With more or less interruptions, for more than twenty years every Monday, on the first day of every month or year (and even more if they coincide), also on the day after regular overeating, or when there is just one month/week/day until an event, where I want to knock everyone down with my slenderness, the morning starts like, well, today.And it's been about ten years since those days ended like tomorrow.The morning starts with ruthless determination: I simply don't eat.I start with a "stomach-friendly" double coffee and vitamin combo, drink a lot of water, and then wait to see what happens.Around noon, of course, I'm already very hungry, but even then I happily and theatrically refuse every delicious snack: in case anyone didn't know, I'M LOSING WEIGHT!Then I don't know what happens.Maybe the UFOs take me away, maybe they mix something like that in my water, or I'm cooking something really delicious, but the next cut is that it's evening, and I'm standing at the kitchen counter, with bread with jam, peanut butter, or the leftovers from my second plate of dinner I am explaining something to the family in my mouth.Sometimes I'm angry with myself, but not so much: even if I don't lose weight, I keep my weight reliably with this method, and around forty you can be happy about it.The fact that all of this is terribly unhealthy, not at all modern, and the attitude associated with it (that is, that thin is beautiful and only thin) is especially toxic, is already a more uncomfortable feeling.At leastI know where and why I was socialized into the most axed diets and body torture.Maybe in the 2000s, and maybe because that was the custom.This was also in the air at the global level: many articles were written about the diet culture of the 2000s and its toxicity, and it is enough to look at the standards the media industry set for the young people of that time with stars like Brintey or Christina (who subsequently broke into it) not to mention his morbidly emaciated models).And we were defenseless: it seemed that the catch-up to the cool club would be complete with weight loss products, diets, capsules and machines.By the end of the 1990s - at least twenty years late, in return, in one huge, unmanageable dose - everything there was to know about self-indulgent diets came out, and there was enormous pressure on us to be thin.I don't claim that the compulsion was more or stronger (I can see exactly how great it is even today with my own daughter), but I do say that not only young people, but an entire society was completely defenseless and vulnerable to diet mania.It just hasn't sunk in how harmful it all is.I, for example, was ten times thinner and – of course, only in hindsight – quite pretty at a time when losing weight seemed to be a much more important issue than it is today, and even at fifty kilos I tried all the existing methods that promised slimness, while covering up the sneaky fact that losing weight it can be if you take in fewer calories than you use, and you can get in shape by exercising regularly.To be fair, I wasn't the only one who resorted to well-marketed methods.Dozens of people around me tried to lose weight using similar methods, and even 20 years ago a complete industry was built to slim the wallets of those who wanted to lose weight.However, we had much less information than today: where was intuitive eating, body positivity, HIIT training or even personalized dietary advice back then...Of course, I already knew a little more about dieting then than I did, and I'm still fully aware today that no one loses weight just by not mixing carbohydrates with protein, or by stunting or even reprogramming their fat metabolism if they eat coded, overpriced food consumes, looks at the glycemic index, or buys brown bread instead of white (hello, malt-colored, deceptive bakery cookies!) in unconcentrated quantities, but also if he eats in moderation.That's fine, but twenty years ago, compared to the millions of dieting diets out there, it didn't seem romantic at all.Changing your lifestyle, eating a little less and healthily in the long term (or jesus mary: forever) seemed like a terrifying prospect and permanence.on the other hand, diets that promised miracles but were painful in return, such as the orange and egg diet - which I did even when it was advertised as the diet of the Max Planck Institute of Nutrition - promised short-term and much more poetic asceticism.I highlight this because the once popular diet even in the menu plan (it is suspicious from the outset when something that barely reaches the same 1200 calories is called a diet regardless of age, gender or weight) operated with dramatic sentences and made me and others like me gain weight by the kilo. young people who did not learn much about healthy eating at home."Breakfast: a dry bun with black coffee without milk and sugar," they wrote, and it was impossible to resist.If they also added that "the Max Planck diet is very strict, and you must not deviate from the prescribed foods and order for the sake of the final result" - I felt that I had found what I was looking for.In retrospect, it is no longer clear what dietary considerations justified the poor dieter having to eat even that unfortunate bun dry.but it didn't matter, just cry.Speaking of which: I also enthusiastically pursued the once popular cabbage soup cure, in which you had to empty your stomach every day with a depressingly boring cabbage soup, because obviously some special active ingredient in the cabbage consumes