Which one will you adopt to lose weight?

Welcome to the dieting season, the time of year when people are looking for recovery from over-consumption of vacation time.

There is a plethora of choices for those looking to lose weight or avoid a negative gain in the winter, and a few actually work. Some of the most popular weight loss programs, from the intermittent fasting to Tom Brady's alkaline diet, may seem a little odd or excessive – until you consider some of the crazy, even dangerous things (tapeworms) that anyone ?) That we have done in the past lose weight.

But first, a little history about weight and weight loss in the United States. Before the 20th century, few people cared whether a person gained a few pounds. A large environment was considered a sign of prosperity and good health. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of "The Body Project: An Intimate Story of American Girls," said that Americans were "uncomfortable with extreme thinness because it signaled the waste of diseases" such than tuberculosis and cancer.

Then, several things changed this view.

The first is that insurance companies, which had established actuarial tables on risk factors related to occupation, age, bad, height and weight, began to become more sophisticated. According to Susan Speaker, a historian at the National Library of Medicine, the "average" weight of men and women reached "ideal" size and weight in the early 20th century, as insurance companies found a correlation between weight excessive and early mortality. These graphics began to appear on the walls of doctors' offices.

Fashion has also played a role. In the 1920s, while the gaze was fluttering, the women wore finer and tight dresses that often ended just below the knees and allowed the arms to appear. Being plump does not seem so nice in such attire. The advertising world, fueled by new companies, was ready to offer solutions. The result? Here are seven of the strangest – and often unhealthy – strategies for losing weight.

– Smoking instead of nibbling. An advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes from 1928 said: "Look for a lucky instead of a sweet" until the confectionery industry threatens to sue. In 1930, the advertisement was rewritten to say: "We do not represent that smoking cigarettes Lucky Strike will bring modern characters or will reduce flesh.We declare that when we are tempted to do too well, if you want to achieve Fortunately, instead, you will avoid leniency in overweight things and, avoiding all indulgence, keep a modern, graceful form. "According to George Bray, a professor of medicine at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Pennington. Baton Rouge, this statement is somewhat truthful, because the cigarette "stimulates energy expenditure" (or burns calories) and probably replaces snacking for some users. And those who quit tend to gain weight when they replace the oral satisfaction of smoking by eating. But no one can call the consumption of cigarettes a healthy approach.

– Fast pills to suppress your appetite. Amphetamines were prescribed for the first time after the Second World War. They were generally abandoned in 1979, when addiction and abuse potential became better known. Amphetamines were used on battlefields during the war to help sleep-deprived soldiers stay awake and alert. After the war, Smith Kline & French began selling drugs for weight loss and depression. "I'm old enough to remember at college having taken amphetamines all night, and then I would not eat for two days," says Brumberg, 74. The "rainbow pills" of the 1940s resemble those of amphetamines. Years 50 and 60, a colorful set of pills including laxatives, diuretics and amphetamines, resulting in several deaths. Although amphetamines are being eliminated, the Food and Drug Administration still approves methamphetamine (yes, methamphetamine) for short-term weight loss in some people, says Bray.

– A "sweet" diet with an unfortunate name. Then there was Ayds, a fudgel-shaped candy that had to be taken before meals as an appetite suppressant. Introduced for the first time in the 1950s, Ayds became more and more popular over the next 20 years. An advertisement shows a slim woman dressed in a yellow shirt dress (which does not look like size 4): "And I love being back to size 10!" But there was something in those little brown squares – the supplement first included benzocaine, an oral anesthetic that would probably have numbed the taste buds. Later, Ayds was infused with phenylpropanolamine, a decongestant also used for urinary incontinence in dogs. But when the AIDS crisis hit in the 1980s, the word badociation seemed to be too much. Ayds was removed from the market in the late 1980s.

– All the junk food, all the time. Also known as "Twinkie Diet", this approach – plus an experience that a serious diet – was tried by Mark Haub, professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, in 2010. For 10 weeks, Haub ate Twinkies, Doritos, Oreos and other junk food exclusively, while maintaining his calorie limit at around 1,500 calories a day, 800 calories less than he needed to maintain his weight. And he lost 27 pounds. Today, Haub says that he has taken back all of the lost pounds except seven, but he thinks the diet has helped him start his weight loss. "I got to the point where I wanted to make changes to my lifestyle and I used it to start this process," he says. His current diet focuses on whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and a more careful diet, he notes.

– Grapefruit. Sometimes referred to as the "18-day Hollywood diet" or simply the grapefruit diet, this diet, which has existed in some form since the 1930s and re-emerged in the 1980s, limited food to almost nothing except grapefruit and maybe Egg. He consumed between 400 and 800 calories a day. Hillel Schwartz, author of "Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Phantasies and Fatty Fats", says the principle of all historical regimes that were based on an acidic substance (see "A spoonful of vinegar" below) was that the acid in the grapefruit would dissolve the fat inside the body. To be sure, a diet of so few calories a day will probably result in weight loss, so yes, a lot of people on this diet lose weight. But being hungry often meant that dieters turned to binge eating and weight gain after the end of the diet.

– The cure of the tapeworm. Khloe Kardashian may have been joking when she said, "I would do anything to have a lone worm" in order to help her lose weight, but Victorian women took this approach seriously and even some contemporary dieters have tried it. The concept is that a tapeworm living in the intestines consumes calories that could otherwise feed the human host. Elizabeth Tucker, co-author of "Popular Culture in the Digital Age," said by e-mail that she had investigated a Tijuana doctor who had offered to provide tapeworms for weight loss if she came to Mexico for them. She refused because she had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa and that she knew that ingestion of worms could have very serious consequences, including causing a blockage intestinal tract and lesions of the brain, liver and eyes. Tucker says that there was even an episode about the death caused by ingestion of tapeworm in the TV show "1000 ways to die". She adds: "Tapeworms interest us because they look like little friends who eat all the food that is not good for us." On the negative side, the parasites could damage you or kill you. Oh, and there is no proof that the solitary worm's diet actually worked.

– A spoonful of vinegar. The "apple vinegar slimming diet" was popular again a few years ago. The idea is to take a few teaspoons of vinegar diluted in water before a meal, which, according to advocates, induces weight loss by decreasing appetite and even reducing insulin levels. Robert Shmerling, editor-in-chief at Harvard Health Publishing and rheumatologist at Beth Israel's Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, says that no studies have conclusively proven that vinegar causes weight loss, although it is not a problem. it can cause a sensation of nausea that encourages people to eat less. The disadvantage, according to Shmerling's e-mail, is that "because it's very acidic, it can damage tooth enamel or irritate the esophagus", which can cause ebb and flow. acid.

Nutritionists say that while people focus their attention and efforts to lose weight during the holidays, it's good to remember that many diets can help you lose weight fast; the problem is to keep them after the diet.

"The real challenge is what you do when you're on the weight boards," says Bray. "For most people, they are unable to maintain this" because maintaining a weight loss requires permanent changes in eating habits and lifestyle.

According to Bray, this is one of the reasons why there is a perpetual market for new fast diets: "none of them has reached the long-term goal of a curative treatment "against obesity.

Gabriella Petrick, historian of food in Boston, said that the bodies of Americans had begun to change in the twentieth century. "As a society, we are growing," she says.

At the same time, she adds, one understands better and better that "once we have gained weight, it is so difficult to remove." The new thinking is: "Do not put it on not in the first place. "

Nobody found out how to do that either, she says.

(This story has not been changed by NDTV staff and is generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)