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)

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)

Just when you thought I might have learned my lesson about dabbling in fad diets for the sake of creative expression, I’ve made my miraculous return to the stage of questionable eating habits. It may have taken me two years to recover from the debacle that was the Cabbage Soup Diet, but I only came back stronger, more stubborn, and single-mindedly dedicated to destroying my body by any means necessary.

When I was asked to return for another installment of the Fad Diet Diaries, I thought about my previous experiences in the way I’m assuming mothers think about past pregnancies: a little nostalgic and blissfully remiss about the suffering that I’d incurred because time has a funny away of glossing over severe trauma. Except instead of being fat, happy and in the possession of a baby at the end of this journey, I am sitting here thin and angry with a bag of Cheetos that I can’t open until tomorrow morning. Still probably the better scenario, tbh.

So with rose-tinted memories and a new bathing suit that I needed to lose about two pounds to comfortably fit into, I agreed to attempt another fad diet in the hopes that people would read about it, laugh, and then never follow in my footsteps. Because how bad could it actually be, right?

Right.

Some background for those of you who aren’t hip on the diet dessert scene: Halo Top is a low-calorie, low-carb, high-protein ice cream that doesn’t taste like shit. In fact, it tastes really, really, good, which makes it a dream come true for people who want to stay in shape but actually enjoy life once in a while. A single pint boasts a mere 240–320 calories depending on the flavor, with anywhere from 20-24 grams of protein. For some context, the average woman is supposed to get 46 grams of protein a day which means this miracle ice cream is providing half of that, given that you shamelessly eat the entire thing. (Spoiler alert: I did that and more).

While researching potential diets I happened upon this article from GQ that was published in January 2016 about one man’s journey to death by Halo Top ice cream. This guy Shane ate nothing but five pints of Halo Top a day for 10 days straight. Wild, right? Shane’s experiment spawned a wave of copy cats like this one from some editors at Yahoo, this one from a reporter at Spoon University, and now me, a staff writer at Betches with an unquenchable thirst for suffering. 

While not necessarily a fad diet, I was sold. Not because I wanted to live out some far-fetched childhood dream of eating ice cream for every meal or because I was inordinately passionate about sweets, but because it sounded fucking ridiculous. Ice cream and nothing else? Can you imagine having to explain that to people? The premise alone was so funny that I immediately reached out to Halo Top, asking them for a generous donation to supply my experiment without taking a minute to think about the ramifications or even the logistics of eating nothing but ice cream for an extended period of time.

After a few days, the kind souls at Halo Top got back to me, undoubtedly psyched that another writer with zero regard for their health wanted to give them a platform to discuss their product. With almost no questions asked other than my flavor preferences, they shipped me a box of about 30 pints, packaged up with their well-wishes and quick caveat that they definitely don’t recommend an ice cream exclusive diet for anyone. Add them to the long list of people I didn’t listen to.

While this may have been my third bout of fad dieting, this experience was truly unique in that everyone I know was aware and accepting of what I was doing. In the past, I’ve either lived at home or worked at places that didn’t foster the kind of office camaraderie that would let me divulge this weird-ass habit. That was not the case this time around.

My roommates, albeit nervous to have to live with me throughout the process, were on board. My co-workers were more excited than I was, not that there was a high bar for that. More strangers, friends of friends, random professional acquaintances, and assorted baristas knew about my Halo Top diet than the people I told about the Master Cleanse and Cabbage Soup Diet combined. It was like I had a small, supportive, highly concerned village around me at all times, which was equal parts comforting and nerve-wracking. Best yet, it held me accountable; there was no way I wasn’t seeing this through, not with an audience like that.

With my ice cream en route, it was time to start laying out a game plan. One thing I knew for certain: There was no way in hell I was eating five pints of ice cream a day. Sure, that’s how many it takes to get a healthy number of calories into your body, but I’ve never taken health into consideration during these experiments and I wasn’t about to start now.

Would I be able to ever look at myself in the mirror again knowing that I was physically capable of eating five pints of ice cream in a single day, let alone for a week straight? Better yet, would I want to? Turns out I would never have to worry about it, because I can’t do it. While I was determined to at least get four pints down on day one and then figure out my regimen from there on out, I tapped out at 3.5. I also may have started hallucinating, but that’s a story for later on.

In hindsight, the fact that I was already struggling to meet any kind of health standard on the first day should have foreshadowed how the rest of the diet would go. The three already published articles about this very experience probably also could have served as an indicator, but whatever.

