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.
Follow IRLXD:
