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