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As soon as people became wealthy enough
not to have to spend every waking hour

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of their day working, cleaning,
hunting, or cooking, they had enough

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time to look in the mirror and
decide what they didn't like about themselves.

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And so for hundreds, if not
thousands of years, people, and let's

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be honest, mainly women, who
have forever been held to unthinkably high standards

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of beauty, have done whatever they
could to their bodies to achieve their society's

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idea of perfection. From the truly
horrific and crippling foot binding practices in Imperial

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China to modern day plastic surgery,
people have been searching for ways to achieve

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their body goals. Victorian England.
The initial setting for today's story was possibly

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one of the craziest times in history
when it came to the number of diet

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fads and body morphing practices. So
what better place to dive in and see

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where the stories take us. These
are the bizarre but true stories from history

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that in some way involved food.
I'm Nick Charlie Key, and this is

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00:01:11,799 --> 00:01:26,519
the fantastic history of food. One
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skill as well. The Victorian era in

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England dominated most of the eighteen hundreds
and is notorious amongst historians for their truly

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bizarre standards of beauty. For some
reason, the uppercrust Society woman decided that

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true beauty meant looking like you were
suffering from a life threatening disease tuberculosis to

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be exact, or consumption as they
called it. Then what this meant in

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practice is that women would shy away
from sunlight, as well as powdering their

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faces in order to get that truly
pale skin look with slightly dilated eyes,

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rosy cheeks, crimson lips, and
a frame so skinny as to struggle to

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hold itself aloft. In order to
achieve some of these looks, women would

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do irreversible damage to themselves and their
health by drinking ammonia or bathing in arsenic

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which at the time they already knew
was poisonous. Figure crushing corsets were pulled

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so tightly that breathing became difficult,
all in the name of achieving that so

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called perfect sixteen inch waistline. In
today's society, thankfully, these practices have

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mostly fallen by the waysiders. Both
standards of beauty have changed along with the

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woman's fight against the pressures of modern
in society to look, act, or

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speak in a certain way. But
as always, one particular practice has somehow

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weathered the storm and clung on through
the sands of time. It has even

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been mentioned by one of the Kardashians
as an option to speed up her weight

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loss, as well as featuring on
more diet blogs than I care to mention.

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And that is the literally stomach churning
idea of the tapeworm diet. In

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theory, it sounds relatively harmless and
rather simple. In fact, all you

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do is swallow a pull capsule with
a freeze dried tapeworm egg inside. The

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warmth of your insides allows the egg
to thaw and attach itself to you before

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hatching into a terrifying tapeworm. Once
the parasite is alive and growing inside of

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the host, it begins eating part
of whatever it's human eats. The theory

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goes that the so called dieter can
then eat whatever they want and still lose

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weight as the tape woem chomps a
portion of everything that comes past it.

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Now, to Victorian ladies, this
sounded like the Holy Grail, the best

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of both worlds, to be exact. One of the most popular pieces of

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women's literature in these times was a
beauty guide penned by a woman named S.

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D. Powers. It was ironically
called The Ugly girl papers and was

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an illustrated guide to becoming more beautiful. In fact, the guide's overarching principle

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stated that it is a woman's business
to be beautiful. Beauty, especially in

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Victorian England, with its myriad of
fads, took a lot of time and

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effort, and, according to the
guide, could not and should not forego

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the tediousness of beauty regimes should she
so desire to find a husban. It's

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not hard to see now why women
were prepared to do almost anything to achieve

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the ideals of their times. Any
concerns about health or any discomfort felt from

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the tapeworm were simply chalked up to
the fact that beauty is pain and sacrifices

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needed to be made. But one
of the ultimate sacrifices to be made was,

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once the woman's desired weight had been
reached, how do we get the

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tapeworm out again? And this is
where things get interesting. Now that the

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tapeworm was no longer necessary, they
would approach doctors to help them retrieve the

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unwanted parasite. In Victorian England,
you would often be faced with two options,

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neither of which were one hundred percent
effective, but ones that were incredibly

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different in their methodology. Firstly,
and most simply, patients were often given

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special medicinal pills to hopefully kill off
the tapeworm and allow it to be flushed

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out of their system. Like I
said, it wasn't always effective, and

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in fact wasn't even close. It
was very hit or miss, and more

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often than not it missed. Then
there was option too, which was a

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whole lot more invasive and a whole
lot more dangerous to the human host.