If I managed four pints a day, that would mean I would be in the range of 1,120 calories and 80 grams of protein a day. As previously stated, the average woman needs 46 grams of protein a day and at least 1,500 calories (if she’s trying to lose one pound a week). With no medical education or any real reasoning behind it, I figured I could probably manage this routine for a week before I died, either from lack of nutrients or by my own hand.

While the food portion was strict, I was lenient with beverages. On top of an insane amount of water, I allowed myself coffee and alcohol because there needed to be some motivation to keep living.

Over the course of the next week, I would proceed to lose six pounds, my will to live, and any semblance of a functioning metabolism. In return, I gained the begrudging respect of my peers and a newfound sense of entitlement this Aquarius both didn’t need and didn’t even know was possible. Buckle up, losers.

DAY ONE

One pint Oatmeal Cookie
One pint Chocolate Mocha Chip
One pint Cookie Dough
Half pint Pistachio
Total calories consumed: 1,080
Total protein consumed: 74 grams

I learned a lot on this first day,  and while some of the discoveries were helpful, not all of them were things I really wanted to know about either life or myself.

Thanks to some handy advice, I learned that Halo Top is at its best when left out to thaw a bit. I don’t have time for things like nature to take its course, so I microwaved all my pints for 20 seconds before eating them. At that point, the consistency is that of average ice cream and slowly melts to an almost soft-serve like treat. It’s perfect.

I also found out it only takes me 30 minutes to eat an entire pint of ice cream. While I was horrified in the moment, this is laughable now. Day One Me would quake in fear before Day Seven Me, who managed to eat a single pint of ice cream in 10 minutes this morning because she was running late to work.

I learned that in some people, good manners and patience run miles deep. On the first day of this venture, I sat in a office-wide meeting, smack dab in the middle of the eye line of a man who had been asked to come in and talk about his illustrious career and instead got to sit and make eye contact for 30 full minutes with a girl who was shamelessly elbow deep in a pint of ice cream at 9am in the morning.

He had to have had 100 questions. Who is this animal? Why did they let her into the office? Why is everyone else ignoring the fact that she’s finished an entire carton of ice cream for breakfast? Why doesn’t she seem to feel any remorse?

But instead of asking a single one, he just smiled at me and continued on with his lecture. This entire saga is my formal apology to him.

Last, but certainly not least, I learned that it only takes 3.5 consecutive pints of ice cream to start hallucinating dead horses in the middle of the sidewalk that are, in fact, just sleeping dogs. No amount of attempted explanations will make anyone feel better about that.

DAY TWO

One pint Chocolate Almond Crunch
One pint Birthday Cake
One pint Chocolate
Half pint Cookie Dough
Total calories consumed: 1,060
Total protein consumed: 74 grams

I would like to say that Day Two was rock bottom when in fact, each new day that I woke up and committed to eating nothing but ice cream was a new level of rock bottom that I had never thought myself possible of accessing.

I can tell you that it only takes two days of this diet to start contemplating additives like salt and hot sauce. I can also tell you that, no matter how sound your logic is on this, no one will agree with you.

It bears mentioning that I’m not necessarily a sweets person. I love salt. I love cheese. I love a good vegetable. I thought I loved ice cream, but clearly it was an infatuation more than anything else, a summer love gone horribly awry.

However, while I may have lamented this diet and spent many long afternoons dreaming of quesadillas, I couldn’t deny that the Halo Top tasted good. Not “oh, this is passable for diet” good, but legitimately enjoyable. No matter how angry I was in the moment, I always recognized that it could have (and absolutely has) been worse because, bottom line, this shit was delicious. I hope that one day I recover from my newfound aversion aversion to ice cream in general, because it’s the obvious choice for a treat yo’self kind of day.

In one of my weaker moments, I ended day two by asking one of my roommates to eat Cheetos so I could watch. Not something I’m proud of, but also not the last time it would happen.

DAY THREE

One pint S’mores
One pint Mint Chip
Half pint Pistachio
One pint Salted Caramel
Total calories consumed: 1,000
Total protein consumed: 70 grams

This was the first day that the diet started to take a toll on my body. I wasn’t constantly hungry, as expected, likely due to the insane amounts of protein I was consuming. 70 grams may not sound like a lot to Wolverine or people from the midwest, but considering that I’m a hapless cook who has in her 25 years just managed to perfect cooking vegetables and the odd egg or two, it was way more than I got on a normal basis. However, because of the low calorie intake, I was exhausted.

