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recommended a daily enema to “flush out the poisons”—an approach that can still be seen today in the practice of colonics. Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s The Fat of the Land praised the traditional Inuit diet of caribou, raw fish, and whale blubber, with almost no fruit, vegetables, or carbohydrates. In Look Younger, Live Longer, Gayelord Hauser drew the admiration of Hollywood actresses Greta Garbo and Paulette Goddard with his emphasis on vitamin B-rich foods like brewer’s yeast, yogurt, wheat germ, and blackstrap molasses. He was also one of the first to develop his own line of special foods and supplements in accordance with that diet plan. Then there was the “magic pairs” diet, extolling the supposedly increased fat-burning properties of certain food combinations—lamb chops and pineapple, for example.

The twentieth century also brought the advent of diet pills and all manner of strange gadgets that were claimed to help dieters melt off the poundage while still eating whatever they liked. It all started when workers at a munitions factory in World War I inexplicably lost weight, and doctors concluded that a chemical known as dinitrophenol—used in the making of dyes, pesticides, insecticides, and explosives—was responsible for raising their metabolisms, so they burned more calories. By 1935, over a hundred thousand Americans had used diet pills made with dinitrophenol. Unfortunately, the side effects were nasty: There were several cases of blindness and a handful of deaths, and dinitrophenol was taken off the market.

My personal favorite weight-loss mechanical device is the belt-driven fat massager that wrapped around one’s torso and supposedly helped jiggle fat away. It was one of many Nautilus-like machines introduced beginning in 1857 by a Swedish physician named Gustav Zander. Zander Rooms were all the rage at elite spas in the second half of the nineteenth century. Today there are Vision-Dieter Glasses, designed to make food look less appealing, and Mini-Forks to encourage diners to take smaller bites, not to mention the Diet Dam—basically a muzzle to discourage you (and those around you) from eating by making you look like Hannibal Lecter. The invention of liposuction offered a shortcut to trimming unwanted stores of fat from hips, stomach, and thighs, and in the 1950s, rumors abounded that wealthy dieters were ingesting pills containing tapeworms to help them lose weight. After dropping sixty-five pounds, opera singer Maria Callas was among those rumored to have tried the tapeworm diet, perhaps because she had a known fondness for raw steak and raw liver.

The latest technology offering new hope for expanding waistlines and flabby thighs is the free-electron laser (FEL) at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, affectionately known as J-Lab. FELs are useful for any number of practical applications, but back in 2006, a team of J-Lab scientists demonstrated that the laser could burn away fat in the body without scorching the top layer of protective skin. This is a very exciting development, possibly leading to revolutionary new laser therapies to treat such chronic bugbears as severe acne, artery plaque, and of course, cellulite. It offers the tantalizing possibility of a whole new way to get thinner thighs in thirty days, with no need for even a lick of exercise.

The researchers tested the concept first on actual human fat (obtained from “surgically discarded normal tissue”) and then on skin-and-fat tissue samples taken from a pig. Just where did they get the pig fat for the experiment? I’m so glad you asked. Ordinarily, laboratories order their supplies from specialty outlets that cater to the tightly controlled specifications of the lab in question. In this case, for some reason, the shipping company refused to transport the pig fat the J-Lab scientists had originally ordered.

Nobody wanted to cancel the experiment, so they paid a visit to a local pig farmer. They purchased a single pig, and asked the farmer not to wash it down with vinegar—the usual custom—because vinegar would react badly with