Crazy Celeb Diets
How do our fave celebs get - and keep - their gorgeous figures? Sometimes by fair means or foul, as this round-up of the craziest celebrity diets demonstrates! Have you tried any of them? Let us know in the comments!
PA PhotosBaby Food Diet
We love Tracy Anderson’s workout videos, but we are less in love with her ‘baby food cleanse’, which she apparently prescribed to Jennifer Aniston earlier this year. For this diet, Anderson advocates very small amounts of food in puréed form – in other words, the kind of stuff you used to nosh on before you had any serious teeth. How does it work? You eat fourteen small servings of the puréed food a day, followed by a dinner of lean protein and veg – and no carbs. ‘Liquid cleanses do help you lose weight but you will gain more the next week,’ Anderson gave as her reason for a solid food cleanse, but we’re pretty sure that replacing your baby-sized snacks with solid food might have a similar effect...
Big PicturesCabbage Soup Diet
This one’s been a celeb favourite since the 1980s for quick weight loss. The procedure? You make a giant vat of cabbage soup (surprise!) at the beginning of the week and eat it along with a few add-ins, like bananas, tomatoes, and beef, for seven days. The result? Up to 10 pounds of weight lost, but as nutritionists point out that it’s actually physically impossible to lose 10 pounds of fat that quickly, cabbage soup diets are most likely shedding water weight...and, um, feeling a bit flatulent. Sarah Michelle Gellar has confessed to using it before big events.
Rex FeaturesAtkins Diet
All the rage in the early noughtie - Renee Zellweger was a fan at one point - this diet calls for cutting out carbs almost entirely – the idea being that the body should go in to ketosis, which means that it is burning fat instead of glucose for energy. Atkins dieters revel in eating all of the red meat and butter that they fancy, but the side effects can include seriously bad breath (a result of the fat-burning), vitamin deficiencies and potential heart problems from all of the fat and cholesterol being consumed. The fact that the inventor of the diet was extremely overweight and had been treated for cardiac problems before he died is not really too inspiring, either.
Rex FeaturesThe 'Friends' Diet
This one’s pretty specific – Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston reportedly maintained their figures while filming Friends by eating exactly the same thing for lunch every day: a Cobb salad (classic American garden salad with added protein), which Cox says was ‘doctored up with turkey bacon and garbanzo beans’. Sounds pretty healthy...but an awfully dull way to spend your lunch for an entire DECADE.
Rex FeaturesThe Grapefruit Diet
This is an old-school one – around since the 1930s, when old Hollywood starlets would turn to grapefruit to help them slim down quickly, but stars like Kylie Minogue still turn to it today. The premise was that grapefruit contained a special enzyme that sped-up fat-burning, but the truth was that if you eat pretty much nothing but grapefruit for days on end, you’re going to lose weight because you’ll be consuming fewer calories. And you’ll also be very hungry.
PA PhotosThe Master Cleanse
Also known as the Lemonade Diet or the Maple Syrup Diet, this is the one that Beyoncé famously did for two weeks to slim down before filming her role in Dreamgirls. The Master Cleanse calls for the dieter to consumer nothing but lemonade made with maple syrup and cayenne pepper along with a laxative (or laxative tea) in the morning or at night, as well as drinking water and/or saltwater. The result? Dramatic weight loss as a result of severe calorie deprivation. And, well, a need to stay very near to a toilet at all times.
PA PhotosThe Caveman Diet
Devotees of this diet plan believe that people need to return to their culinary roots and eat like cavemen – that is, consume the foods that were on the menu in prehistoric times when people had to hunt and gather their meals. Alex Reid is a fan when he’s in training for big fights: meat (possibly eaten raw!) and fruit and veg are in; carbs and dairy products are out. Effective like other low-carb diets without the extremity of the Atkins, but nutrient deficiencies, especially in terms of calcium, are a real risk.
PA PhotosThe Watercress Soup Diet
Yes, another soup one – this time, loved by Elizabeth Hurley. You eat as much of the soup as you’d like/can manage, supplemented again by various low-calorie foods on specific days. It’s hard to consume more than 1000 calories per day on this diet, so weight loss ensues...but only temporarily, unless you’re dedicated to sticking to it forever.
PA PhotosThe Macrobiotic Diet
Developed in the 1920s by a Japanese philosopher, this was beloved of Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow back in the day when they were besties and presumably got together to munch on brown rice. Totally vegan, macrobiotic dieters eat only organic, whole carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, and pulses. Beverages besides water and decaffeinated tea are not allowed and dieters are advised to chew their food until it becomes liquid in their mouths. One of the more sustainable of our celebrity diets, perhaps, but following Paltrow’s recent diagnosis of the brittle bone disease that precedes osteoporosis, one wonders if the macrobiotic ban on vitamin supplements, including calcium, is smart.
PA PhotosJuice Cleanses
Salma Hayek swears she’s been doing these cleanses for 15 years. Ostensibly, they remove non-specific ‘toxins’ from the body, but as Hayek has said, ‘If I’ve been indulging in rich foods, a cleanse is a wonderful way to hit the reset button. I always lose weight.’ Juice cleanses are usually shorter and sharper than other diets – think nothing but juice for three or four days – but this is another case where experts think that water weight, rather than fat, is being lost as a result of highly restricted calorie intake.
