Just because someone in your neighborhood has a cousin who lost 10 pounds in four days with a diet doesn't mean it’s safe, effective, and sustainable for you. We tend to think that being stylish and eating healthily is a recent obsession- however, if you go back through human history, it turns out that dumb things have been eaten for a lot longer than you might have assumed.

People are willing to undergo crazy diets just so they can drop a few kilos or lose some love handles to maintain a slim figure. There have been dozens of weird and wacky diets over the years – from the mayo diet to cabbage soup diet to carbo diet and many others. Some may have gotten the job done, but a few could have been too effective or even harmful for people.

There’s no shortage of choices when it comes to choosing a diet that’s right for you. Let’s have a look at some of the diets which will make you shiver:

1. Tapeworms (Mexico) & Roundworms (China): Why plan healthy meals when you can infect your body with ravenous parasites? Up until the turn of the century, tapeworms were sold inside pills for diet purposes. It was argued that the worm would hook onto your stomach lining and eat your food, causing you to lose weight. Baby tapeworms grew to 25 feet in length and caused complications such as seizures, and the U.S. administration banned their sale. They were also associated with brain cysts, eye cysts, and spinal cord cysts. Roundworms, like tapeworms, hatch in the stomach and consume your lunch, but they also cause diseases such as respiratory failure and liver disease.

2. The Cotton Ball Diet: Almost all modern diets involve eating something edible, regardless of how odd they are- this is what separates the cotton ball diet from its contemporaries. This includes consuming five whole cotton balls a day, soaked in the desired choice of juice/smoothies. The fad first became popular in 2014 after a series of seriously weird YouTube videos, but it has been widely condemned as extremely dangerous and crazy- it causes intestinal blockage, osteoporosis, etc.

3. The Air diet: It's easy. Those practicing are allowed to eat exactly nothing. The basis for the diet is to eat and take in nothing but the air you are breathing.

4.The Sleeping Beauty Diet: Don't forget that you can't eat while you're sleeping. This particular diet requires sleeping to lose weight, as its name implies. The diet primarily encourages you to sleep when you feel hungry. Moreover, practitioners were also encouraged to do a lot of exercise with a calorie deficit.

5.The Chewing Diet: While tilting your head at an angle, chew each bite 32 times and spit out the remains.

6.The Vinegar Diet: Lord Byron's report of anorexia and bulimia did not stop him from promoting the vinegar diet in the 1820s. The gist of his idea is to drink a lot of vinegar daily plus one cup of tea and one raw egg. Side effects include vomiting and diarrhea. Lord Byron ate an extreme diet of potatoes dipped in vinegar and biscuits along with soda water. Then he would gobble up large meals and follow those up with doses of milk of magnesia. At times, he would drink apple cider vinegar mixed with water as a diuretic and hunger suppressant. Nothing wrong with that—it’s probably the cycles of eating extremes that harmed him.

7.The Baby Food Diet: Although it sounds like a joke, there are in fact people who claim to have lost weight by eating only baby food. Baby food is supposed to be less calorically dense, so you’ll lose weight quickly. Although it is possible, you can’t live on baby food forever. A diet designed to promote weight loss involves eating upward of sixteen jars of baby food per day. You can still have one regular meal per day. Not only is the plan weird, but it also involves embarrassing trips to the store.

8.The Vision Diet: Regarding diets, the vision diet is one of the oddest. It employs your eyes to hold off hunger. The diet was devised in the early 2000s by a Japanese inventor based on the theory that foods look much more appealing if they are in the red or yellow spectrum of color. As a means of counteracting this, wearing blue lenses will make the food appear less appetizing, thus curbing your hunger for them.

9.Clipping Your Nose While Eating Food: The idea behind it is inserting nose plugs/using a clip to block the smell receptors in your nose which helps to suppress appetite.

10. The Ice Diet: Feed yourself a litre of ice per day and then let it melt rather than chewing it. According to the people who made this diet, melting ice is a calorie-burning job because our body produces heat to melt the ice. Well, so is dehydration.

11. The Ice Cream Diet: While the ice cream diet sounds appealing, it won't lead to lasting weight loss. The participants eat a certain amount of ice cream every day. The ice cream is made from coconut milk and honey, which do have health benefits, but weight loss can only be accomplished over time if a varied diet is adhered to.

Any diet that limits you to only one food (even if it's ice cream or cookies) is too restrictive, and you won't last more than a couple of days.

A weight loss plan which promises you weight loss in a week isn't healthy as you'll gain the weight back right away. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop people from trying out all kinds of diets. The only way to lose weight is to stick to the simple tried and tested diets.

If you would like to learn more about the diet that best suits you, keep an eye out for our next blog about weight loss tips and information to plan the best diet for your unique body type!