It’s been predicted that the global weight loss industry will be worth over $400 billion by the year 2030. With a world population of 8 billion people, that means it’s worth about $50 for every single person out there.  It’s safe to say that there’s a lot of money to be made thanks to weight loss, and people are constantly trying to find ways to improve their chances of getting healthy.

We all know that watching your caloric intake and exercising are standard and reliable ways to lose weight, but people still like to find an edge when they can. Some unique or unpredictable way of helping to shed the pounds. A lot of methods are not scientifically sound, and some are downright fraudulent, but there are a few weird tricks that can help you burn an extra calorie or two if you’re interested.

10. Ice Cold Water is Technically Negative Calories

One idea that people have found attractive over the years is negative calorie foods. For a long time people suggested that something like celery was a negative calorie food. That means if you eat it you burn more calories in the act of eating and digesting and you get out of the food itself. Unfortunately for the celery lovers out there, that’s not true. There aren’t any foods with any nutritional value at all that are negative calories. It doesn’t mean that there’s nothing negative calorie out there.

Ice water is the only more or less negative calorie food that you can ingest.  Water naturally has no calories, so you’re already at zero calories, but if it’s ice cold your body actually needs to use energy to warm it up to body temperature, which makes it a net negative overall. 

Is drinking ice water a great way to lose weight? Not really. Your body will warm the water up to 98.6°, or whatever your base body temperature is, and to do that you’re going to burn about 8 calories. That’s less than the calories you’d take in from eating a single potato chip.

9. There’s a Way To Prepare Rice That Greatly Reduces its Calories

Nearly half of the population of the world eats rice.  It’s a staple grain and one of the most popular foods in history. It’s also considered fairly healthy, but as a carbohydrate it’s also something that you need to be cautious about eating in large quantities because of the potential calories involved. 

A cup of cooked white rice has just over 200 calories. As a part of a larger meal, it can significantly contribute to the overall calories, especially if it’s eaten several times a day as it may be in some parts of the world. But with all that in mind, you can actually reduce the calories in rice based entirely on how you prepare it. 

A cup of cooked white rice has just over 200 calories.As a part of a larger meal, it can significantly contribute to the overall calories, especially if it’s eaten several times a day as it may be in some parts of the world. But with all that in mind, you can actually reduce the calories in rice based entirely on how you prepare it. 

Research in 2015 suggested that if you cook rice with some coconut oil, then let it cool down, you can reduce calories by as much as 60%. This is due to the oil entering the starch molecules in the rice and making them resistant to digestive enzymes. As the rice cools, the amylose, which is the soluble part of the starch, is stripped away and tough hydrogen bonds are formed between the molecules. All of this means that your body can’t digest those starches anymore, which means you can absorb the carbohydrates and associated calories. 

If you let the rice cool in a fridge for 10 hours, you’re going to get the best results overall in terms, and you can still warm it up again to eat it when ready.

8. Donating Blood Burns 650 Calories

Now keep in mind that no one is suggesting this as a viable, and certainly not sustainable, method of weight loss. This could be pretty dangerous if you push the envelope. However, it’s worth noting that donating blood burns a lot of calories. Compared to most methods of losing weight, it burns a lot.

Donating blood just one time can burn up to 650 calories. That’s the equivalent of walking for 7 miles if you weigh 200 pounds. The reason that donating blood is such an effective way of burning calories is that your body has to synthesize all those proteins and cells again to replace the blood you’ve lost. 

Most places have a fairly strict rule regarding how often you can donate blood, with many settling on at least 56 days between donations, so this isn’t a surefire weight loss cure by any means.

7. Hot Peppers and Capsaicin Increase Metabolism and Lead to Weight Loss

The active ingredient in hot peppers and other spicy foods of that nature is called capsaicin. Over the last decade or two on the internet it’s become a novelty item as people post videos of eating spicier and spicier foods and peppers just for fun.

Not everyone is aware that capsaicin actually has health benefits, however. One of these is that it can cause a significant metabolic increase. In clinical studies, patients given capsaicin have shown a marked increase in weight loss over those taking a placebo. Not only does capsaicin increase your metabolism which helps you burn fat quicker, it also acts as an appetite suppressant so you’re less likely to want to eat more which can also help with weight loss. 

6. Fidgeting Can Burn 350 Calories Per Day 

Would you call yourself a fidgeter? You might want to look into starting if you’re not already. People who fidget are at a natural advantage when it comes to losing weight. And of course it makes perfect sense when you think about it, because they are engaging in physical activity. It may not seem significant, but if you’ve ever watched somebody who is naturally fidgety, you’ll notice they can sustain it for a long time. Kids who have certain attention deficit issues can fidget for an entire class when they’re in school.

