Sorry, but Met Gala-honoree Karl Lagerfeld wrote one of the most disgusting diet books of all time
- Karl Lagerfeld is being honored at this year's Costume Institute Met Gala.
- While he's best-known as a designer, Lagerfeld also co-authored a very questionable diet book.
Monday night, the fashion world will honor designer Karl Lagerfeld with a Met Gala themed in his honor. The German-born Lagerfeld helmed some of the most celebrated fashion houses in the world — including Chanel, Fendi, and Chloé — in his more than 60-year career before dying in 2019 at the age of 85. He also wrote one of the most horrific diet books of all time.
Lagerfeld published "The Karl Lagerfeld Diet" in partnership with Jean-Claude Houdret, a general practitioner and self-proclaimed diet doctor. The 2004 tome spills how the designer lost more than 90 pounds over a 14-month period through strict dieting and diet drink consumption. Lagerfeld didn't embark on the diet in order to get healthier, he makes clear. Instead, he writes, "My objective was to get to 154 pounds in a year so I could wear different clothes."
The plan — which Insider absolutely does not condone — is called the Spoonlight program. It involves a restrictive caloric intake, appetite suppressants, food supplements, and substituting some meals with flavored "protein sachets." It also eschews exercise because exercise "runs the risk of making you hungry."
Houdret's plan recommends that dieters start off by eating 800 calories a day for two weeks, far fewer calories per day than researchers recommend for sustainable weight loss (women should generally eat at least 1,200 calories per day and men should eat at least 1,500). Lagerfield and Houdret's preferred calorie-cutting method appears to be creating the most unappetizing meals possible.
To keep slim, Lagerfeld and his doctor concocted dozens of garish recipes, including baked rabbit spread with fromage frais, fish soufflé, jellied fruit terrine, ham and raspberry mousse, vegetables in aspic, and roast guinea fowl with turnips. There is a recipe for blackberry and tuna mousse, an eggplant and grapefruit appetizer, and all other manner of unholy combinations (in Lagerfeld's world you eat calf's liver with strawberries and stewed plums with absolutely everything).
In the world of this diet, there are also allies and enemies. Houdret praises soup as an "ally against excess eating" though he labels fish both an "ally and an enemy" calling out sardines, tuna preserved in herring cream, and anchovies as particularly problematic.
By way of appraisal, Lagerfeld notes at the end of the book that "if I want to stay thin as I am, I will have to be careful for the rest of my life." If you're wondering whether this man ever enjoyed anything non-aspic-ed in life, well, Lagerfeld occasionally treated himself to toast "for dessert." There was also his Diet Coke addiction.
"I drink Diet Coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed," he once told Harper's Bazaar. "I can even drink it in the middle of the night, and I can sleep. I don't drink coffee, I don't drink tea, I drink nothing else."
Unfortunately, Lagerfeld's obsession with his own weight also spilled over to others and he regularly criticized women who were not standard model-sized. In 2009, Lagerfeld told the German news magazine Focus that "no one wants to see curvy women " on the runway. And in 2012 he told a European newspaper that singer Adele had a beautiful face but was "a little too fat."