Fitting in with the theme of New Year's resolutions, the week of January 1st through 7th is known as Diet Resolution Week. It's the time of year when we collectively look back on our food and exercise choices of the previous year with a hint of disgust and shame and promise ourselves to do better in the coming year. I also refer to these as "promises that I do not intend to keep".
Ah, the 1980s. A decade of neon spandex, big hair, and the kind of food guilt that could make a salad seem like a punishment. But amidst the aerobics videos and the craze for everything low-fat, the 80s also gave us some of the most… let’s say creative diet fads in history. And yes, we tried them. Some of us even survived.
First up, the Grapefruit Diet. Ah yes, the miracle fruit that promised to melt fat like butter on a hot skillet. “Lose weight fast—just eat grapefruit with every meal!” the ads proclaimed, and we believed them with the blind faith of someone who’d just discovered ThighMaster infomercials. I remember slicing one up at breakfast and thinking, this is it—my ticket to a smaller waist! Three bites later, I was crying into my grapefruit, fantasizing about pizza. It was tangy, it was bitter, it was the flavor of broken dreams.
Then there was the Cabbage Soup Diet, which could double as a chemical warfare test. Eat nothing but cabbage soup for a week, they said. Lose 10 pounds, they said. Well, let me tell you, my parents’ kitchen smelled like a soup factory apocalypse, and our cat refused to come near the house. By day three, I was trading cabbage leaves for a clandestine bite of peanut butter straight from the jar. If cabbage soup had an official slogan, it would’ve been: “Lose friends, gain intestinal fortitude!”
We can’t forget Slim-Fast, the powdered drink that promised we could sip our way to slenderness. “When it’s gotta be fast, it’s gotta be Slim-Fast,” went the jingle, and boy, did we drink. I had one for breakfast, one for lunch, and one for dinner, feeling like a futuristic nutrition experiment. It was kind of like drinking chalk-flavored happiness. But hey, at least my appetite was under control! And then, inevitably, I would eat a brownie in secret and tell myself, well, technically it’s balanced if I skip supper tomorrow, right?
Of course, low-fat everything became king in the 80s. Low-fat cookies, low-fat ice cream, low-fat mayonnaise. Basically, if it wasn’t grease-free, it wasn’t invited to our plates. I remember one night at a friend’s house, eating a low-fat, sugar-free cake and wondering how something could taste simultaneously like sadness and cardboard. The slogan “Just as good, only better for you!” never felt so ironic.
And who could ignore the aerobics boom? Jane Fonda VHS tapes littered every living room, and we twisted, turned, and leg-lifted our way toward imagined perfection while sipping diet sodas and pondering if kale existed yet. Personally, I mastered the art of looking like I was working out while actually perfecting my “casual foot tap” technique.
The 80s were a decade of extremes, both in hairstyles and waistlines. We were willing to try anything, from grapefruit to cabbage to neon spandex workouts, to chase that elusive dream of being thinner, fitter, or at least “less guilty about that last slice of cake.” And honestly, those fads gave us stories, laughs, and a healthy dose of perspective: diets may come and go, but memories of pretending to enjoy chalky Slim-Fast shakes while secretly raiding the fridge? That’s eternal.
So here’s to the 80s, where the bigger the hair, the stricter the diet, and the louder the neon leggings, the better. May we never forget the lessons we learned: cabbage soup is dangerous, grapefruit is emotional, and chocolate…Well, chocolate always wins in the end.
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