Why Crash Diets Don’t Work: Boomer Truth Bombs About Weight Loss, Wellness, and the Dumb Sh*t We’ve All Tried

Every generation has its own flavor of self-inflicted misery. For Boomers, it was bell-bottoms, fondue pots, and crash diets. We thought we were smarter than science, like we could just out-starve biology with cabbage soup, grapefruit juice, or whatever hack some half-drunk doctor scribbled into a paperback that somehow ended up on a bestseller list. Spoiler: it didn’t work then, it doesn’t work now, and it never will. Yet here we are, sixty-plus years old, still surrounded by a world that worships quick fixes while ignoring the fact that quick fixes break quicker than a Walmart lawn chair in July.

I know this because I lived it. I’ve worn the T-shirt, puked it up, and gained the weight back. Let me drag you through some of my personal “nutritional war crimes” and explain why crash diets are about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

Sometime in the early 90s, I decided that soup made out of boiled cabbage was going to “change my life.” It did, but not the way the pamphlet promised. The diet went like this: eat cabbage soup for every meal, with the occasional “banana day” or “beef and tomato day” thrown in like a sadistic joke.

For the first 48 hours, you feel like a genius. “I’m saving money! I’m losing weight! This is great!” Then the hunger fog sets in. You start smelling phantom hamburgers. You start snapping at your kids because they dared breathe within five feet of you. By day four, you’re bloated from all the sodium and farting so much you could power a hot air balloon.

Did I lose weight? Yeah. Did I gain it all back the second I stopped? Absolutely. Plus, I couldn’t look at a head of cabbage for ten years without dry heaving. That’s not a diet. That’s food-based trauma.

Another classic: “Eat half a grapefruit before every meal and watch the fat melt away.” Who thought of this, exactly? Some Florida retiree with a citrus grove to unload?

I ate so much grapefruit in my twenties I damn near burned the enamel off my teeth. Acid reflux became my spirit animal. And the fat? Still there. It turns out grapefruit is just a fruit, not a fat-melting furnace. But you couldn’t tell me that back then. I was convinced I’d discovered the “cheat code” to my metabolism. What I discovered instead was the world’s longest bathroom session and a lifelong suspicion of “miracle fruits.”

Then came Atkins, the low-carb revolution. I dove into that one headfirst because it promised the best of both worlds: lose weight while eating cheeseburgers without buns. To a Boomer raised on diner food, that sounded like a religious experience.

And at first, it worked. I dropped ten pounds in two weeks, strutting around like I’d cracked the code of human evolution. But then week three hit. My energy tanked, my breath smelled like a corpse, and I realized I’d basically reinvented constipation. When you haven’t eaten a vegetable in two weeks, your colon stages a full-blown rebellion.

Atkins was like a Vegas weekend fling. Wild, exciting, and doomed from the start. You come home broke, bloated, and wondering why you ever thought this was a good idea.

Here’s the cold reality, the one the diet industry doesn’t want you to say out loud: crash diets don’t work because they aren’t sustainable. Your body isn’t stupid. You starve it, it slows down. You feed it only cabbage, it revolts. You cut out entire food groups, it fights back harder than a pissed-off teenager.

Biology is patient. It will outlast your willpower every single time. You can’t cheat evolution with a pamphlet and some lemon juice. That’s why every “miracle diet” is followed by a rebound. You end up heavier than when you started, with your metabolism wrecked and your brain fried from the rollercoaster of guilt and hunger.

The younger generations think they invented crash diets. Nope. We were the guinea pigs. We’re the ones who first lined up at Weight Watchers meetings, convinced that counting points was the path to enlightenment. We bought SlimFast shakes by the gallon, only to realize we were just drinking overpriced chocolate milk. We watched Richard Simmons sweat to the oldies while quietly dying inside because his energy level was the exact opposite of how we felt after a day of eating celery sticks.

And the best part? Decades later, the same scams are being repackaged on TikTok and Instagram. Instead of cabbage soup, it’s “water fasting.” Instead of grapefruit, it’s “fat-burning gummies.” Instead of Atkins, it’s “keto.” Different labels, same bullshit.

You know what works? The boring stuff. The unsexy stuff. The “no one can make money off this” stuff. Eating real food. Moving your ass. Sleeping. Lifting weights. Drinking water. Rinse, repeat, for the rest of your life.

Nobody wants that because it’s not dramatic. You can’t sell a “walk 30 minutes every day” plan for $29.99 on Instagram. People want the hack, the secret, the shortcut. They want to look like Chris Hemsworth without doing the work. Sorry, buddy, the only thing you’re going to look like is hungry.

I spent years bouncing between crash diets, each one leaving me a little more broken. Then I hit my fifties and realized the obvious truth: it’s easier to stay in shape than to get in shape. At 25, you can lose five pounds in a weekend by skipping pizza. At 65, you need six months, a personal trainer, and a prayer.

That was when I quit the quick fixes and started playing the long game. I learned that I don’t need to fit into a magic number on a scale. What I need is to be able to get out of bed without grunting, keep my blood pressure in check, and live long enough to annoy my grandkids. That doesn’t come from cabbage soup. That comes from consistency.

Crash diets are like bad relationships. They’re intense, they burn fast, and they leave you worse off than when you started. You get seduced by the promise, you commit too quickly, and before you know it, you’re crying into a bowl of lettuce wondering what went wrong.

But here’s the thing: it’s not your fault. It’s the system. The diet industry is a multi-billion-dollar racket built on your desperation. They don’t want you to succeed. They want you to fail just enough to come back next January for another round. And we’ve all been there. Hell, half of us are still there.

If you take nothing else from this rant, take this: if a diet promises you the world in seven days, run. If it tells you to cut out entire food groups, run faster. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s not just untrue, it’s dangerous.

At our age, we don’t have time for bullshit. Crash diets waste your time, wreck your health, and drain your joy. You want to lose weight? Great. Do it slow, do it smart, and do it in a way you can live with for the rest of your life. If that sounds boring, good. Boring works. Boring keeps you alive.

And if you ever catch me near a cabbage soup recipe again, you have my full permission to smack me in the face with the pot.