Recently unearthed from Vogue’s 1977 beauty issue is the ultimate in crash diets: the ‘wine and eggs’ diet. First published in the 1962 book Sex And The Single Girl, this three-day diet plan promises to make women feel ‘sexy, exuberant and full of the joie de vivre’, a French phrase meaning very drunk.
The author was future editor of Cosmopolitan Helen Gurley Brown, who pre-empted the magazine’s reputation for bizarre life tips by outlining one of the most uniquely destructive meal plans in existence.
On the diet, your day starts with a breakfast of one hard-boiled egg and a glass of white wine. Lunch is two more eggs and two more glasses, and for dinner you down the rest of the bottle with a five-ounce steak. Each meal is rounded off with a soothing cup of black coffee.
Gurley Brown promised her readers a weight loss of 5 pounds (2.5kg) in three days. This isn’t hard to imagine considering all the nutrients and calories that three eggs and a bottle of white don’t provide.
‘I can’t even give you a single benefit of drinking a whole bottle of wine a day,’ said nutritionist Lara Metz speaking to the Daily Mail. And the steak and eggs – a great nutritional investment for those suffering from low levels of HDL cholesterol, a problem almost no-one has.
The wine would provide a small amount of nutrition if it were red. Red wines contain resveratrol, which has been found to reduce the risk of the heart disease you’re destined for by living on steak and eggs. Unfortunately, every meal Brown prescribed recommended a glass of white (ideally Chablis), which has exactly zero health benefits.
The coffee, alcohol, and absence of water means that the rapid weight loss isn’t just down to the low calorie count – it’s also the result of severe dehydration.
Vogue saw fit to publish it, so this three-day diet should give you an air of sophistication or at the very least a glamorous personal cloud of sulfur and ethanol.
