It can be super tempting to head to your local Walgreens/CVS/witch doctor and grab a bottle of pills promising SUPER XXTREME WEIGHT LOSS or CRAZY ENERGY or YOU’LL LOOK LIKE KATE MOSS IN 1997. No one LIKES to get sweaty and gross at the gym, say no to that double chocolate chip cookie, or skip on the extra parmesan grated oh so nicely over your lasagna, so making a pill do the work seems like the most American way to lose those extra three pounds.
However, because of lots of loopholes in our system, almost any asshole can produce a bottle of pills, claim it does magical things, and use very little (if any) data to back it up. Yes, there are some supplements that “show in studies” that participants experienced some very modest weight loss, but the many of these pills have studies that a) are sponsored and, therefore, not v legit or b) gave rats and animals such high fucking doses of said pills that the caffeine and other shit naturally made them sweat off five pounds or whatever the rat equivalent is.
Here are some of the most bullsh*t diet pills that don’t work. Grab an iced green tea and take a walk instead, because that will do more for you than these pills.
1. Raspberry Ketones
According to LiveScience, “Reliable research on the use of raspberry ketone for any health condition in humans is currently lacking. Further high-quality research is needed.” This is not just my opinion, BTW—so says Catherine Ulbricht, senior pharmacist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and co-founder of Natural Standard Research Collaboration, which reviews evidence on herbs and supplements. More importantly, literally none of the studies done to show weight loss from raspberry ketones WERE DONE IN HUMANS. So, yeah, maybe if you have the same fat problems and diabetes as a pale white lab rat (guilty), you could benefit from raspberry ketones the same way. But it’s probably better to just go with diet and exercise.
2. Hydroxycut
I’m sorry to break it to you, but Kim K and Anna Nicole (RIP) lied to us. Hydroxycut has been around for-freaking-ever and is super popular, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t full of sh*t. Basically, this stuff claims to work the same as caffeine, making you all cracked out and jittery in exchange for losing a pound or two. Unfortunately, there’s only one study on the supplement and no long-term data on how effective it is after, like, a week. So yeah, if you crush and snort Hydroxycut and chain smoke for a week, you’re probably gonna lose the same amount of weight you would from drinking 10 cups of coffee and chain-smoking. Amazing!
3. Green Coffee Bean Extract
Ding ding ding! Industry sponsored studies do not an honest supplement make. According to Health Line, green coffee bean extract did help some people lose weight (like, five pounds more than a placebo over the course of a few weeks), but the studies were all pushed and paid for by the company. And, again, the weight loss in these “studies” is so modest that can it even really be counted? I can lose five pounds from eating nothing, too, but I’m not going to market that sh*t. Or maybe I should?
4. CLA
CLA stands for Conjugated Linoleic Acid, and has been popular for like, a while. Again, don’t waste your money / I’m about to ruin your day. Basically, CLA claims to reduce your appetite and give your metabolism a needed push, but in a review of 18 studies, the weight loss was about 0.2 pounds per week with the potential for lots of side-effects. AGAIN, that’s practically water weight I can pee out each morning. Why take the risk for like, oily diarrhea poos and the loss of one singular pound when you can trade a piece of pizza for a salad and feel better?
5. Forskolin
Forskolin is a compound found in the roots of a plant that’s sort of like mint and has been used in herbal medicines for like, ever. Once Dr. Oz started singing songs of its glory, Americans were all about this stuff. The claim is that forskolin effects fat metabolism; however, a lot of the studies showed it had very little, if any, effect on body weight. Even more sketchy, there is INCREDIBLY limited data on side-effects. Probs best to avoid this stuff that I keep reading as “foreskin”.
Images: Giphy (2)
Omg it’s like, almost summer. Time for salads and smoothies until you can’t see straight but you’re like, super fit and skinny. But heading to the salad bar or opting for the fast food power salad isn’t necessarily the best choice. We all have a tendency to overindulge, add too much shit, or not add enough good stuff. If you’re going the salad route because your beach bod is more reminiscent of a Pillsbury mascot’s than a fitness Instagrammer’s, it may be time to take a hard, investigatory look at what you’re putting in your salad and how you’re sabotaging your bod.
1. Croutons, Wontons, And Tortilla Strips
I know a little handful of toasty, crunchy bread snacks doesn’t seem that bad, but anytime you’re adding on croutons, wontons, tortilla strips, or another deep fried (or even baked) bread snack, you’re adding empty calories. They’re literally just unhealthy carbs in every case, and they greatly up your caloric intake. Just say no to bread (unless it’s pizza).
2. Dried Fruit
Sugar central. Dried fruit can be great when pooping isn’t happening (much love, apricots and prunes), but topping your salad with shit like dried cranberries or raisins is raising the sugar levels. Just a ¼ cup of Craisins has 29 grams of sugar. Way harsh, Tai.
