The History Of Fad Diets
The bikini recently turned 60, which brings us to the topic of the history of fad diets, and how they manage to convince us they are effective.
Summer is here, which also means that you’re probably crushed about the fact that you didn’t achieve your New Year’s goal of getting that perfect beach body.  All we see on our Instagram feeds are bodies that we would kill to have, that’s advertised as wellness culture, however it’s really self-inflicting body-shaming.
All of these social media influencers aren’t actually selling us anything new, they are touching on the exact same techniques as the past to get it where it hurts, our self-doubt, which comes hand in hand with the fad diet.
One of the biggest examples of this was Horace Fletcher, who claimed that his fletcherising food saved him nearly dying at 60 years old. He wrote a book explaining that one could regain control of their health through his method, which encouraged eating only small of foods and chewing food thoroughly prior to swallowing.  His method was a combination of juicing and mindful eating.
Then there is the Paleo diet, which became popular by Dr. Loren Cordain, who pushed the idea of going back to a natural diet and eating only foods that we ate as cavemen, avoiding all dairy, legumes and grains for our diets.  Both Fletcher and Cordain believed that their diets were the cure for the health of society as a whole.
Fletcherism is no longer relevant, how Paleo is still very common, especially on Instagram today who attract millions of followers to their accounts, by claiming that this diet changed their lives.

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