• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar

IRL Experience Design

  • Blog
  • My Work
  • About
  • Immersive Austin
  • Unique Austin
  • Weird Austin
  • More Austin
    • 5 Fun & Unique Austin Team Building Activities for Small Teams
    • Things to Do in Austin When it Rains
    • Austin Halloween Guide 2023

The Museum of Diet and Exercise Fads

November 2, 2021

Note: This post is part of my “Museums Project“, a collection of 200+ high-concept ideas for museums.

There are so many diets. I don’t mean cultural and regional diets as in “what do they eat”. I mean “lose weight” and “be healthy” diets. Every single time I’m at the grocery store checkout the magazine rack tells me about another one.

And the number of pieces of junk that have been sold offering a more attractive body must be in the thousands.

The Diets

Humanity loves the idea of silver bullets. Despite strong evidence that the only real silver bullets in life are literal bullets made out of literal silver.

Is the diet fab a purely 20th century invention? I doubt it. There’s probably ancient diets. In ancient time there were probably diets that people used to gain weight.

The museum has opposite diets stacked up against each other – the all fruit diet vs the no fruit diet, no carb against all carb.

The museum shows which diets fads are currently popular in which parts of the world, which ones have been the most popular, which ones have faded the quickest.

The museum shows the science behind the diets – or lack thereof. 

Here’s just a few of the diets I’ve found: The tapeworm diet, the chew all foods 100 times before swallowing diet, the baby food diet, the clay diet, the cookie diet, the pizza diet has its own book, Amazon has multiple “beer diet” books. In fact, you can type nearly anything with the word “diet” after it and google will find you a diet.

The Exercise Equipment

While diets are fascinating, they don’t lend themselves to as good of visuals as exercise equipment. The ThighMaster (did you know there was a vibrating ThighMaster?), the Shake Weight, and of course this thing.  It’s like the more ridiculous or sexually innuendoed it is the better it might sell.

People can actually use the devices when they visit the museum. Maybe the museum should not be called a museum, but instead is called a gym. The Silver Bullet Gym.

Colorful ads and magazine articles extolling the virtues of all these items hang on the walls and many of the products’ commercials and videos are be available for viewing.

Many of the items have great backstories to be told in exhibit form.

There’s lots of pages on the web with fad exercise equipment. Here’s a good one. Here’s another.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Posted Under: Experience Design Tags: #ExperienceIdeas, #Museums, #TheMuseumsProject

Primary Sidebar

About Me

I make awesome experiences for people. Read More

NEW CONTENT 2+ TIMES A WEEK

  • IRL Experience Design
  • Amazing Experiences
  • Fun Weird Sh*t

See My Favorite Books

  • For IRL XD
  • For Learning
  • For Getting Things Done

@IRL_Experience_Design

instaglogo

RSS Feed

rss logo

Secondary Sidebar

VISIT MY BOUTIQUE IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE

SEE MY AUSTIN EVENTS WALL CALENDAR

Austin Events 2023 wall calendar cover

Search My Blog

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

Filter by Category

  • Experience Design (189)
  • Productivity (65)
  • Everything Else (111)

FILTER BY DATE

December 2023
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Sep    

Read My Recent Posts

  • Eureka Room Update 9/12/2023
  • Drinks + Cups: The No-Hassle Party I’ve Been Dreaming Of Came True
  • Eureka Room Update 5/18/2023
  • Are You Reading to Learn, or to Confirm?
  • ChatGPT and Content Creation
  • Covid
  • Possible Small But Important Changes That AI and Chatbots Will Bring: Making Us Better At Email.
  • Digging Into Online Stats to Identify Issues
  • Google Analytics Update
  • Eureka Room Update 3/14/2023
  • Eureka Room Updates 3/10/2023
  • Eureka Room Update 3/7/2023
  • “What a waste of time”
  • Meditation Benefits (Actual Concrete Examples)
  • Bookeo and Google Analytics Tracking (Take #2)
  • IRL Experience Designers Professional Group
  • Eureka Room is Hiring!
  • Eureka Room Update
  • Eureka Room Update 2/10/23
  • Brainstormingitis

  • Contact
  • About