it, and it's not that you take in more liquid and fewer calories that you fill up yourself with fiber.I also had adventures with the Atkins diet, in which I especially liked that it was explained in such a scientific way that it recodes the entire metabolism if you eat fat with fat.I don't doubt that it works anyway (I know someone who lost weight with it), but it would have been worth paying attention to body hacks here and there, even in this regimen you can't eat cheddar cheese with bacon for 10,000 calories a day or drink duck fat as an aperitif.I also sat on the other, low-fat train: I really liked the light stuff - the term was a buzzword of the 2000s anyway.For example, I used to eat light yogurts and the like, only later did I realize that low-fat yogurt with tons of sugar does not instantly get you in good shape, just as two bananas blended into 3 deciliters of half-and-half milk are anything but progressive.We drank drink powders instead of 1-2 meals - they were more good for digestion, because they made you incredibly hungry, we filled up liters of water with cucumber and apple cider vinegar,we lost weight only with popcorn, only pasta, later only with wine,with an apple and sour cream diet, juice fasting, turbo diet, Mayo diet, body control, by drinking instead of eating, I even knew a girl who lost weight with ice cream!The peak of my personal reform kitchen adventures was when I created scrambled eggs with liver cream on the protein day of the ninety-day diet.I haven't eaten anything more repulsive since then, but looking back, I was more shocked by how much my thoughts were filled with the compulsion to lose weight.The situation was similar with sports.By the time I'm 40, I can see that there are no special secrets in this area either: you can't skimp on exercise, especially if you're into sports:a machine that moves for us has not yet been invented.However, I think from the beginning that the exercise and lose weight message was a huge scam, more precisely the message of exercising your brain to look good.Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't exercise, because you really do.But even if you feel like a fitness blogger when you walk for half an hour after lunch, the calories you burn don't even add up to a bar of yogurt, so exercising isn't so much about losing weight as it is worthwhile for your health.However - today I know very much.Coming back: if they didn't invent machines that move instead of us, ones that we believed that we would move with them, because of them, and that without them we would never be as tight as the girls and boys moving on TV, really.(Exercise bikes, weighted hula hoops, home ellipticals or stair climbers all work of course, their danger lies in the fact that they end up as clothes hangers.) Who wouldn't have fallen for the inner thigh strengthener that can be folded and pushed under the bed? From this point of view, it's quite amazing what kind of bohemian machines he's packed with the apartment is full of people who could do it, especially since it is completely unnecessary.While it seemed clear from afar, in the teleshop, that anyone who stood on them would become a muscular gazelle, at home they were more like dust collectors, and you couldn't even watch TV properly.I tried a couple of times to watch a good movie on the basis of pleasant and useful, but I couldn't enjoy the movement or the movie that way.But my favorites were the abdominal muscle strengthening machines!I really don't want to pretend to be a sports guru, but if you can train your abs without such miracles, thousands have been enchanted by names like AB flex and AB isolator.Let's say I don't know why they pronounced these in Hungarian in the Hungarian advertisement (ab is an abbreviation of the English word abdominal), in any case, since I had no idea what it was going to be, these gadgets seemed even more exciting.I've only seen the first one up close, I think it's likely that my dad bought it just because it looked like a good-looking spaceship, otherwise it worked like you had to press it against your stomach, which forced you to tense your muscles.Brilliant, isn't it?It's like a sit-up, except it doesn't really make any sense.At our place, my dad only pulled one or two in, which hurt his elbows more, but it looked great among the discarded things during the garbage disposal.You had to buy the products that were advertised by extras dressed in doctor's coats, mockingly depicted swimming rings, and unrealistically perfect abs.Advanced people put me on an electric belly button (you can still get something like that now), which, after being tapped on, pulled your abs in a funny way - after all, sitting up is a weapon for the weak.The modernized expander was perhaps the most useful of the tools we have, because although I never dared to train with it (I was afraid it would hit me in the face, today I will completely pull it apart), it was great fun to pinch your brother's arm hair with it.I saw it on TV, but unfortunately we didn't buy the rocking chair (you had to lie down in it and sit up together with it), nor did we buy a stairclimber, although who knows what shape I would be in now if they had been available...However, the training videos were somewhat more useful: if there was something that influenced my figure in any way from the diet culture of the 2000s, it was the couple of tapes that I really got up from the sofa for - true, the message emanating from one or the other of them is again quite it was