I probably should have asked a doctor what kind of havoc over-indexing on protein and depleting my daily calories would have on my body, but instead I decided to see if I was still capable of exercising like normal. Guess what? I wasn’t.

If being able to continue your workout regimen like normal on a diet of high protein ice cream is what it takes to work at GQ, it looks like I’m never going to make it. Hats off to Shane, who somehow managed to do more than sleep and yell at people while undergoing this experience. I was just barely able to drag my lifeless body to one Barre3 class, where I told them I’d just recovered from a two week long bout of the flu so that my reputation wouldn’t be ruined by my performance.

The truly pathetic part is that, while it was a poor showing, this was not my worst class, which is a testament to how out of shape I was before I started going to Barre. Sure, it didn’t kill me, but it was definitely my last attempt at fitness that week.

What no one tells you about eating ice cream for seven straight days, as if there’s a manual for this kind of thing, is that people are going to think you’re insane. It seems like that would be a given, but it’s not.

Because your friends and coworkers are (skeptically) supportive and it seems like word has started to spread, you’ll forget that the entire city of Portland didn’t receive a press release about your endeavors. You may become so comfortable in your new lifestyle that you think it’s socially acceptable to arrive to bars or restaurants with a pint of ice cream in tow and casually dig in while everyone else eats normal food. You’ll likely make eye contact with people you’ve never met before but who you will certainly never forget, because the awe/horror/pity/fear in their eyes as you polish off a pint of Birthday Cake ice cream in a beer garden is the kind of thing that sticks with a person. This is part of the experience. Accept it, embrace it, and move on.
 

One of our writers tried the Halo Top diet, where she only ate Halo Top ice cream for a week straight. These are her stories. Catch up on part one of the Halo Top Diaries here!

DAY FOUR

One pint Birthday Cake
Half pint Cookie Dough
One pint Oatmeal Cookie
Half pint Strawberry
Half pint Chocolate
Total calories consumed: 1,020
Total protein consumed: 70 gams

Day four was monumental for two reasons.
It was the first day that I woke up actively craving ice cream.
It was the day that my body turned on me.

Up until this point, the first couple seconds of the morning were a time of naive bliss before I remembered what I had signed myself up for. I’d wake up and imagine heading out to brunch before being hit with the brutal reality of a pint of Vanilla Bean ice cream.

Also up until this point, I was confident. Overly confident. The ancient Greeks might have described it as hubris. I knew the diet would be hard. I knew that I would be mad. I knew that it was more sweets than I was accustomed to. I also thought I knew the limits to which my body could go.

When I first started telling people about this idea, most had the same initial reaction which was something along the lines of “Holy shit, that’s a lot of dairy. Isn’t that going to hurt your stomach?”

I laughed in their faces.

I thought that I was unequivocally prepared for this diet because my body thrives on dairy. Things like lactose intolerance and Osteoporosis are a myth in my family. Our bones are made of steel and our stomachs are lined with milk and while that’s a horrifying mental image, it’s just the way it is. My friends affectionately call me the Dairy Queen, partially because they don’t want me to be in a functional relationship anytime within the next 30 or so years, but also because my love of dairy-based products and my ability to process them knows no bounds.

In the Halo Top diet, I had finally met my match. One and a half pints into Day Four, I experienced a stomach cramp that I can only describe as cataclysmic. Were I not 100% sure that my appendix had been removed just a year before, I would have been sure that it had burst all over again. I was lying on the floor of my room, writing my will and Googling things like “can you have two appendixes???” before my roommate reminded me that I had consumed nothing but dairy for the past 72 hours. It took a minute for the implication to set in that my beloved dairy had somehow betrayed me but once it did, everything changed. From that point onward I was a broken woman.

A bottle of Pepto Bismol and a lot of praying later, the pain finally passed. As did my innocence and sense of youthful invincibility. I finally understood exactly what it was I had undertaken, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared.

But it wasn’t until this moment that I realized the phantom cramp never returned, so just kidding I’m back to being untouchable.

DAY FIVE (Also Known As The 4th Of July)

One pint Vanilla Bean
Quarter pint Lemon Cake
One pint Cookie Dough
Total calories consumed: 660
Total protein consumed: 45 grams

While most Americans spent their 4th of July eating hot dogs and getting drunk in the hopes of collectively trying to forget the dumpster fire that we’re currently living in, I spent mine huffing chicken skewers on a beach. I was at a BBQ surrounded by friends and knew the people who had cooked the skewers, but that didn’t seem to make me feel any better.