Research has shown that people who do fidget a lot are able to burn up to 350 calories per day doing it. This is because they have issues just sitting still and will naturally move around more often. Over the course of a year, this could translate into the loss of 30 to 40 pounds.

5. Laughter Increases Your Heart Rate and Burns Calories

Everyone has heard that laughter is the best medicine, but we probably weren’t laughing when we ended up in the hospital with the flu or a broken arm. While it may not cure a lot of diseases or help heal injuries, that’s not to say that laughter can’t be of use to your overall health. Laughter is able to increase your heart rate and burn calories as a result. Laughing for 15 minutes is the equivalent of walking about a half a mile. That can work out to about 4 pounds a year, just from laughter. 

The laughter doesn’t need to be sustained, so no worries about forcing yourself to become the joke. It’s cumulative, so if you watch a few comedies or laugh with friends you’ll probably be good. 

4. Urine From Pregnant Woman Was Touted as a Weight Loss Method By a Number of Doctors

There are lots of proven ways to lose weight, most of them related to how you eat in the physical activity you do. There are also a million and one quack weight loss methods that probably don’t work at all. And somewhere in between there’s a little gray area where anecdotal evidence suggests something works even though not a lot of science has been involved to prove it one way or the other. And that’s where we are right now with urine as a weight loss tool.

The hormone hCG can be found in the urine of pregnant women and in the early 2010s it became the biggest fad in weight loss, at least for those who could afford the $1,000 doses. This despite the fact that the FDA warned it had not been proven to decrease appetite or aid in weight loss. 

The stuff still had to be prescribed by doctors, so there was at least a sense of legitimacy behind it. The popularity stemmed from the fact that doctors were anecdotally claiming to have observed significant weight loss in many of their patients who were using it.

The flip side of the coin is that patients who were taking the hormone were also on 500 calorie a day diets, which could certainly explain significant weight loss without having to resort to the use of urine. Reports at the time indicated that patients on the diet, and taking the hormone, or able to lose up to 1 lb a day.

Why would this work at all? The idea is that the hormone, because it’s produced during pregnancy, tricks your body into thinking it’s pregnant and increases your metabolism as a result.

3. You Burn Up To Two Times the Calories Walking on Sand Versus Hard Ground

Not all walking is created equal. Just because your legs are moving and your feet are hitting the ground doesn’t mean you’re getting the same workout as somebody else doing the same thing. Where you walk has a lot to do with how effective it is as a method of weight loss.

If you want to make the most of going for a walk, take a page from cheesy personal ads and go for a walk on the beach. Walking on the sand is going to burn about twice as many calories as walking on pavement. 

Because sand is not as hard as pavement, the muscles in your legs need to work harder in order to keep you balanced on it. We’ve all gone for a walk on sand and noticed that you slip, sink, and generally have a harder time moving because of how uneven it is. But that unevenness makes it a much better method of working out, if your goal is to burn calories.

Studies conducted on diabetic patients who walked in sand as a method of exercise showed a significant decrease in body mass index, overall body fat, and an increased quality of life versus those who didn’t. 

2. Hiking Burns More Calories Than Just Walking the Same Distance

In a person’s quest to lose weight there are countless options for activities that you can engage in. Some people want to hit the gym and use machines, some people prefer to go out in nature where you can run, swim, ride a bicycle, and so on.

Obviously some physical activities are going to be more intense and burn more calories than others. But it can be surprising to learn just how much more effective one thing may be compared to something else. For instance, if you want to get out in nature, you’ll burn more calories if you hike for a mile than if you walk for a mile. It’s kind of like the sand walking effect, but for slightly different reasons.

Going for a mile-long walk might burn about 100 calories for you. However, if you choose to hike that same distance then you’ll be burning about double the calories. Also, if you decide to put on a backpack that’s loaded with gear and add some weight to you, you may end up burning close to 500 calories. All of this over the same distance.

The chief reason for the increase in calories burned is that hiking takes place over uneven terrain. You have to engage more muscles and put in more effort because you’ll be walking up and down and over steeper inclines than if you’re just walking on a sidewalk.

1. Improved Posture Can Help In Achieving Weight Loss

It looks like bad posture is one of the greatest health issues to affect people who don’t even realize it’s a problem. As many as 80% of Americans will suffer from back issues and posture is one of the chief causes. But it’s more than just back trouble. Posture affects your weight as well.

Poor posture makes poor use of all of your muscles. When slouched, your muscles aren’t operating at full capacity and you have a tendency to develop more fat deposits to balance you out because you’re not in an ideal position.