poisonous.The person jumping on the screen - whether a Hungarian guru or a foreign model - gave a little extra motivation, the person was less likely, but at least later, to fall back on the sofa if they were constantly encouraged, and some tapes raised the level of guilt awareness."I used to exercise on Cindy Crawford VHS every day.To this day, I know by heart when Cindy says what and with what tone of voice.His music was also very good: when I hear "Crazy" by Seal, I immediately fall on my back and start doing sit-ups," recalls our colleague Anita of the times when we still did gymnastics with supermodels.And there was also the qualified case of this whole madness, when the person - although he did not want to suffer - really wanted the kilos to melt away immediately from the parts of his body that were painted by the media (and this was also promised by all kinds of miracle preparations, which were advertised even more freely 20 years ago than today).That's when the various massages, rubs, wraps, saunas, creams, capsules, and teas came, which also promised sure weight loss.The gateway drug was wrapping in foil: it was well known that nothing melts the local fat pads like wrapping your thighs in foil so that you sweat like a mess underneath.For example, it made my legs especially slim.(No.) Our colleague Ágota can also confirm how effective this method was: "I also did the plastic foil wrapping: thigh-buttock-stomach, I wrapped it like that on the exercise bike.I'll tell you: the winding didn't matter."The advanced method was the teleshop teething belt, and the professional was ordering the complete consumer clothing, and this sweat = weight loss is so strongly burned into our consciousness that even today it can hardly be eradicated.I can say the same about consumer creams, which made people believe that they were working either by creating a cold or hot sensation, and these sensations caused extra discomfort even when the material applied to the thigh slipped a little higher.Slimming can come... (Photo: Getty Images)We also piled up the different virgin tea and apple cider vinegar capsules, mostly because of the romance: taking a laxative doesn't sound very good (note that as a young adult I also slipped up on this, and no one told me that it was very wrong), the digestion stimulating is almost healthy!Many people experimented with appetite suppressants that swell in the stomach and with mysterious drugs that allegedly prevented the absorption of various nutrients.“Even in the late 80s there was a cool diet tea.Well, if someone else smelled or drank something worse than this... It's enough for me to think about it, and not only my appetite, but also my will to live, goes away" - recalls a Facebook comment about the mechanism of action of the teas, and in hindsight I'm smarter too: if they had any effect it was for such drugs, the maximum is that they upset the person's stomach, or if he already spent a lot of money on them, he himself did everything to really lose weight.I don't know, but looking back from here, it raises criminal law questions that at the beginning of the 2000s, they not only distributed substances already banned abroad, but also advertised them with this ban.A Facebook commenter recalls the worst weight-loss adventure of his life: “She shed the pounds in seconds, but started with endless diarrhea and then blood on the tenth day.I was admitted to the infectious disease, enteritis.I have never taken weight loss products before or since."He was luckier with another drug: "About 25 years ago, I had a chewing tablet that I started taking.I didn't lose 1 gram, but my nails have never been as beautiful in my entire life as they were then."Unfortunately, we can't say that we lose weight much smarter, but I definitely feel that we have more opportunities to access information than before, and it would be great if we could use this more than before.And I also trust that more and more people have already received the message that weight loss does not require thoughtless or bombastic miracle campaigns, but rather conscious planning, patience, healthy food and activity.I planned this to be a cheerful, retro article, but as I wrote it, I also realized that what we have done to ourselves is quite scary, and that I, for example, should work hard to pass on as little of this attitude at home as possible.I trust that we have grown up so much that in 2022 we will no longer approach weight loss with such ancient and harmful or, at best, ineffective methods, but start from the dietetic foundation of fewer calories taken in and more calories expended, and find a supportive community where we can share with others we can share our experiences, exercise (feel free to lift weights - we have already written about the benefits of this at length - so that we can maintain the health of our bones for a longer period of time), get enough rest and avoid the various drugs that promise rapid changes.And anyway, let's forget the outdated idea that only thin is beautiful.We should eat, rest and exercise well not only and not primarily to meet some ideal, but to have a longer, healthier and fuller life.And the above diets, gadgets and pills - even if we can laugh at one or the other - should be thought of as a deterrent example.Featured image: Getty ImagesMake your lifestyle change a success, join us!Get involved in the lifestyle-changing challenges of Nők Lapja, gain yourself extra healthy years, and enter the competition for prizes!Follow us on Facebook too!