3. Creamy Dressing
No surprise here, but if you’re layering on the ranch, creamy Italian, or really anything that isn’t oil and vinegar, your salad just became hundreds of calories heavier. A lot of creamy dressings use mayo or cream as a base, which, isn’t as healthy as say, lemon juice or balsamic vinegar. Try making your own with Greek yogurt or just sucking it up and not layering lettuce with blue cheese dressing, you unhealthy fuck.
4. Nuts And Seeds
Yes, adding a handful of walnuts or almonds boosts the healthy fats in your salad, but adding more than ¼ cup of nuts or seeds can sabotage your diet big time. Keep in mind that healthy fat is still fat, and a ½ cup of walnuts is like, 190 goddamn calories. Sunflower seeds? Just ¼ cup has 186 calories. Stay woke, fam.
5. Avocado
Like we said, healthy fats are still fats. Adding four to six slices of avocado to a salad may not seem like a lot, but it’s almost half of an avocado, weighing in at about 115 calories. On the flip side, this is one of the healthiest toppings you can get for nachos, so it really just depends on your situation.
6. Iceberg Lettuce
If you eat Iceberg lettuce, you’re trash. I’m not even sorry. Who goes out of their way to get this shit when you have the option of non-contaminated Romaine, beautiful artisan spring mix, kale, spinach, and our bestie, arugula? Garbage people do. This has no flavor, is mostly water, and, yeah, has like no calories, but it sucks in every way. Fuck you, iceberg lettuce. Stop ruining America’s salads.
7. Cheese
Yo, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have had to add this, but I did. Yah, you’ll get some extra calcium (strong bones AMIRITE), but half a cup of cheese is like, 250 calories and 20 grams of fat. That’s gonna go right to your thighs, which are already causing some chub rub, aren’t they?
8. Bacon
C’mon.
9. Getting The Biggest Bowl
Not a food item, but heading to the salad bar and grabbing the biggest bowl or plate you see and LOADING it with shit isn’t going to help your arteries. Opt for a medium size or even a small bowl or plate, then go for seconds if you’re really THAT hungry.
10. Eating Only Lettuce
If your goal is to be hungry in two and a half hours, grab a bowl and load it with only lettuce and cucumbers, then top it with straight vinegar. That isn’t going to keep you full for very long (and probably tastes very sad). You can add some of the things on this list—like nuts and seeds and avocado—just in moderation. It’ll keep you fuller longer, i.e. you’ll borderline forget about the trash bag of popcorn in your desk or the gummy worms you found on the floor that still look okay.
Images: Giphy (7)
Holy shit, it’s June. We ignored all the signs and warnings. We threw caution to the wind as we ate that third (all right, fifth) slice of pizza. We didn’t switch out our Diet Coke for LaCroix (LET ME LIVE). We promised ourselves that tomorrow would be the start of our diet. Bitches, tomorrow is here. But before you freak out and go on a 72-hour fat flush and laxative tea diet, we did some investigatory journalism about those diet myths you def have believed since age 12, when you saw your first issue of Vogue and wondered why your tummy had fat rolls. Stop believing these diet myths now that you are a grown-ass adult.
1. All Calories Are Created Equal
If a piece of pizza is 300 calories and a giant salad is also 300 calories, then, like logically, I should “cheat” and have the pizza cause I deserve it and also it’s the same amount of calories and will sit upon my thighs the same way. Right? Fuckin’ wrong. According to Eat This Not That, your body will store calories differently depending what they are.
If you eat something that’s more difficult to digest, like corn, your body can’t absorb as many of the calories and, therefore, you aren’t as likely to gain weight from it. Protein is also great because a) it keeps you fuller longer and b) your body is more easily able to burn off the calories while it’s digesting your salmon or steak. Cookies, on the other hand, get their calories from our friend sugar, which isn’t as easily burned off. So veggies and protein good. Cookies and pizza, not so good.
2. All Sugar Is The Devil
Errrrrr, wrong. You can’t equate the sugar found in a banana with the sugar found in a box of Jelly Belly (like my mom’s now-defunct diet program tried to do in the early 2000s). It just isn’t the same. According to Prevention, the sugar in fruits and veggies comes with fiber that helps slow down the absorption of said sugar. Jelly beans come with nothing but short-lived happiness, then a slow decline into cellulite, so there’s that trade-off to consider. Don’t be afraid of the naturally occurring sugars in your fruit. Be afraid of the naturally occurring sugars in cookies and pie.
3. Cut Out Every Single Carb
Carbs are evil: a mantra we’ve known since the dawn of about age 14. According to Prevention, you CAN have carbs, live your life, and not end up on an episode of My 600-lb Life anytime soon.