I don’t know if it was the great Dairy Attack of the day before or if I had just finally hit my breaking point, but I couldn’t seem to force myself to my regular 3.5 pints. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to hit that mark again before the diet ended. Logically I knew I needed to eat more, but my body just seemed to shrug in the face of that particular bit of information. It was ready to die before it consumed anymore ice cream, which was dramatic and severely on brand.

There was a doctor in attendance at this BBQ and he didn’t immediately punch me in the face after I explained the premise of this ordeal, which I took as official medical approval to continue on. In a half-hearted attempt at being festive, I made a float out of the Vanilla Bean ice cream and some Marionberry cider. I’ll include the recipe for anyone who wants to try it out at home.

Step One: Pour the cider of your choosing directly into a pint of Halo Top Vanilla Bean ice cream. Don’t even pretend to be human enough at this point to experiment with cups.
Step Two: Cry.

DAY SIX

One pint Mint Chip
One pint S’mores
One pint Vanilla Bean
Total calories consumed: 800
Total protein consumed: 60 grams

This was my first day back at work since kicking off the diet and the point at which I truly recognized how exhausted I was. I did a lot of contemplating and broke my experience down into three distinct phases.

Days One & Two: Curiosity meets hunger. Sure, I wasn’t completely satisfied with my diet, but it still had a sense of novelty to it. Look at how quirky I am! Just a girl and her industrial size box of ice cream!

Days Three-Five: Complete mania. I had no filter, no social graces, and not a single care other than letting the world know just how dissatisfied I was and potentially taking them down with me.

Days Six & Seven: Resigned exhaustion. I was still miserable, but had transcended mania into just a general sense of tranquil numbness. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was shaped like a breakfast burrito.

I went straight home afterwork and locked myself in my room with one of my now trademarked Marionberry cider floats (patent pending) and proceeded to scour the internet for documentaries about North Korea. No red flags here.

DAY SEVEN

One pint Pistachio
One pint Birthday Cake
One Pint Mocha Chip
Total calories consumed: 840
Total protein consumed: 64 grams

This last day was a victory lap. Nothing notable happened other than the fact that I repeated the sentence “I’m almost there,” upwards of 70 times, sometimes to people, sometimes to myself, and sometimes to blank walls.

I had to reassure the dentist that I wasn’t dying when she counted my exceptionally low blood pressure, which lead to a conversation about why I thought it was a good idea to eat ice cream for seven days straight before my first dental appointment in years. Again, there wasn’t an abundance of foresight involved in this.

As I sit here on my final night of suffering, a pint of Chocolate Mocha Chip in hand and a tasty video for Pineapple Swinedogs on perpetual repeat in the background, I’ve come to reflect on the past week.

If you’re looking to lose a significant amount of weight in a short period of time, this may be the diet for you. However, I think I have to attribute the weight loss to a total lack of nutrients rather than the magic of the ice cream itself. I averaged a measly 922 calories a day combined with a whopping 65 grams of protein. I don’t know what that means for my body, but I’m hoping I wake up with superpowers and not a stroke.

Despite it all, I do need to recognize that there were some perks here. I didn’t starve for seven straight days like I expected, which I’m assuming had something to do with the excessive amount of protein I was eating. I was also more hydrated than I’ve ever been in my life, because in moments of desperation two bottles of water can pass as a satisfying meal. But these minor victories don’t outweigh the fact that, for the most part, I was a ravenous monster with little to no impulse control whose only saving grace was the fact that I genuinely enjoyed the single food item I allowed myself to eat for an entire week and had four days off of work to support a nap-heavy schedule.

If the single metric of success for this diet was weight loss, I guess you could chock it up to a win. That being said, I would not recommend it as a viable option for the five pages of reasons I just listed above. I would, however, recommend Halo Top in moderation, because I bet it’s a delicious treat which could be better enjoyed in less than whole pint increments.

In the end, I’d like to thank Halo Top for making this all possible, both through your donation and for creating an ice cream that gave me a platform to further explore my self-destructive habits. For the rest of you, it’s become clear that there are no limits to what I’ll put myself through in the name of what I consider “journalistic endeavors” and what others have referred to as “a wasted college degree,” so feel free to submit ideas for the next installment.