diet
 
Celebrity fad diet
Simon Cowell, Life-enhancing diet
 
Celebrity fad diet
Luigi Cornaro, Sober life
 
Celebrity fad diet
Henry VIII, Banquet diet
 
Celebrity fad diet
Lord Byron, Romantic poet’s diet
 

For the curious, here’s the real thing. This is the Dutch painter Willem Claeszoon Heda’s Breakfast Table with Blackberry Pie from 1631:
 
Breakfast Table with Blackberry Pie
 
via designboom

Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.05.2014
03:08 pm
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