Growing up in Marin County, I was witness to what I like to think of as the freakiest examples of girls doing crazy shit to themselves to look good in Not A Girl Not Yet A Woman-era pube-hat jeans. Eating disorders are sad, but they’re also responsible for the funniest diets I’ve ever heard of.
The Sudafed and Wheatgrass Diet – Pretty self-explanatory. Sudafed suppresses your appetite, while wheatgrass shots make you feel like you’re absorbing nutrients. In reality, this diet makes girls loopy and gassy, not necessarily in that order.
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The Weed Diet – This is a funny one. Apparently if you smoke shitloads of weed and somehow resist the urge to snack, you lose weight, fast. Something about metabolism. This would sound all the more laughable if I didn’t see it completely 100% work with a dude-friend. He wanted to lose a few before college, bought an ounce, and disappeared for a week. When he came back he looked like Tin Tin and did a lot of crying.
The Cotton Wool and Orange Juice Diet – A classic. If you’ve ever seen an after-school special, you’ll know about this one. I’ve only seen it in action once and there was so much gagging I almost sympathy-ralphed.
The Learn-To-Puke-On-Command-Using-Only-The-Power-Of-Your-Mind Diet – The girl I knew who could do this was Canadian and ended up stealing everyone’s credit cards at a party in Junior year and disappearing into the night forever. But when she did this barf trick, it was simultaneously so alarming and dainty it was like seeing some boner-inducing combination of Uri Geller and Glenda the Good Witch in action.
Atkins – I’m not gonna knock Atkins because A) doing so stopped being funny in 2003 and B) I think it reduced my dad’s blood pressure. But once when I was briefly on this diet I made bacon and cream cheese sushi. Not in the sense that the bacon was raw, but that the cream cheese was rolled in fried bacon. It may have taken two years off my life, but I will never, ever achieve that kind of happiness ever, ever again.
