The Biggest Diet Trend the Year You Were Born

In 1963, Jean Nidetch founded the iconic program based on her own 70-pound weight loss success. The stay-at-home mom shed the weight by conducting weekly meetings with a group of six friends in her home, and by the start of the '70s, the program was officially a trend. Oh, and while many diets tend to have their followers yo-yoing in weight, Nidetch kept it off for 50 years, weighing the same 142 pounds in 2011 as she did when she first shed the weight, according to the New York Times.

Though this sucker was originally a big deal in the 1930s (when it was also nicknamed the Hollywood Diet), it garnered itself a resurgence in the '70s after it was mistakenly connected to the Mayo Clinic. Proponents of the plan were probably very sad to learn that, unfortunately, eating half a grapefruit at every single meal does not guarantee a smaller waistline. Tough break.

A Florida doctor knew exactly what he was doing when he told people they could eat cookies and lose weight (playing into our weaknesses, that's what). His concept: Blend the cookies with amino acids and protein that only he knew the recipe for (hmmm….profiting much?) in order to control cravings and help patients stick to a low-cal diet. Of course, Hollywood quickly ate it up…and so did every other woman who didn't think it was too good to be true.

Rumored to have been tried by Elvis, this diet isn't as Disney-esque as it sounds. It involved taking sedatives — a lot of them — under the notion that if you're heavily sedated or sleeping for a few days at a time, then you're not eating and thus losing weight. Uh, not only is that dangerous for your health, but it can seriously screw with your natural sleep cycle. And, ya know, you could die while on the diet. So there's that.

It's so easy — drink a shake for breakfast, another for lunch and, well, you're on your own for dinner. Back in the '70s, this beat the hell out of meal planning…and left more time for other recreational activities of the decade.

Doc Herman Tarnower released his plan to the masses this year, which was a two-week low-carb, low-cal diet that only had you eating around 700 calories a day. Now, we're not saying the two are connected, but only two years later he was shot by his girlfriend. Yeesh.

No one seems to know where this diet came from, but for some reason it's always rising and falling in popularity. The week-long cleanse experienced its hey-day in the '50s, when supporters would eat a couple bowls of cabbage soup each day, along with a prescribed set of foods (think bananas and skim milk). It surged in popularity again in the '80s, and has shown up in Google search trends time and time again. Yes, cabbage soup is a healthy soup. But to subsist on that and nothing else? We can only imagine how hungry those people were.

This sucker was on the New York Times best-seller list for 30 weeks, and was based off long-standing notions of food combinations. Or rather, non-food combinations, because you were supposed to keep them far, far away from each other. Example: You can eat fruit and only fruit (in a specific order no less) for the first 10 days, and carbs and protein are to be consumed separately. Given that we know carbs help our bodies better digest protein, we only have one thought: WTF?

Although the weight loss management company was founded in 1983 over in Australia, it didn't make its way to the States for a few years. But once it did, the meal replacement worshippers never looked back. The company has had their highs and lows, as any long-standing diet plan does, but with celeb endorsements from the likes of Kirstie Alley (2005), Queen Latifah (2008), Valerie Bertinelli (2009), and Mariah Carey (2011), it's no wonder those ads keep popping up on our TV screens.

Richard Simmons + a deck of food group-themed cards = the diet of our sequin-loving dreams. Simmons' commercialSimmons' commercial commercialfor the program said using the deck would help you create a balanced diet that dished out a minimum of 1,200 calories. Combine that with a VHS tape of Sweatin' to the Oldies and you were in business.

While we're sure she would've loved to have a whole company named after her a la Jenny Craig, that's not the case here. Instead, the beloved actress published her self help book, Elizabeth Takes Off, which made it to the best-seller list. In it, she tells dieters to eat veggies and dip every day at 3 p.m. to stay slim. Why? Um, good question.

Thank Oprah for this one. This was the year she strutted across the stage wearing a pair of size-10 Calvin Kleins while pulling a wagon full of fat. That wagon symbolized the 67 pounds she lost on a liquid protein diet, so naturally everyone with a TV screen starting chugging. She now says it was one of the biggest mistakes she's made on television.

Say hello to the McLean Deluxe burger from good ol' McDonalds. Americans all decided low-fat was the way to shed, well, fat, but they still grabbed the fast food varieties for convenience. Le sigh.

The uber-popular aerobics program was founded in 1969, was in every state by 1983, and had its own diet plan come '93. Based on the Jazzercise philosophy of fun fitness, followers ditched the calorie counting and instead used a rainbow coordinated chart to determine which foods — and how much of them — they should eat.

Dean Ornish started researching heathy diet options way back in '77, but it wasn't until 1993 — when he published his best-seller Eat More, Weigh Less — that the plan really took off in popularity. Originally, the guy just wanted to help patients develop diets that controlled heart disease (which looked like a lot less refined carbs and fat, and a lot more whole grains and vegetables), but since it also helped people shed an average of 25 pounds, it took off in the weight-loss world, too.

As Jennifer Aniston was hitting her stride on an an NBC sitcom (you may have heard of…Friends), people naturally wanted to know how she kept up her physique. Introducing the Zone Diet, which calls for a specific ratio of fat, protein, and carbs for each meal. The A-lister has reportedly been a supporter of the plan for years (though she says she's not quite so strict nowadays), but '95 was when it really started to garner attention.

People started catching on that sugar = bad, so of course companies started shoving no-sugar products down our throats. Except, well,there really was sugar. They just got better at hiding it under hard-to-pronounce names. Tsk, tsk.

Quick question: Does your body handle protein better than veg? According to physician Peter D'Adamo, a look at your blood type can tell you the answer — and thus what kind of diet you should be on. Unfortch, there's not a whole lot of science to back him up.