Just follow the USDA recommendation: half your plate should be veggies, one-quarter whole grains, and one-quarter protein. Plus, you can ditch shitty carbs like white bread and white potatoes and replace them with bougie carbs like farro, quinoa, and sweet potatoes. If you cut carbs altogether, you’re more likely to crave them, order from Domino’s at 11pm, inhale that three topping cheese-stuffed goodness, then cry yourself to sleep.
4. You Need To Do Juice Cleanses And Detoxes
Ok, first of all—you don’t need to detox. That’s what your liver and kidneys are for. It’s fine to eat lighter or more healthfully the day after drinking a handle of vodka and eating a Little Cesar’s Hot & Sweaty, but there’s no need to starve yourself into a meditative plane and subsist on lemon juice and cayenne pepper because Beyoncé did it and I just do everything Beyoncé fuckin’ does now. Plus, if you slash your calories to like, 800 per day for a week, you’ll end up losing and then GAINING weight thanks to your body being too smart to fuck up your metabolism like that. Get it together and have a sandwich.
5. Don’t Eat After 7pm
Sounds great and is based on nothing. According to Real Simple, “calories can’t tell time,” which is news to me and probably most of our great American nation. The idea is that if you stop eating after 7pm, your body has more time to digest before it goes into nappy sleep mode. That isn’t true, since if you eat a bowl of oatmeal for whatever reason 15 minutes before bed then pass out, your body will just use those calories the next day. Now, this doesn’t mean you should def continue your routine of eating a bowl of Breyer’s before bed every night, but it also means you can have that piece of fruit or bit of cereal before hitting the sack without worrying about gaining 50 pounds.
Images: Jamie Street / Unsplash; Giphy (2)
STOP THE PRESSES, because we literally found out that another fad diet has, essentially, eaten shit for false claims and making you subscribe to unhealthy eating habits. As we’ve told you before, most fad diets, or, really any diets that tell you to cut out whole food groups are bullshit. So, this shouldn’t be a big surprise to our LOYAL readers, but it’s true: Whole30 is bullshit.
WTF is Whole30?
Whole30 is a diet regimen that is based on cutting out food groups like grains, beans, all sugar, and dairy. Also alcohol—so I’m assuming literally no one reading this has tried it. So far, it sounds fucking awful. The idea is to “reset” your body and help you figure out which foods are making you tired/fat/bloated/poor. What can you eat? Mostly meat, fruit, veggies, eggs, etc. Think of it as the trendier Paleo diet, which, uh, it is. And since the Paleo diet has been proven ineffective by our good old buddies, the scientists, you can kinda already see what we’re in for.
The Burn Book Diet Rankings
That brings us to the annual ranking of diets in U.S. News & World Report, the magazine/journal you may know of because you stalked their college rankings to decide where to apply senior year. But back to the diets list, though: Where did Whole30 land in a list of diets examined by important medical people? Fucking LAST.
Awesomely-named scientist Dr. Katz, an expert on this diet expert panel, said that he considered Whole30 generally shitty because it overly promotes chomping into beef, pork, chicken, and other animal meats. These things aren’t BAD in moderation, but eating all meat while ignoring, say, whole grain bread or black beans isn’t that awesome. We assume he also spoke at length about the absolute preposterousness that is associated with not having a bottle of wine every night, but we’re still trying to track that quote down.
Of course (yawn) the creator of the diet claims it’s super awesome and healthy and has changed fat people for the better, but, honestly, so does the Master Cleanse, and I still fail to see the merit in hallucinating for a few days so I can lose 3 lbs. I can go to Burning Man or Coachella and do the same shit without realizing I’m dieting.
Do yourself a favor and stick with eating healthy ALL the time and not DIETING. Oh, and work alcohol into your diet, because, like, health benefits.
When we look back over the sad, failed history of dieting, one thing came to mind: “wtf.” Diets alone are really fucking stupid, given the fact that most, if not all, are unsustainable. If you cut out a whole food group, eventually you’re either going to slip up and eat from said forbidden food group OR crave it so much you go crawling back sans self-control or dignity. Same for any diet that considers soup your now only source of food. Do yourself a favor and eat HEALTHFULLY without restricting yourself to crazy, weird shit. By “crazy, weird shit” we mean any of the below aka the 10 worst diets of all time. Think of it like Nike, only the complete opposite i.e., just don’t do it.
1. The Tapeworm Diet
In today’s batshit crazy news, we learned that there literally used to be a tapeworm diet. Back in Victorian times, when a woman’s biggest issue was fitting into a corset and pretending to not be interested in banging her husband, some medical professionals decided that swallowing a goddamn tapeworm was the answer to pesky chubbiness. We shouldn’t have to explain why this is a terrible idea, but yeah, it is. To add to that, people are still buying janky capsules with tapeworm eggs inside/drinking the tap water in Mexico on purpoe. Earth to Matilda: This is really fucking dumb. Why doesn’t it work? Because the damn tapeworm lives in your fucking intestines, eats all your food, can result in malnutrition, AND yes, you can die.
