Can You Diet Your Way to a Celebrity Body?

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I entered the world of celebrity dieting almost by accident.  I had stumbled on the diet of William Howard Taft while looking at a sleep apnea website (I don’t have sleep apnea. The internet often lures you into strange corners). There, buried around anecdotes of Taft annoying his wife by falling asleep all the time, was Taft’s daily diet from the brief time period where he was trying to lose weight.   It was then and there I decided to go on his diet, because I love rules, I was thinking about going on a diet anyway, and I thought it would be amusing.

The diet was disgusting. It was mostly boiled fish and mutton.  You could sometimes have some wine, but that was the only bright spot. I actually gained weight.  After that abysmal failure, I decided to go on the diets of female celebrities.  Maybe I would lose weight then.   That was my thought process.

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It is actually extremely easy to go on a famous person’s diet.  You can find a famous woman’s diet just by googling her name and the word “diet.”  You can also find diets in the weird “shape issue” of Vogue where everyone wears octagonal clothing.

This is because in the end, celebrity dieting is a business.  Celebrities have a lot of things they can sell us—- a movie, a poncho with a fur trim for pregnancy, and another movie 18 months later.   But they also have another powerful tool.  They look amazing and we all look terrible. It stands to reason that they can tell us their secrets of health and wellness and in due time, with enough elbow grease, we can look just like them.  That is the American Dream.

Rebecca Harrington. Photo: ©Michael Lionstar

I tried countless diets for my new book I’ll Have What She’s Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting. I lived like Gwyneth for a week (at least the food part). In her cookbook called “It’s All Good” she celebrates a diet free of red meat, tomatoes, strawberries, gluten and deep water fish.  She starts every morning off with a green juice. Despite all the restriction, her diet is awesome.  Her recipes are creative and delicious.  Her exercise regimes really work.  She makes an excellent salad.  The one downfall?  Ideally, her recipes require you to be incredibly rich.

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Liz Taylor put peanut butter on her steak and ate tuna mixed with grapefruits.  She didn’t really believe in exercise.  She loved a drink combining Kahlua, vodka and hersheys syrup and ate a blue cheese dip in the afternoons.  And with this philosophy, she wrote a best selling diet book! I lost a bunch of weight on this diet despite the lack of movement because it was so disgusting.

Victoria Beckham, aka “Posh Spice” reportedly followed a diet called “The Five Hands Diet” which requires eating five hand sized portions of protein a day, mixed with unlimited vegetables.  The “hand” of the title, happens to be more “palm-sized” which is a bit disappointing.  I was absolutely starving on this diet. A hand is not much food at all. I am still hungry thinking about it.

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We eat like celebrities, we buy their books, we get face transplants and cheek implants and forehead implants.  Why?  Because they have what we want!  And they have extolled the illusory path of how to get it.

Do these paths work?  Can you look like Kim Kardashian just by doing squats? It’s hard to say.  Did I end up with Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce or Madonna’s body after doing their diets? Nope. Did I lose weight on some of these diets? Yes. And then I entered my real world and ate a slice of pizza. Celebrities must not eat pizza, which is really a shame.

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What’s more interesting to me is looking at our obsession with celebrity in a broader context. Why do we act like a diet is the ultimate expression of a celebrities’ essence?  Now that there are more and more visual mediums where you, yourself, are a celebrity to your small coterie of friends, is it more important to look perfect than ever before?

All I can say is that I learned a lot about how hard it is to diet like a celebrity.  Most eat in a quite regimented way. Celebrities might have something to teach us.  I just don’t know what it is.   It is definitely not something about nutrition.