Dangerous diet fads that are a waste for your waistline

Why go to the trouble to eat healthy, exercise, and get enough sleep simply to maintain your weight? You don’t need to do that—not when you can eat a diet of cookies. Or red meat. Or cabbage soup. Or, of course, an intestinal parasite. Sounds like a sensible diet, right?

No, of course not.

Nevertheless, here are some crazy fad diets that might just take off the weight. Or they might kill you. Either way, you won’t have to worry about dieting any longer.

The Cookie Diet

Eat cookies and lose weight? That’s the idea behind the Cookie Diet^®, which has been around since 1975. Created by weight-loss physician Sanford Siegal, DO, this diet consists of eating nine of Dr. Siegal’s “hunger-controlling” cookies (available from his website) plus a healthy dinner—totaling no more than 1,000 to 1,200 calories per day. The goal is to practice eating smaller portions throughout the day while preparing healthy meals and getting a little exercise.

But, overall, it’s still basically a calorie-restriction diet. “There is no credible evidence that the Cookie Diet actually helps people lose and maintain weight loss over a long period of time or that there is any health benefit from doing this,” Louis Aronne, MD, director, Comprehensive Weight Control Program, Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY, told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The Carnivore Diet

Do you like steak and hate vegetables? Then the Carnivore Diet is for you. Also known as the All-Meat Diet and the Zero-Carb Diet, it includes only meat and water—that’s all. If you want a side salad or a dinner roll to go with your steak, or even a beer to wash it down, you’ll have to go elsewhere.

The diet isn’t limited to beef, though. “Fatty cuts” of meat—including pork, lamb, and poultry—are preferred, but fish, eggs, cheese, and heavy cream are also allowed. Also, bone broth and stocks from scraps make “excellent hot drinks.”

Proponents of the Carnivore Diet claim that it provides quick and easy weight loss, boosts energy, reduces inflammation, and improves digestion. But the disadvantages to an all-meat diet are all too obvious: insufficient vitamins and nutrients, no fiber, and an increased risk for heart disease and colorectal cancer.

The Cabbage Soup Diet

The Cookie Diet and the Carnivore Diet have something in common—they’re based on foods that people actually want to eat. The Cabbage Soup Diet? Not so much. On the upside, the Cabbage Soup Diet lasts for only 7 days. On the downside, the Cabbage Soup Diet lasts for 7 days.

Proponents of this diet claim you can lose up to 10 lbs while eating cabbage soup for every meal every day. Fortunately, the diet also includes side dishes of fruits, vegetables, beef, chicken, and brown rice, depending on the day. Proponents are honest about it, admitting that the number one reason that people quit the diet is because it’s boring and bland, and that it shouldn’t be continued for longer than a week.

But besides being boring, the diet probably isn’t very effective long term because most of the weight loss is from water weight. So, once you stop the diet, you’ll likely gain back any weight you’ve lost.

The Cabbage Soup Diet has other disadvantages, too. “Because you're not getting proper nutrition, you may feel weak or tired while on the diet,” wrote Katherine Zeratsky, RD, LD, Mayo Health Clinic, Rochester, MN. “Depending on the recipe for cabbage soup, the diet can be high in sodium. The large amounts of cabbage also can make you more prone to flatulence.”

The Tapeworm Diet

You say you want to lose weight without doing exercise or eating right? No problem—just swallow a tapeworm. This crazy Victorian-era weight loss idea has resurfaced several times over the years, particularly with a 2013 report of an Iowa woman who presented to her doctor with a tapeworm infection. She reportedly bought the tapeworm on the internet as a way to lose weight.

People interested in this “diet” buy tapeworm eggs illegally and swallow them, resulting in a tapeworm growing inside the body. The idea, of course, is that the tapeworm will eat up whatever you’re eating, so you can eat as much as you want and still lose weight. This idea has just one flaw: You’ve infected yourself with a live parasite.

“Ingesting tapeworms is extremely risky and can cause a wide range of undesirable side effects, including rare deaths,” wrote Patricia Quinlisk, MD, MPH, medical director, Iowa Department of Public Health, in response to the 2013 tapeworm incident.

Besides the “undesirable side effect” of death, other problems include diarrhea, nausea, abdominal pain, dizziness, weakness, and fever—not to mention blockage or disruption of organ function, as well as neurological signs and symptoms, including seizures.

As an added bonus, a tapeworm can live for up to 30 years inside the host.

Whether people are actually doing this is unknown, and skeptics question whether intentionally ingesting tapeworm eggs is nothing more than an urban legend. But consider the plethora of over-the-counter parasite-cleansing pills now available. Someone is certainly trying to get rid of “the conqueror worm.”