Various Diet Plans in the 80íes and 90íes

Although I never reached the ultra slim look I actually was going for, I finally found the boyfriend, who was the real thing. We met during on of my “skinnier” times and during the years we were together, he got acquainted to my “shape shifting”. He, although being not really overweight, was willing and able, to join me in my

diet plans. Eating the same stuff as I, he soon also experienced some ups and downs in his weight. All the different diet plans we tried, were not all completely successful, but overall the diet plans delivered, what they were promising.

At that time we did not know that we were more or less lab-rats for big companies, news papers and “diet-specialists”. Nobody knew then that the research on food and diets, what was healthy and what was not, was more a matter of trial and error. Whenever they announced new diet plans, it was more guessing than knowing. Some of the diet plans they recommended twenty years ago, would be nowadays actual reason for court cases.

For example, amongst these diet plans, there was a “grapefruit & egg” diet, which recommended over the course of three weeks no less than 126 eggs (3 minutes) and 42 grapefruits. Additional there was a little bit of cooked fish and once a week, a poached chicken breast. Lets not even talk about cholesterol (science nowadays would say that 126 eggs are enough for two years!); the only real success after the three weeks was that you started vomiting, by just seeing an egg or a grapefruit.

All these diet plans had one thing in common: you lost weight during the diet and you started gaining weight again, roughly three weeks after stopping the diet. The general problem of all diet plans, past and present, is that there is no strategy for after the diet. Most diet plans require a certain amount of self-discipline, which you might master for some time. But normal human beings like me will lose this self-discipline after a while. Small things like using butter again or having a Danish with the coffee, are the first steps to disaster and from there it is only downhill.

For many years, amongst all those diet plans, I did not once find one, where the lost weight stayed lost for longer than 12 weeks. Then it took another 6-8 weeks to gain the weight again. At this point it was then time for the next item on the list of diet plans.