ReZoom

This is the last in ReZoom's series about popular and long-standing diets. We took a look a what works and what didn't work ... and now we need a laugh.

About a thousand years ago as lore has it, William the Conqueror had grown so corpulent he couldn't fit in the saddle, so he devised a weight-loss technique, confining himself to his room and consuming nothing but alcohol. Well, it was the Middle Ages, the vortex of wrongheaded science.

Today, particularly in our current culture where the beaux ideal is Kate Moss, it's crazy what we will do for quick weight loss. Would we wrap ourselves in duct tape if we thought it would make us thinner? Place leaches on our thighs? Well, apparently we would. So, at the tail end of our diet series, we present our picks for bad diets in no particular order of wackiness:

The Cabbage Soup Diet
Talk about grueling, pun intended. This diet is about as palatable as eating fax paper. Some people find the soup nearly impossible to ingest after the first few days, so they just slowly start to disappear.

According to the diet, if you can hang in there, you can lose up to 10 pounds in one week, likely from sheer starvation. Some side effects include light-headedness, weakness and reduced levels of concentration.

The diet is meant to be a one-shot introduction to another diet, any other diet. Added benefit? You can diminish your "carbon footprint" because the "natural fuel" provided by the cabbage soup diet will reduce your need for a car — only a skateboard will be necessary.

The Grapefruit Diet
Doesn't it just seem liked grapefruit has all the qualities of a great weight-loss pill? Bitter, fat burning, speedy? Purportedly, grapefruit has fat burning enzymes, which when "complemented" with eating less than 800 calories a day, the dieter can lose anywhere from 12 to 20 pounds in a week or two.

Let's face it, if a person could eat grapefruit alone for more than three days, he or she has enough tenacity and impulse control to map out a regular, healthy diet, stay on it and get to the gym every day, if for nothing else than just to get away from the grapefruit.

Apart from that, it's fabulous.

The Maple Syrup, Lemon Juice and Cayenne Pepper Diet
Beyonce Knowles, in preparing for her role in the cinematic blockbuster "Dream Girls," went on a crash diet of the aforementioned ingredients. The plan began as a detox program, and it may actually work to a certain extent since lemon and cayenne have detoxifying properties

The diet, mostly unheard of until now, is, of course, famous and well-documented because Knowles became so svelte on the diet. Many of the other claimed benefits include clearer skin and eyes, shinier hair and stronger nails and improved brain power. Paris, are you listening? Don't you just need one celebrity to tell you that something works?

The Eating According to One's Blood Type Diet
This plan's developer, who will go unnamed lest he be litigious, maintains that the foods we eat should be based on one's blood type. How this was devised is unclear, but the idea is based on the evolution of man. Apparently unbeknownst to researchers around the world, as we developed different blood types, certain types of food became "off limits."

One can only image the complex clinical studies that went into this diet. Oh, were there clinical studies? No.

Eating According to the Bible
The Maker's Diet is actually a pretty good diet, and we think Our Maker is just fine with us taking care of ourselves, body and soul. What's a little silly about this diet is its assumptiveness: a theory of "Biblically correct" eating? When we last looked, the Bible had no prescription for supplementing with whole foods. The diet also includes eating "modest" portions.

It also focuses on emotional and spiritual health, practicing advanced hygiene, exercising, reducing toxins in your environment, avoiding deadly emotions and living a life of prayer and purpose. Amen, if you can do it.

But seriously, folks:

• The Weight Watchers Diet
• The South Beach Diet
• The Zone Diet
• The Mediterranean Diet
• The Atkins Diet