Improved posture helps your better function more efficiently and means any other exercises you do will be of greater benefit. If you exercise with proper posture, you’ll receive greater gains as a result.

This year, the French began to enforce a law that bans unhealthily thin models, with said models needing a doctor’s certificate in order to be hired for work. In addition the law stipulates that digitally altered images, that make models appear even skinnier than they are, will need to be labeled as such. It’s a dramatic step to tackle the growing epidemic of eating disorders that continues to perpetuate in the Western world.

With more and more individuals attempting to reach unattainable beauty standards, it’s no surprise that weight loss gimmicks and scams have reached epic proportions. However, to our surprise, radical and misguided attempts weight loss have been prevalent throughout history. Here are 10 such methods more horrifying than you probably imagined…

10. Victorians Ate Live Tapeworms

The Victorian Era, which took place roughly between the 1830s to 1900, was known for its particular beauty standards. Most notably, women of wealth wore extravagant, multi-layered skirts which had a beehive shape. For women in the Victorian period, getting into those tightly worn outfits was a struggle in itself. Most women of the Victorian Era were pushed into fastening corsets around themselves, with the goal of achieving the esteemed 16 inch waist. Internal organs weren’t deemed to be of that much importance. And while corsets are not in great use today, a Victorian Era practice still is: tapeworms.

The concept is as terrifying as it is disgusting. Ingest a pill containing a tapeworm egg? Sounds more like a science fiction movie than a diet routine. We wish that were true. Apparently, once hatched, “the parasite grows inside of the host, ingesting part of whatever the host eats.” What makes the tapeworm diet so appealing to many is the belief that the dieter will not have to change their lifestyle or eating habits at all. The theory holds that ingesting the tapeworm allows hosts to lose weight and eat without worrying about calorie intake. There is little to no evidence that supports these claims, but somehow, the theory still exists with even “celebrities” like Khloe Kardashian suggesting their merits.

It’s our hope that the tapeworm will join the rest of Victorian fashion in the dustbins of history.    

9. Vinegar to Keep Thin

Khloe Kardashian won’t be the first or the last celebrity to use their status to promote an unhealthy weight loss method. Celebrities have long used their platform to either shape or inadvertently promote an unwise weight loss diet. Enter Lord Byron. The Romantic era poet and politician, Byron was greatly concerned about his figure and popularized a vinegar-based diet. Although side effects included vomiting and diarrhea, Byron would drink vinegar daily and eat potatoes soaked in the pungent liquid. It was meant to cleanse his body, as Byron believed that he had a “morbid propensity to fatten.”

Soon after his habit became known, it became a craze with one critic noting, “Our young ladies live all their growing girlhood in semi-starvation.” The youth of the period were so influenced by Byron that they began diets consisting of vinegar and rice to emulate their idol’s thin and pale look. The need to be perceived as thin was so great during the time that even Queen Victoria worried about gaining weight. It seems that even as times change, some things do not.

8. Poisoned Themselves With Arsenic

A precursor to the “wonder pills” that are currently advertised were the drugs, pills, and potions that became a part of the big business of weight loss in the 19th century. However, without the FDA, the 19th century drug makers were liable to include much more dangerous ingredients – including arsenic. For those unaware, arsenic is a rat-killing poison that will kill humans if consumed in large amounts. Studies have also linked prolonged exposure or use with cancer, diabetes, and liver disease. It remains unclear why exactly dieters believed that those ingredients would help in weight loss, but some experts believe that it “was advertised as speeding up the metabolism, much like amphetamines.”

The amount of arsenic used in these drugs and pills was small, but it was still extremely dangerous for users; especially because many would consume more than the prescribed amount with the belief that they would lose weight sooner.

7.  Dieters Would Chew And Spit Out Food

Some of the greatest artists in history have had their names used to characterize other works. Works resembling Shakespeare have become Shakespearean, works similar to Kafka have become Kafkaesque. It’s not much of a leap to believe that William Fletcher must have believed his name would join the great men in history with his radical Fletcherism diet.

In the early 20th century, Horace Fletcher came up with a new weight loss program. He argued that a lot of chewing and spitting was the most effective way to lose weight. It began to be known as Fletcherism, and as it became more nuanced, Fletcher stipulated that one must chew a mouthful of food until the “goodness” was extracted, then spit out the remaining material that was left. Fletcherism became immensely popular, with proponents including the likes of Henry James and even Franz Kafka. Items such as shallots were said to be chewed more than 700 times, and dinner parties soon began to include members timing one another’s chews.

As a result of the diet, participants only defecated once every several weeks. Fletcher seemed to take this as a positive, even arguing that one’s feces would smell like “warm biscuits.” It was said that William Fletcher even carried around a bag of his own feces to demonstrate the great smell.