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Victorian doctors employed the invention of a
doctor Myers of Sheffield, who surmised that

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because tapeworms loved food so much,
the patient should therefore starve themselves for a

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few days and in turn also starve
the tapeworm. Once the tapeworm was desperate

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enough for some food, doctor Myers's
invention would be used. The invention in

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question was a cylinder filled with food
attached to a long string. The cylinder

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would be inserted via the mouth,
and, if all went well, swallowed

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down into the digestive tract. The
smell of the food would alert the tapeworm

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and it would attempt to eat whatever
it could inside the cylinder. The cylinder

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would then be pulled back up the
digestive tract, luring the tapeworm up and

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up until it was visible to the
doctor, whereby it could be grabbed and

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slowly wound out of the patient.
At this point, it's worth noting that

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adult tapeworms can grow to be as
long as twenty five meters or eighty feet

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long. The pulling out process was
not a quick thing, and, as

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I'm sure you can imagine, an
incredibly uncomfortable procedure for the patient. There's

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also one other thing that made this
method particularly daunting for patients, and that

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is due to the size of the
cylinder the patients needed to swallow. Many

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of them unfortunately ended up choking to
death on the cylinder before the tapeworm could

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even be successfully removed. Now,
some folk medicine cures hilariously state that one

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should simply hold a glass of milk
at both ends of your top and bottom

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openings and wait for the tape worm
to come out for a drink. In

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nineteen twelve, reports of t tapeworm
consumption began to appear in the United States.

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In this case, it happened unwillingly
to a wealthy woman who had sent

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away for a miracle diet pill,
only to realize after consumption that they contain

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tapeworm eggs. There are also stories
of horse racing jockeys famous for needing to

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be as small and light as possible, ingesting tapeworms to maintain their optimal racetrack

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weights. Tapeworms generally only cause minor
discomfort and sufferers, and nowadays can be

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easily treated. However, in some
cases, when they grow to excessive sizes

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and aren't treated for a prolonged period
of time, they have been known to

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cause meningitis, epilepsy, and even
dementia. This is in stark contrast to

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a nineteen twenties newspaper advert cheerfully selling
the tapeworm diet as a solution, which

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read tapeworms no danger, no diet, no exercise. Now, the tapeworm

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diet wasn't alone in being a crazy
diet fad from recent history, but it

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certainly was the weirdest and by far
the grossest of them all. One of

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the other popular diet crazes this time
in the early twentieth century was known as

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Fletcherism. A man named Horace Fletcher
suffered for years from indigestion and obesity and

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decided to come up with a unique
method to combat both of these afflictions.

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Generally, the main concept behind this
fad actually makes a lot of sense.

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Essentially, it was calling for mindful
eating, to slow down during a meal

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and really consider each and every mouthful. There was one mechanical requirement for it

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to work, though, and that
was that Fletcherism required you to chew each

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and every mouthful at least thirty two
times before swallowing. People of the times

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denounced him as a quack and accused
him of promoting constipation rather than weight loss.

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In reality, however, there is
some scientific backing for his method of

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eating. Even if it can be
overwhelmingly tedious, it helps prevent overeating in

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a very simple biological way. Inside
of our small intestine is a group of

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cells that react to food by releasing
a hormone called p YY. This hormone

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acts as a hungus apressant and helps
to give you that feeling of being full

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after a big meal. Fletcherism helps
this process in two ways. The release

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of the pyy hormone can often take
a while to kick in, and that

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full feeling can present too late if
you're an overly fast eater. The mindful,

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slow chewing method of Fletcherism helps your
body to release that hormone in time

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to stop you eating more than necessary. The second way that it helps is

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that the hormone is released even quicker
because the overabundance of chewing has helped to

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break the food down more quickly,
meaning it triggers the p YY receptor is

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faster than less chewed food. Now
we are all too aware of them to

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day, but one of the very
first diet influences in history was the infamous

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Romantic poet Lord Byron. He advocated
for truly bizarre vinegar diet, whereby he

