The Eleven Most Ridiculous Diets

5. Russian Air Force Diet
This diet does not require you to stand in the bread line, but it does require you to survive on near starvation levels of food. Originally developed in the former Soviet Union to keep soldiers fit, you are allowed to put herbs, salt, pepper, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, and ketchup on all your meals. But about those meals … breakfast is coffee only. Lunch: two eggs, a tomato. And dinner allows you to feast on a sliver of meat and a salad. Yes, you will lose weight. Yes, you will feel like you’ve enlisted. And yes, you will feel like you are back in the USSR.

4. The Three-Day Diet/Hot Dog Diet
These diets are similar, because both recommend eating franks for dinner. You also get to eat one cup of vanilla ice cream and one tablespoon of peanut butter in the course of this diet, as well as other strictly measured amounts of food. The result of losing ten pounds over the course of three days is due to severe calorie restriction, even if your calories are coming from precisely measured hotdogs. And after the three days? Regain.

3. The Apple Cider Vinegar Diet
Yummy—nothing like throwing back a few teaspoons of vinegar to get your gut prepared for a meal. Talk about an appetite suppressant. This diet relies on the premise that apple cider vinegar, taken fifteen minutes before a meal, will decrease hunger and curb the urge to nibble. There’s no real evidence that apple cider vinegar can help you lose weight, but reducing portions and exercising, like most of the proponents of this fad also tell you to do, will.

2. The Writing Diet
I can’t seem to figure out why we writers aren’t all size twos. Because according to Julia Cameron’s new book The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Sized, we should be. The premise for this too-good-to-be-true diet is that people overeat not out of hunger, but because of emotion. By writing daily, we tap into our emotions, and put them on the page instead of in our mouths. While I can concede that having your hands on a keyboard will prevent them from grabbing a bag of Doritos, I can’t figure out how sitting on your butt is supposed to make it smaller.

And the number one most ridiculous diet …

1. The Atkins Diet
Don’t get me wrong: the Atkins diet can help you lose weight. I’ve tried it, and I lost weight. But man, I felt like crap. And after a week, all I could think about was eating an orange. An orange! Of all the harmless food items out there. Of course, cutting out refined sugars and nutrition-less carbs is a good thing, but not all carbs are bad for you, and the good ones fuel muscles, fill you up, and are pretty damn tasty. Not to mention that the Atkins diet isn’t a healthful lifestyle change; it’s a limiting diet that requires you to eat a lot of not so healthy foods. And chances are you won’t be able to avoid eating carbohydrates for your entire life, nor would many people want to.

While these diets are ridiculous, unsustainable, and often times dangerous, if your main goal is to lose weight, you just might find them useful. After all, extreme caloric restriction, per the Three Day or Russian Air Force diet, seems to be a tried and true method of dropping pounds. And they’ll stay off—at least until you come to your senses.