What to do when traditional diet and exercise lose their appeal?
- The Shake Weight
What it is: The Shake Weight is a pulsating dumbbell that is designed to work the arms, shoulders, and chest. Consumers are instructed to hold the dumbbell in front of their chest and grip onto it tightly as it pulses back and forth.
What it claims to do: According to the description on Amazon, the weight “increases upper body muscle activity by up to 300 percent compared to regular exercise … [in] just six minutes a day.”
Why it’s questionable: The recommended arm-strengthening motion can be seen as a little, well…suggestive. A YouTube search of one of the instructional videos is worth a thousand words.
- The Grapefruit Diet
What it is: The Grapefruit Diet is one of the oldest fad diets around, with people trying it out since the 1930s. It suggests eating grapefruit with every meal, based on the apparent existence of enzymes in grapefruit that, when eaten before other foods, burn fat. It also recommends restricting the overall intake of carbohydrates and calories, with some variations of the diet recommending as few as 800 calories a day.
What it claims to do: The diet has many variations, but generally lasts for 10-12 days, and claims to help you lose as much as 10 pounds.
Why it’s questionable: First of all, you’re going to lose weight through only consuming 800 calories a day no matter what you eat, because that’s simply not enough to sustain most human beings without tapping into their stored forms of energy. That’s all going to come right back as soon as you stop restricting your food intake. And according to a 2015 study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, you would need to eat 40 grapefruits in order to harness any discernible effect from these fat-burning enzymes, which is the equivalent of 5,000 calories and a kilogram of sugar a day.
- The Hawaii Chair
What it is: The Hawaii Chair is an office chair that is powered by a “2800 RPM Hula Motor,” which jiggles around in circles as the consumer sits in it.
What it claims to do: According to the infomercial, the chair claims to “take the work out of your workout” by working your abs while “answering phones, using the computer, balancing books, and filing paperwork.” This is apparently done while wiggling around in circles.
Why it’s questionable: The simple fact that the paid actors in the infomercial can barely keep a straight face while using the product, probably says a lot about just how completely ridiculous it looks. Ukulele music plays in the background as a middle-aged man attempts to read a book while joyfully proclaiming, “That feels great on my abs!”
- The Cotton Ball Diet
What it is: This is a relatively recent diet that seems to have been born on Facebook, YouTube, and online chatrooms. It involves eating cotton balls soaked in orange juice, lemonade, or smoothies. In some variations of the diet, cotton balls are consumed with meals, while in others, people subsist entirely on the cotton.
What is claims to do: The idea of the diet is to feel physically full while ingesting as few calories as possible.
Why it’s questionable: As an ABC article on the diet points out, most “cotton” balls aren’t actually made of cotton at all, but rather bleached, synthetic polyester fibres. If the mere idea of that isn’t enough to give you pause, it’s also worth considering how easily this type of material can get caught in and block your digestive tract. So yes, it’s gross and very dangerous.