I have spent about 17 minutes of my entire life dieting. I did it to teach myself healthy eating habits so my body doesn't explode on my 25th birthday, when my metabolism is supposed to screech to a halt.
But in those 17 minutes, I was even grumpier and hungrier than I usually am. My skin smelled like grilled chicken and zucchini. And then Jenny Block wrote about an 8,000-calorie burger from Heart Attack Grill and I thought, "What the hell, I still have a few years until I swell to the size of Mount Everest. Dig in."
The first rule of dieting, if I remember, is everything in moderation. Stop eating when you feel full? Who does that? Here are five diets that give more variety, but are just as bad for you as Heart Attack Grill. Unless misery burns calories, in which case my science is way off.
Super Model Diet The Super Model Diet allows only one Tic Tac per meal, washed down with a glass of water (an alternate study published in RuPaul's Workin' It, clearly a legitimate medical journal, demands Tic Tacs with breakfast and lunch, but only a glass of water for dinner).
There is also the case of Natalie Cooper, a young woman (super model status: unconfirmed) whose body rejects all food except for Tic Tacs. She survives on a feeding tube and spoonfuls of tiny mints. This is apparently, as my friends insist, tragic and not at all funny.
Following this diet, you would have to shovel more than 5,333 Tic Tacs to reach the calorie count in a Quadruple Bypass Burger. And you might still get a cute nurse to fawn over you while you recover from doctors digging TicTacs out of your internal and external crevices. We can't say if it will make you a super model. You'd probably need to stop trolling food blogs first.
Special K Diet The Special K diet says if you buy lots of Special K cereal and replace two meals a day with their product, you are likely to lose weight. I assume this works the same way anorexia works.
To equal a burger, one would have to down about 68 bowls of Special K. If one ate that much cereal, he or she would probably land a gig as a temporary spokesperson. But then he or she would be ravaged by diabetes from eating 8,000 calories worth of shredded cardboard and artificial sweetener. At least a hamburger tastes good.
Naturally Thin Diet
I haven't read the book, so I'm not an authority on author Bethenny Frankel's Naturally Thin regimen. I assume it has something to do with tasting everything and eating nothing, and probably buying lots of low-calorie booze, and it may even have something to do with berating your kind in-laws on national television.
Lauren Drewes Daniels wrote about fans standing in the rain for a chance to see Frankel (and then be promptly whisked away). Frankel's aforementioned low-calorie booze (which earned the taste title "fine") is meant for a cocktail that tallies only 100 calories, meaning you can suck down 80 of them before health crusaders come after you with pitchforks and cauliflower.
If you haven't drowned or died of alcohol poisoning after 80 drinks, consider a few more. Standing in the rain for 10 hours will burn off the extra calories.
Cotton Ball Diet Not only are there people who will stand in the rain for 10 hours, but there are also people who eat cotton balls before a meal to feel "full." And then there are people who say that cotton balls are a great source of fiber, because apparently there are people who don't know much about fiber.
I searched "cotton ball calories," but Google returned to remind me that cotton balls are not food. Using the scientific method, I assume that cotton balls have no calories, so you can eat an infinite number of them. They'll probably cause just as much internal blockage as a Quadruple Bypass Burger, but look how full you feel! You're probably in the mood to skip this afternoon's Tic Tac.
Jonathan Swift Diet Google also reminded me that cannibalism isn't wholly endorsed in this country and couldn't give me the nutritional info on braised peasant baby. So I searched "braised pork loin" instead, and got 419 calories. So eating a Quadruple Bypass Burger is the same as eating 19 babies, depending on the size of the babies, of course.
To me, the outrage over Heart Attack Grill is ridiculous. A burger with 8,000 calories is a gimmick, not an assault on our waistlines tantamount to a terrorist attack.
Heart Attack Grill caters to adults who can make their own choices. Far from a plot to knock the nation on our fatty asses, Heart Attack Grill's 8,000 calorie burgers are an exercise in satire. If you don't get that, then you probably also thought Swift was serious when he said the famished Irish should eat babies.
