Late 60s - mid 70s 'diet foods'

[SunshineAvenue]

Just had cottage cheese on Melba toast with grapes for lunch which always reminds me of my mum who was (I now realise) often on a diet.

It's a real early 70s 'diet' lunch in my eyes as is grapefruit and black coffee for breakfast.

What foods/meals do you associate with diets from this era? Do you/did you like them.

This isn't a diets are bad/no food is 'diet' thread but more of a nostalgic look back.

TAB diet drink in a can anyone?

I remember being prescribed Tenuate Dospan as a kid (age 10/11) by a dodgy private Dr. And no I wasn’t fat, just had parents that ‘didn’t want me to end up fat like auntie Pat’
I was also sent to Slimming Magazine Club and knew the calorie count of every food at a young age. I look at photos of myself as a kid and I was slim!
I now have disordered eating strangely enough.

I remember all my mum’s friends being on diets, some using laxitives, others black coffee and fags or very low calorie diets.

I remember all the talk of 'not letting yourself go' weight wise.

God me too. My mother used to live on crispbread and cottage cheese and cigarettes also.

She was OBSESSED with my weight growing up.

I dieted myself UP 4 stone in my teens.

Celery I love but reminds me my mum hates it but used to eat when she was trying to lose weight - the faces she made! - but the hilarious thing really is even when “on a diet” she’d still be having copious cups of tea - made with 1/3 cup full fat milk and 3 sugars!
My Mum had a friend who was convinced that if she ate salad with a pork pie she was dieting-as if the salad cancelled out the calories. And yes to the tea; Mum lost about a stone when I persuaded her to switch to sweeteners in her teas, instead of 2 spoonfuls of sugar (she drank a lot of tea)

I can't believe a parent would allow their child speed so the they wouldn't get like"fat auntie"

@MrsJay I don’t think she really though about what the pills were. I went along with one of her friends. I didn’t take them anyway as they made me feel awful.
I’d completely forgotten about it until I saw the name of them.

It is astounding though @tightpants as a young girl she was worried about your weight btw my mother was the same to an extent. The hoha around not eating was a big thing in my home growing up . We think body image iissues are s a new thing but it really isn't .
.

God I loved those 10 calorie soups, they were actually nice as an alternative to a tea or coffee

Christ this sounds awful. My mum always had a steady weight (no sweet tooth and amazingly active)

However she had a fat dd (me) and her gentle attempts to manage that weren't great. We had gold and low fat ski yoghurts - well I did whilst my DB could trough what he wanted.

I love cottage cheese and had special k for breakfast today. Still fat though

I remember my DM been off and on the slimfast and Cambridge diets for about 18 months , then she joined wight watchers and brought the books home with recipes in , they were always loaded with salt .

Puff Cracknells were like polystyrene, Ayds fudge were delicious and there was a whole range of Limmits diet meal substitutes.

Energen rolls

My mum always had these! Back then, it was all about keeping your carbs low. I remember when it all changed, and we were told 'it's not the pasta that makes you fat, it's what you put on it' - and that was when we all switched to low fat diets!

I remember using Slimfast as food when swotting for my finals at University. Utterly vile and tasted of iron.

That was around 1980, so not strictly 1970s.

I'd forgotten Gold until some pps mentioned it.

Not "letting yourself go" was a well-used mantra. I'm not surprised kids were prescribed slimming pills.

I'm still trying not to let myself go, 45 years lster.

We were weighed in school to make sure we weighed ENOUGH. How times change....

Omg, CRACKERBREAD! It was vile! And we had Ski yoghurts too.

Pmsl at speed and fags, yep, that’s how I remember it

My mum used to have those crispbreads were they scandi crispbread? I'm sure they were Scandinavian in origin.

I love Crackerbreads, especially with cottage cheese and pineapple. The round bread was lovely when toasted as well (tasted like French Toasts), albeit I wasn't allowed butter because margarine was the Healthy Choice.

Having said that, at 8 stone 2 and 5 foot 2, my mother was convinced I was obscenely fat and greedy although she was 4 foot 11 and 14 stone. She said that I was always going to be fat because 'stupid doctors' wouldn't prescribe diet pills any more - and that was also apparently the reason why our house was filthy, because they made it possible to clean the house and not eat. In her eyes, the only way to be slim was to

Starve yourself, take pills and smoke.

Mind you, when she developed gallstones and was told that fat would cause her pain, she informed the consultant that it would be his fault that she started smoking again if he insisted upon saying she needed to lose weight. She never did get the surgery, but switched to stuffing biscuits, sweets and pasta instead of chips and cheap processed meats - she now claims it's his fault that she has Diabetes, as though a year of inhaling sugar out of 70-odd of being obese could cause it.

I hated the instant diet soups - they tasted vaguely of flavoured dust, either having be swept up three rooms away from the tomatoes or something yellow.

Thank heavens you remember those 10 cal soups too @ClientQueen, I thought I was having one of my repressed false memories again.

I remember the cereal diet too, a bowl for breakfast and lunch then a healthy dinner.

I still have crackerbreads and marmite for breakfast most days

@Fluffycloudland77 these! They were in a teeny box

Yes that’s the ones I used to buy dh, so they must have been around in the last 15 years.

I loved cottage cheese before the only versions you could buy were the current low fat ones. The old ones were still quite low in fat but had enough to give them a lovely creamy texture and flavour. I used to go to a local cafe and have the cottage cheese salad with 2 tinned peach halves on top. There was also a delicious cottage cheese with salmon and cucumber I used to buy in Safeways.

My mum took speed type pills she got of the doctor and ate energen rolls that were supposed to swell up in your stomach so you felt fuller for longer. She ended up with thyroid problems. I remember ex-lax chocolate. A friend of my mums ate 3 digestive biscuits all day every day and took laxatives. She was very skinny and her skin was dried out.

Not a food, but an exercise aid - a rubber or plastic kind of onesie that you exercised in and the idea was that you'd sweat your flab off

I remember my mum going on the All bran diet and if we went anywhere she'd need to run to the toilet

Quark

A tanning salon near me was selling diet pills in the late 90s I remember school mums whizzing about ! a friend of mine ended up in hospital with heart palpitations

Ex-lax

I remember that. Take it and crap your way to a flatter tummy.