In my lifetime I've been on pretty much every diet known to man.  Right now, in fact, I'm back on Jenny Craig as it is one of the few diets that I can do with any success because I don't actually have to think about what I'm eating.  When I have to think about what my next meal is, how many calories are in it, or how many points it will cost me, I spend most of the day thinking about food.  I'm a lifer when it comes to diets.  I've rarely been happy with my weight, and I'm one of those dogs that is too old to teach new tricks.

Like I said, I've done them all.  Weight Watchers? Check. Nutrisystem? Check. Atkins? Check.  I've eaten all fruit until I've gotten a mouth full of chancre sores; and relished the one month where I ate pounds of bacon, sausage, cheddar cheese, and In-N-Out Burgers wrapped in lettuce until I needed a colonic and was warned this wasn't in the true spirit of the no carb philosophy. My cousin Gina and I combined cocaine and the Cambridge liquid diet into weight loss gold, until the first time we smoked a joint and ate all 15 lbs back in one trip to the market.

I've gone the medical route too.  Thanks to my mother's life long obsession with both of our weights I've been able to be a guinea pig for a number of medical professionals whose degrees came from the back of a cereal box.  Of course there was the Phen Phen craze.  Loved that. I was amped up on ever increasing doses of amphetamines and given a little orange pill, Pondimin, that worked like magic on my waistline until the FDA got all cranky about it.  When I was in high school I saw a doctor who worked out of a small dark office off a rather sketchy alley near skid row who sent my mother home with injections to give me to supplement my 500 calorie a day diet.  A few years ago, while driving home one night, I asked my mother precisely what was in those injections. She paused for a moment to inventory the catalogue of diets we've been on, and then said, without missing a beat, "Oh, that.  Impregnated cows' urine."  There was also the time when, after I had eaten a whole serving of spinach artichoke cheese dip to myself that my mother handed me a Xenical pill, promising me that it would keep all the fat from being absorbed into my system, and would have no side effects.  Clearly the woman doesn't understand the meaning of the word side effects.  Let's just say Murphy's Law includes oozing oil from every pore and orifice.

I've even tried self-medicating my way to weight loss. When I was in high school I was pretty friendly with the drug scene and while all the other girls in my group who were doing coke lost weight, I could snort a gram in one go and then eat two Big Macs and two large fries in one go and still be hungry.  I even tried snorting Dexatrim. Word to the wise, don't.  You wind up sneezing all those little balls from the capsule all over the dining room table.

So, what I'm saying is that it takes a lot to surprise me when it comes to diets.  But there are two new trends that register pretty high on my WTF metre.  The first is the new celebrity fad of eating baby food. Yup, you heard me, baby food.  While Jennifer Aniston may be denying that she's in the running for the role as the new Gerber baby, there are plenty of eating disordered starlets who are willing to hork down puréed vegetable beef or chicken with gravy. (Anyone else's gag reflex kicking in ?)

The second item that's got me seriously bewildered? Slim Chips.  No fat.  Barely any calories, and in chip form to boot.  Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? (Yeah, my first thought was WoW chips too, so you're not alone.) However, it would appear that some nice young man from Iceland has come up with the idea solution.  Chip flavoured paper.  Yeah, you heard me, paper. And they come in mint flavour, blueberry, cheddar or wasabi. Good lord, what will they think of next?