The diet and weight loss industry has never disappointed us when creating diet plans that make no absolute sense and are more comical than healthy. Here’s yet another fad diet that made us question the sanity of its founder. This diet is more commonly known as the Vision Diet.
Apicius, the Roman gourmand of the 1st century, rightly said, “We eat first with our eyes”.
This phrase has many contexts, the primary one is that in the process of feeding ourselves, the first step is to find food, which directly links to the function of the eyes. Hence our eyes find edible stuff and then we consume it by mouth. This phrase inspired Dr John D. Miller, an optometrist, to create this gimmick, The Vision-Dieter Glasses, which undoubtedly is the lead character of this diet.
The basic concept of this diet seemed rather interesting to us so we dug in a bit deeper and found..
The Vision Behind the Vision Diet
Dr John D. Miller decided to introduce a new way of controlling the portion sizes and shedding the extra weight.
Like most wannabe dieticians and noobs, instead of actually working on the real stuff and actually reducing the portion sizes of food he decided to trick the brain by creating these glasses that make your food visually less appealing.
So the inventor observed how all these food companies work on the appearance and colour schemes of their food to attract more customers and decided that if people can be attracted and controlled by these colours then the same factors can also repel and de-control these people.
And so this idea led to the creation of the Vision-dieter glasses. As you would have guessed by now, the goal was to make the food look unappetizing and in more clear terms, Ugly.
How it is Supposed to Work:
These two-toned glasses create a bluish cast over your food undermining the natural colours and thus try tricking your brain to believe the food is unappetizing…
As we mentioned earlier, the goal was to Trick the Brain. The only fact that was ignored was that our brain judges the food based not just on the visual presentation but also on the texture, and aroma.
So if I am actually presented with a blue hamburger with freshly baked soft and warm buns and a delicious aroma of minced beef, it won’t take a minute for me to ignore the colour and attack the delicious-looking greasy, juicy beast. Now even though the bun we anticipated and imagined was blue it still made our mouths water, so now the real question is…
Does the Diet Really Work?
Here is the one-word answer: No. This diet is a complete fail.
The FDA had a completely different point of view about these glasses. They categorized the glasses as unapproved medical devices. Dr John D. Miller was reluctant to answer any questions of the FDA and tried his best to avoid all sorts of investigations. He failed miserably in providing solid research showing actual weight loss results, to prove his point.
Subsequently, the US marshalls seized all pairs of these gimmicks which were later destructed in 1984, keeping only 75 pairs for educational purposes. All jokes on Dr John D. Miller, after this rough and tragic ending of the main hero of the Vision Diet, it’d be safe to say, the attempt of tricking the brain completely backfired.
Why Should I Avoid This Diet?
The reason is pretty self-explanatory, after reading all its historical background we came to a conclusion that this diet plan was just a scam and a business idea to earn a few extra bucks from these dieters-vision specs.
You should avoid it simply because you need to show some respect towards the capabilities and intelligence of your brain. It’s a matter of common sense that if you are to pick and wear a pair of tinted glasses with the motive of making your food look unappealing and ugly, your brain is fully aware and is in fact responsible for all this thought process.
So amidst you and your brain, we leave it here for you to decide who tricked whom…