Fads & Fletcherism

It’s dinner time over a hundred years ago and Horace Fletcher is chewing a bite of cabbage. Though it’s only a mouthful and quite tender at that, he carefully chews it at least 32 times and until it has been reduced to a cabbage-flavoured liquid in a process known as ‘’.

A term that describes Fletcher’s groundbreaking practice of chewing your food thoroughly and only eating when you are genuinely hungry, not when you are anxious or depressed.

For this, Horace will go down in history as ‘The Great Masticator’ and Americans trying to lose weight in the early 1900s will wear their teeth down to the gum trying to liquefy lamb shank or make smoothie of steak.

As an ardent proponent of a low-protein diet, in cases such as bovine mastication and the consumption of other fibrous matter, Fletcher encourages simply spitting out the juiceless pulp so as not balls up the dietary practice which will no doubt result in weight loss as well as improved health and strength.

The Great Masticator also swears by the rigorous and regular examination of one’s own faeces, which, if you are following his practice and dietary recommendations religiously, will be quite inoffensive and practically odourless with a slight scent of “warm biscuits”.

About seven years later, after poor Fletcher has died of bronchitis, a serious young thing is sitting at a corner café in San Francisco. Her coffee’s black, bitter and untouched and she’s pulling on a Lucky Strike cigarette as if her social life depends on it.

And it may just. Right then every American woman who is anyone is on an unofficial cigarette diet and, to make matters shambolic, Lucky Strike has launched a campaign fit to shame a girl right out of her Mary Janes.

The adverts when one strikes it unlucky enough to see them read: “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” soon to be replaced by an equally chagrining “Light a Lucky and you’ll never miss sweets that make you fat”.

People don’t know yet about all the nuisance that’s coming with the nicotine and the tar, lung cancer and the crisis of simply sucking in breath and no one’s much agreed that cigarettes are prelude to a bad time and excruciating death.

What they do know is that six cigarettes a day keeps the bulge away and, when a woman’s puffing on a Lucky, she hardly thinks of eating at all.

About 30 years later, opera singer Maria Callas is fending off rumours that she’s shed the equivalent of a young boy by ingesting a tape worm.

The rumour persists despite Callas being a lover of rare steak which can be a swell way to get tapeworms rather than purposefully ingesting one in some kind of gruesome tapeworm diet.

Still, in the mid-1950’s, there are some exemplary desperadoes who skulk around looking for tapeworm pills and babies to throw down their necks in the hope that they will grow in their intestines and help them lose weight without having to give up clam chowder.

No matter that an ingested tapeworm’s effect is a particularly malnourished pallor coupled with minor inconveniences such as meningitis, seizures and dementia.

For Elvis, 20 years on, it appears that tapeworms are out of the question.

Instead the route to sequined jump suit glory is via The Sleeping Beauty Diet. A languorous affair that embraces the truism that you can’t eat if you’re asleep.

Naturally, this diet involves being sedated and subscribers weave in and out of a sleeping pill stupor for several days with little or no eating until they literally wake up thinner. What with having slept through many a midnight binge and general sustaining of life.

By 1975, a Dr Sanford Siegal is hard at work making everyone’s dreams come true.

The good man has formulated a special biscuit in Florida and he says that if everyone replaces breakfast and dinner with six cookies spread throughout the day with just one sensible dinner in the evening, they’ll be in the business of losing up to 10lbs (4.5kgs) per month.

Floridians go wild. People are ready to eat again! And by gum they want cookies!

Almost 40 years later, when Snooki makes his diet popular again, Dr Sanford will say of his cookie diet to the Daily Mail:

“I chose a cookie because it’s durable; doesn’t need refrigeration; fits in a purse or briefcase; and is enjoyed by nearly everyone. I was careful to make my cookie taste good but not too good.”

Good.

But not too good.

That’s the key.

Not long before biscuits come back, Beyonce credits her ‘Dreamgirls’ physique to the Master Cleanse but admits that it made her ‘evil’.

But like a villain in a B-grade horror movie, the cleanse comes back to life in 2004 through a book titled ‘Lose Weight, Have More Energy & Be Happier in 10 Days’.

It’s a great sell.

Possibly because the dust jacket omits to expound on the cleanse’s side effects of fatigue, nausea, vomiting, pain and irritability as well as heart and kidney problems if one insists on making the Master Cleanse one’s life.