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would drink undiluted vinegar multiple times a
day, but not only that, he

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would also soak his food in it
before eating it. This, apparently and

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unsurprisingly, was said to be the
cause of, at the time his very

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in vogue appearance. He was famously
known to have been incredibly pale and slim,

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bordering on gangley As a physique,
what most people took to be the

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epitome of health and fashion, more
than likely was illness and malnutrition. The

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annoying thing about all of this is, though, in recent studies, it

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has been shown that small amounts of
diluted vinegar, and specifically apple cider vinegar

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does in fact have a rather large
impact on the amount of sugar one consumes

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from starchy foods like bread when taken
before eating another. Bonker's diet idea first

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appeared in Venice. In fifteen fifty
eight, a merchant there by the name

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of Luigi Cornaro published a book titled
The Art of Living Long. He was

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apparently a convert from a life of
utter excess into a man who severely restricted

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his diet. After suffering from exhaustion
and illness for a few years, he

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decided he would institute an almost militant
regime when it came to his food consumption.

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He decided he would only consume three
hundred and forty grams of food per

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day, consisting of any combination of
bread, egg, yolks, meat,

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or soup, in order to still
have some enjoyment in his life. He

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did allow himself half a bottle of
wine per day as well. After mastering

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this restrictive diet, he apparently took
things to even greater heights by allowing himself

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one single egg per day and nothing
more. And who can argue with him

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when he is said to have lived
to the ripe old age of one hundred

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and two. Finally, we come
to one of the weirdest of them all,

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but one which boasts a rather famous
adherent, the King himself, Elvis

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Presley Others. Diet first surface in
the nineteen sixties and seems designed purely for

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people with no self control whatsoever.
It seems to rely solely on the concept

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that if you're sleeping, you aren't
busy eating, so naturally, it was

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given the name the Sleeping Beauty diet. People looking to lose weight quickly would

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block out a few weeks of their
life and then basically just sleep. Now,

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obviously, the human body can't do
that naturally, and so they would

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employ the use of copious amounts of
sedatives, sleeping pools, alcohol, and

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00:15:50,679 --> 00:15:56,039
other drugs to force the body to
stay as sleepy as possible, sometimes for

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up to twenty hours a day.
Elvis found out about this actors, and,

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desperate to shed a few pounds,
had a doctor put him in a

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medically induced coma for a few days
to stop him being tempted to eat.

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The King did have a rather unhealthy
relationship with food, The diet often ranging

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from deep fried pickles to peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwiches. After gorging

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on meals like that for a while, it's no wonder he felt the need

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00:16:22,000 --> 00:16:30,679
to sleep it off. Well.
There have been so many fad diets throughout

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the ages, many of which have
proven to be physically harmful and damaging,

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that any perceived gain from the regime
is often more than artweighed by the negative

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00:16:38,600 --> 00:16:41,879
effects on the body. I am, by no means a doctor or a

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00:16:41,919 --> 00:16:47,799
dietitian, but in my experience,
our bodies all need different combinations and variations

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00:16:47,799 --> 00:16:52,200
of certain eating habits to perform at
their optimum. Moderation is always key,

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00:16:52,559 --> 00:16:56,639
but so is finding out what works
for you in a sustainable manner. But

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00:16:56,720 --> 00:16:59,679
that's enough for me. I hope
that whenever you eat your next meal,

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you savor it and enjoy it,
as that truly is the essence of the

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joy that is food. This show
is made entirely by me Nick Charlie Key,

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00:17:14,519 --> 00:17:18,440
with our theme music having been made
by the enigma that is the mysterious

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00:17:18,480 --> 00:17:26,960
Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd like to
support the show, the simplest way to

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00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:30,079
do that is over on our Patreon
account. There's just one option, So

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00:17:30,279 --> 00:17:33,519
for just two bucks a month,
you'll help me keep producing the show,

200
00:17:33,839 --> 00:17:37,839
and in return, you'll get your
name forever etched onto our supporters Wall of

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00:17:37,880 --> 00:17:42,079
Fame over on our website and then
maybe listen out for your name in an

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00:17:42,119 --> 00:18:03,920
upcoming episode. So until next time, bono petit damn