6. Women Tried to Wash the Fat Away With Soap

If advertisements now seem deceptive, imagine seeing an ad that claimed that with just a little of soap, you could wash away fat. A 1920 newspaper advertisement did just that, claiming the La – Mar  brand could, “wash away fat and years of age.” The promotional material makes a lot of ridiculous claims, promising users that there was no need for “dieting or exercise. Be as slim as you wish.” In a lot of ways, what the La-Mar soap promises isn’t that outrageous in comparison to many of the current dieting plans. However, the La-Mar brand did make some claims that even the most ambitious scam artists wouldn’t make.

Here are a few: acts like magic removing double chin, results quick and amazing, and reduce any parts of the body desired without affecting other parts.

The amazing and terrifying thing is La-Mar wasn’t alone: La Parle existed in the United States with the same promises of their competitors, and undoubtedly the same “results.”

5. Breatharian Diet was Like a Cult

Probably the most terrifying diet on our list is more than just a diet, and is considered a philosophy and even a spiritual movement. Proponents believe that all one needs to survive is… sunlight. That’s it. Advocates claim that human beings who demonstrate spiritual purity can live solely on water, sunlight, and the life force (Prana). While it may seem to be an ancient hoax, “breatharianism” is currently practiced in the United States.

Leaders of the American movement, Wiley Brookes and their founder Jasmuheen (born Ellen Greve), have led its growth and resurging popularity. Jasmuheen claimed to be able to survive without any more than the occasional cup of tea for months on end. However, after an interview with 60 Minutes where she consented to stay in a hotel room to demonstrate her abilities, she was unable to stay for a single day without demonstrating signs of dehydration.

Actress Michelle Pfeiffer, who admitted to participating in the movement early in her career, has called it a cult with adherents who are very controlling and manipulative.

4. Anklets Were Another Form of Corsets

It’s hard to beat the crudeness and restrictiveness of the corset, but the anklet certainly made its best effort. A rubber device that appeared like a modern ankle brace, the anklet promised to “reduce your flesh.” The advertisement claimed that weight would be lost without diet or exercise, simply by dissolving fat as a result of perspiration that will be caused by wearing the anklet.

Promotional material claimed the anklet was deemed effective by a Dr. Jeanne P.H. Walter. And we don’t think it takes Holden Caulfield to tell us that the woman’s middle initials must have stood for phony.  

3. Spot Reducer Has a Familiar Advertising Slogan

The Spot reducer makes the list because of its demonstration of the parallels between ad campaigns. The great similarity between advertisement for the Spot Reducer and La- Mar soap is quite fascinating and terrifying. A one page promotional piece placed in the 1950 Milwaukee Sentinel for the Spot Reducer encouraged readers to not to stay fat, but to “lose pounds and inches safely.” A small gadget made of aluminum and rubber, the Spot Reducer was nothing more than a small vibrator. That didn’t stop advertisers.

Wherever the reader has extra weight, the Spot Reducer will erase it “like a magic wand,” they said. Similar to earlier ad campaigns, they told consumers that they did not have to worry about diet or exercise, all the work would be done by the Spot Reducer. It’s sad that people not only believed those words then, but continue to believe them now.

2. Tongue Patch Test

A “modern” iteration of the tapeworm diet, the tongue patch test consists of a doctor sewing a patch of mesh into patients’ tongues. As a result of the patch, swallowing or eating, in general, becomes difficult – even causing pain. The tongue patch test is most prevalent in Venezuela but has also been documented in the United States.

A cosmetic surgeon in California who has begun to administer the patch charges $2,000 for the procedure while promising it will lead to 18 to 20 pounds of weight loss in 30 days.

For those who found this method appealing, “the procedure comes with an 800-calorie per day liquid diet of shakes and drinks until the patch comes off.” Buyer beware.

1. Last Chance Diet Took Lives

Like Mr. Fletcher, the Prolinn diet also bears the name of its creator: Robert Linn. The Prolinn diet was created in the 1970s as a precursor to the wonder drinks of the 1990s. Linn’s special drink was said to contain “400 calories of liquid protein.” However, after some investigation, the “protein” in Linn’s drink began to be questioned. Soon after, it was revealed that the “protein” was nothing more than the leftover of slaughterhouse byproducts like crushed animal horns, hooves, hides, tendons and bones.

Linn then used artificial flavors, enzymes, and colors to make the drinks more appealing to consumers. And it became more than appealing to consumers: they actually bought it. Millions did. In total, two to four million people used the Prolinn diet to lose weight and, sadly enough, 58 people died from heart attacks while on it.