High fat diet ... famously curvaceous Elizabeth Taylor stars in 1959 film Suddenly Last Summer. Photo: Reutersr
An effective diet entails a balanced intake and plenty of exercise, right?
Not exactly, if you follow the dietary advice of Elizabeth Taylor.
We've heard our fair share of questionable dietary tips - not from least Karl Lagerfeld, who champions the highly dubious nutritional content of Diet Coke as key to slimming down from fashion heavyweight to fashion's dahling.
He's not alone. Who can forget the baby food diet (possibly not you, Jennifer Aniston), or those who are said to order water and Red Bull in place of a meal (we're looking at you, Paris Hilton), or those who favour ADD drug Adderall (Britney Spears, that was once you, we hear)? There are those who have experimented with laxatives and, of course, those who resort to a surgeon's scalpel to shift a few pounds.
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Grapefruit diets - la Kylie Minogue may be less terrifying, but watching calories is nothing new. Nietzsche and Henry James were strict weightwatchers, while the Huffington Post reports that Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson were ahead of their time in another way, choosing a vegetarian diet in days when meat was all but obligatory.
Reportedly a proponent if the distinctly unappealing steak-and-peanut butter sandwich, Taylor doled out some eyebrow-raising weight-loss tips, pushing a high saturated fat diet that has well and truly fallen by the wayside with current nutritionists (and anathema, surely, to those who criticise the Atkins diet).
Audrey Hepburn in 1957. The actress preferred to stay active rather than take any exercise - but seemed to eat worryingly few proteins.
What a difference 23 years makes - along with her take on steak, the Cleopatra actress mixed cottage cheese with sour cream and advised nothing but plain toast for breakfast in her 1987 diet book, Elizabeth Takes Off.
Originally posted here:
Steak and peanut butter: the Liz Taylor diet