2. The Cabbage Soup Diet
Any diet that literally has you eating one food for an extended period of time is a terrible goddamn idea. Can you imagine how insanely crazy you’re going to feel on Day 7 of eating cabbage soup? It doesn’t even SOUND appetizing. Yes, vegetables are good for you, but eating just cabbage soup will make you drop a ton of weight and then instantly gain it back when you stop dieting. Next.
3. The Grapefruit Diet
As is the case with No. 2 on the list, eating just grapefruit for an extended period of time is an awful, awful idea. Can you even IMAGINE your new aversion to citrus after a few days of this shit? Yes, you should be working things like grapefruit into your diet—shit, have one every morning for all we care. But if you go on replacing every meal with this sour af fruit, you’re going to fail in the long run. You’ll crave steak, fruit snacks, and all the carbs. Also if you’re on the pill it could fuck up your medication and you could end up pregnant. JUST SAY NO.
4. The Cookie Diet
This sounds like my kind of fucking diet, since my spirit animal is and always has been cookie monster. However, upon further investigation, we can’t believe this was ever—or even still is—a thing. Dr. Siegal, whose medical degree we question, came up with a diet that entails eating one to two cookies every few hours along with a 500-calorie meal of the dieter’s choice. The catch? The cookies are made of some bullshit ingredient (probably from Sweden and isn’t legal in the U.S., like phentermine) that is apparently going to make you lose weight. So, not only will the cookies taste like shit, but you’ll start hating cookies. Additionally, this won’t make you adjust your shitty eating habits AT ALL. Since, ya know, you’re training your brain into thinking cookies are the answer. Which, in this case, they are not.
5. Cigarette Diet
This sounds like a theme from Mad Men. Apparently, back in the 1920s, tobacco companies started pushing their cancer sticks as a means of controlling appetite. Nicotine does, in fact, suppress your urge to eat, but at the cost of having disgustingly smelling clothes, hair, and hands. Is the cancer worth dropping a few pounds? Gonna go with no on this one.
6. The Apple Cider Vinegar Diet
Ok so yes we were all obsessed with the Master Cleanse a few years ago because we were really fucking stupid. How fast did you gain back all that weight? I’ll hold while you crunch the numbers. Drinking a combination of apple cider vinegar, cayenne pepper, maple syrup, and other bullshit may have you drop a few pounds at first, but, like OF COURSE YOU WILL, YOU’RE NOT EATING ANYTHING. I could drink Blue Gatorade and Ensure and drop weight, too. To add to that, enjoy your gastrointestinal discomfort brought on by the whole drinking vinegar thing. Not to mention the terrible, terrible gas. Sexy.
We tried the Master Cleanse (and lived). Read Memoirs Of A Master Cleanse here!
7. Detox Diets
Hey! You know how you have a liver and kidneys? The job of those apparently ignorable organs is to DETOXIFY YOUR BODY. So, these fucking diets touting extreme regimens like liver flushes, body cleanses, colonics, etc. are literally (and I mean literally) full of shit. Your body detoxifies itself all the goddamn time. Sure, if you want to add a few veggie juices and whole foods to your diet after a week of bingeing on pizza, it’ll “detox” you in a mild way. But having shit literally sucked out your butt and calling it necessary is the shittiest shit we’ve ever heard.
8. The Air Diet
I can’t even believe I have to address this, but, it’s a thing. Probably started by Gwyneth Paltrow and her ungodly shitty GOOP blog (Hey, Gwyneth—are you going to go ahead and rescind that jade vagina egg post? No? Cool). How’s it work? Dieters literally sit with an empty plate, fork, and pretend to fucking eat. Um, can’t think of a faster way to a) starve and b) develop a high-key eating disorder. Man and betch do not live on air and sunlight alone. There need to be nachos and chocolate. On second thought, anyone who does this probably has a great future in miming.
9. The Clay Diet
Something else probably piloted by Diet and Lifestyle Professional, Gwyneth Paltrow, is the clay diet. Apparently, you stir clay—yes, literally clay—into water and drink it. Why? Because it’ll totally detoxify your organs, of course! Wow, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how thrilled mothers of toddlers everywhere will be when they find out that, yes, their children can continue eating mud for health benefits. Seriously, whoever came up with this one: Go fuck yourself.
10. “Miracle” Diets
Any diet that starts with “miracle” or “what doctors don’t want you to know” is probably going to be really fucking stupid. Additionally, any diet that tells you to drink green tea or chug acai juice or roll in memberberries to prevent eating more than 500 calories per day is going to make you gain double the weight back in the long run. Your metabolism will actually slow down, so when you do start eating like a human being again, you’ll get fat. Congratulations, idiot.
May all of your diets fail and may you eat like a normal human being. Amen.
