“Russian marriage” and other strange and dangerous regimes of the past

Previously, everything was different – people had vague ideas about the structure of the human body. The female uterus, for example, was considered either the “internal scrotum” or the “sewers of the body”, and there were either two, three, or seven chambers. Needless to say, the idea of ​​proper nutrition was strange? Today we are going to talk about four of the most unusual diets that have appeared in the past.

William the Conqueror may have been the first to diet for beauty, not utility. The neighbors made fun of the fat monarch: for example, the King of France called the Conqueror a pregnant woman. The last straw was the groom’s message that after a walk Wilhelm’s favorite horse had a back injury – so the king decided to lose weight.

Wilhelm invented his own diet: he announced that from now on he would stay in bed and … drink wine. Oddly enough, it worked – after a few months the servants had to remove old caftans from the chests, which had not previously converged on a man. However, the Conqueror did not repeat the “course” – a clear head is still needed to rule the state.

The alcoholic diet has survived its creator: after 500 years, the Venetian aristocrat Luigi Cornaro advised everyone in his book The Art of Long Living. Luigi himself drank half a liter of wine a day and ate an egg a day, and managed to live on such a diet for up to 98 years. Do not try to repeat this experience – now any doctor will confirm that Cornaro was lucky to have good health, and this diet will very quickly kill anyone else.

Our “great-grandfathers” did not follow a diet to lose weight – on the contrary, the women of Rus strove to become as fat as possible, because it was not for nothing that our ancestors had the word “ thin” as a synonym for the adjective “bad, worthless”. In wealthy families, the girl began to put on weight before the wedding – she was given a huge amount of sweets and fatty foods, so that at the wedding the bride would turn into a corpulent beauty.

It is with this tradition that the Dutch doctor Valentin Bils connects the tragedy of Maria Khlopova, who was chosen as a bride over the bride by the first tsar of the Romanov dynasty, Mikhail. The girl arrived at the court in good health, but very soon the future queen fell ill. Bils was sure that Maria’s indigestion had started due to the abundance of food. In addition, Khlopova constantly received vodka for appetite.

It is possible that the Dutchman was right – all Maria’s troubles disappeared after the girl was “demoted” and exiled to Tobolsk. However, there is another version: historians believe that villains could have poisoned Khlopova in order to achieve the verdict “the royal bride is not lasting to the joy of the ruler”.

Read also: “Clap politely, hold hands”: what were the family traditions in Rus’

Austrian Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria was obsessed with her appearance: three times a day she weighed and measured herself, then wrote down the numbers in a special notebook. In order to maintain a waistline of 48 centimeters, Sissy organized fasting days, during which… she drank blood! Not human, of course: using a special device, the cooks squeezed veal juice for the Empress. Elizabeth also did vinegar wraps at night – she believed vinegar was able to penetrate the skin and break down fat.

In the early 20th century, Asian tapeworm tablets containing tapeworm larvae became incredibly popular. Once in the stomach, the parasite devoured all the nutrients, and the woman, not limiting herself to anything, quickly lost weight.

Of course, no one offered the ladies to live with the worm forever – it was assumed that when the worm grew, the girl would take a second capsule that would kill it and save the built beauty from diarrhea, dizziness and pain constant. However, in practice this method did not work – the parasite turned out to be incredibly stubborn.

They tried to lure out the tapeworm by placing a metal cylinder with bits of food down the woman’s throat. However, these traps turned out to be useless – they had to catch the worm with the help of surgeons.