Protein has long been a thing in diet culture, as Knox Eat and Reduce Plan (Charles B. Knox Gelatine Co., 1955) illustrates.
The booklet starts with a bunch of not-at-all leading questions.
I would be very shocked if the answer to "Is this a monotonous 'same foods every day' diet... or is it a varied one you'll find easy to stick to?" were "This diet is so monotonous you will soon be willing to eat your placemat just because it would be something different."
But you know the best thing about the Knox diet?
It "allows you to have the famous Knox High-Protein Gelatine Drink 3 times a day"! So nice that this is "allowed" by the company that happens to make gelatin. And it will surely not get monotonous because the Q&A section explicitly stated that it would not!
Plus, there are so many ways to enjoy the famous gelatin drink.
You can have it cold with fruit juice! Or hot with bouillon! Okay, that's really about it, but think of all the juices you could use-- like orange! Tomato! Grape! And there's beef or chicken bouillon! Whee!
If that's not enough gelatin for you, though, "you'll find you have a wide choice of delicious, filling Knox soups, salads, and desserts..." I love that they're called "filling" when Jell-O's old tagline used to suggest the opposite about gelatin: There's always room for Jell-O. But, hey, maybe the sugar-filled version is lighter than Knox's plain.
In any case, Knox tried to make the solid-ish options seem as varied as possible.
The Basic Main Course Salad Mold offered half a dozen ways to make a seafood-based salad jigglier than usual.
That's nothing compared to the Basic Gelatine Salad, with a full dozen options.
The options span from shredded carrots and canned peas as the "solids" to shredded cabbage with cooked carrots and canned peas to peas, diced cooked carrots, and shredded pimiento. (Okay, I'm being reductive. You could also go with diced cooked beets and shredded raw spinach or grapefruit sections and coarsely chopped nutmeats if you felt crazy.)
And of course, the booklet offers some delectable-sounding desserts, like Egg Nog Chiffon Pudding.
And yes, it's basically just eggs in artificially sweetened gelatin, with a little rum flavoring and nutmeg to give it an egg-noggy edge.
In short, this is definitely a diet that could never get monotonous, and the fact that a few dozen people who were serious about this diet could keep Knox in business all by themselves was just incidental to the plan. Knox was just lucky that gelatin was the perfect medium for weight loss. Amazing how diets back then were more get-rich-quick schemes than likely to be helpful for actual long-term weight management. It's nice that things have changed so much today. 😆
Or if you got tired of drinking water or diet soda before meals to fill your stomach before a meal (never works), you can make the water or diet soda chewy so it seems more substantial. Then you can pretend that you can't eat as much (when you really can). Bonus points for using two diet tricks that don't work.
ReplyDeleteIt really is a doorway to disordered eating!
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