The Most Popular Diet The Year You Were Born

The cabbage soup diet had already been popular for decades, but its lofty claims helped it gain popularity among housewives in the 1950s and early '60s. Eaten three or four times a day, the soup did help with weight loss–if you didn't mind the side effects like dizziness and fatigue. Plus, most of the weight you lost was water anyway—so it was nothing more than a quick fix.

Years before Slim Fast there was Sego. The meal replacement drink was later described as "baby formula mixed with water" (yum!), but it did come in flavors like chocolate, chocolate coconut, chocolate malt, vanilla, strawberry, banana and orange, all at 225 calories a pop. The tagline? "See The Calories Go With Sego."

Helen Gurley Brown, in her 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl, recommended a diet composed of mostly wine and eggs. Breakfast was one egg any style, no butter, with one glass of white wine. Lunch added another egg and another glass of white wine. Dinner consisted of one steak and the instructions to finish that glass of wine. The author, who later became the editor of Cosmopolitan, said the diet would make you feel “sexy, exuberant, full of the joie de vivre.”

We've all heard of Weight Watchers (thanks, Oprah!) but did you know it started way back in 1961? The story goes that a 214-pound housewife named Jean Nidetch started holding private weight-loss meetings in her home in New York City. The company went public in 1963—and it's still one of the most popular weight loss brands today.

Tab, Diet Pepsi, Patio—1964 was the year that artificially sweetened colas hit it big. Just a few years later, seven million cases of Diet Delight fruit cocktail, which used a sweetener called cyclamate, were reportedly pulled from store shelves after a study showed it could cause bladder cancer in lab rats.

The Drinking Man's Diet was one of the first low-carb diets—but with a sexist twist. It proposed that eating a diet of so-called "manly" protein-rich foods like steak and lobster, together with tons of alcohol, would result in weight loss. Over two million copies of the book were sold in just two years.

The Stillman Diet was another low-carb diet published years before Atkins. It allowed lean cuts of meat and low-fat dairy. The diet gained popularity when Karen Carpenter reportedly went on it. She abandoned the diet, but later tragically died of complications from anorexia.

By the end of the decade, diet pills were the new diet shake. A January 1968 Life magazine cover highlighted the potential health impacts from taking the pills—but their popularity continued to surge as new drugs hit the market in the coming years.

It's taken many forms and many names over the years, but the grapefruit diet, in which you eat a grapefruit at every meal and sometimes as the entire meal, was a popular weight loss hack in the early 1970s. Any weight loss achieved through the diet was likely attributable to increased fiber and caloric restriction, not any magical component in the grapefruit itself.

In the world of dieting, if it sounds too good to be true, it definitely is. The Cookie Diet was introduced in 1974 and quickly gained popularity because...who doesn't want to eat cookies and lose weight? The diet spread like wildfire once Hollywood got a hold of it. The doctor-prescribed cookies were protein-packed to curb hunger, but did nothing more than create a calorific deficit (which you can achieve by eating something other than six cookies a day).

After developing heart disease at the age of 42, Nathan Pritikin went on to pioneer a heart-healthy high-carb, low-fat, low-sodium diet. In 1975, he opened the Pritikin Longevity Center in Florida, where patients could stay for weeks while following his plan. Pritikin committed suicide after developing cancer at the age of 69 in 1985, but his autopsy revealed no signs of heart disease at the time of death

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The Last Chance diet was a dangerous liquid diet created by Dr. Robert Linn in the 1970s. Though it became quite popular later in the decade (he made $40 million from book and product sales), the FDA ultimately intervened after 30 of the diet's followers died. The concept: drink something called Prolinn, high-protein drink made from slaughterhouse scraps like cowhide and tendon.

Elvis Presley was reportedly a fan of The Sleeping Beauty Diet, in which participants were sedated for hours or days at a time. If you're sleeping then you're not eating–except the risk of death, sleep problems and other major health complications makes this diet one of the worst ways to lose weight.

The best-selling diet book The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet was published in 1978, but the low-carb, Mediterranean-ish diet it recommended didn't take off until after the author, Dr. Herman Tarnower, was murdered in 1980.

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Though founded two years earlier, Slim Fast started to take-off as a diet fad in 1979. Mixed with milk or slurped out of an aluminum can, the creamy and sweet shakes were meant to replace both breakfast and lunch.

The Beverly Hills Diet sold over one million copies and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 30 weeks after its release in 1981. With a focus on digestive enzymes, followers of the diet could only eat specific fruit for the first ten days. After day ten, butter, bread and corn was allowed. Protein like steak wasn't allowed until day 19

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The Australian company Jenny Craig makes its way to the States and becomes a household name in the early '80s. Celebrities like Valerie Bertinelli, Mariah Carey, and Kirstie Alley have fronted campaigns for the meal-replacement company in the years since, and it continues to be one of the most recognizable weight loss brands today.

The current popularity of the Paleo diet can be traced back to 1985, when S. Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner published "Paleolithic Nutrition—A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications" in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985. The groundbreaking research is considered the precursor to today’s popular Paleo diet, which allows lean meats, nuts, seeds and some fruits and vegetables, but doesn’t allow dairy, grains, and processed foods.