Is This the Hardest Celebrity Diet?

Madonna
Photo credit: We Dem Boyz / Splash News

Following a celebrity diet is never easy-but this celebrity diet in particular is more intense than the majority of celebrity diets that we’ve seen. And it belongs to none other than the diva herself: Madonna.

The multi-talented entertainer—she may have gotten her start as a singer-songwriter, but she’s morphed into an actress, author, direct and entrepreneur—definitely looks good for her age. At 54, Madonna looks as young as ever, and it’s thanks to her intense celebrity diet.

Madonna follows a strict macrobiotic diet—that means no wheat, eggs, meat, or dairy. This type of celebrity diet is not an easy thing to follow: it’s quite grueling and requires a lot of discipline (to see just how grueling this diet is, check out what happened when celebrity blogger and extreme dieter Rebecca Harrington tried to follow the macrobiotic diet for a week).

The idea behind the diet hails from Japan, and combines ideas from Buddhism with a traditional vegetarian diet. The macrobiotic diet is also not only about what you eat or how you look—it’s a way of life that extols the way food can impact our bodies and souls. In fact, the word “macrobiotic” hails from Greek and means “long life.”

On the macrobiotic diet, the goal is to balance the types of food you eat, to achieve a balance of yin and yang. So your meals are made up to pair opposing foods (hot and cold, sweet and sour etc.). If you follow Madonna’s macrobiotic diet seriously, then you will be eating more natural, locally grown foods—preferably no baking, boiling, or cooking. You can also eat lots of fish, nuts, seeds, and fruits.

To achieve the maximum benefit, according to proponents of the macrobiotic diet, you would eventually work your way up to only eat a diet of brown rice and water.

While that extreme celebrity diet sounds a little unrealistic to us (and can be dangerous if you do end up at this last stage), there are some benefits to eating an unprocessed, local, organic diet, heavy on fruits and vegetables. This macrobiotic diet also tends to be low in fat and high in fiber and rich in plant foods—all known to help us achieve maximum health.

You may not want to follow this grueling celebrity diet forever but the ideas behind it—to eat more natural foods, eat a variety of vegetables and to focus on unprocessed foods—definitely rings true and can help you stay as healthy as ever. At the end of the day, following an intense celebrity diet for a short period of time isn’t worth it, if you’re just going to bounce back later on and regain the weight. But if you take the principles of the macrobiotic diet to heart, you can reap some real rewards.


Sources:

Zelman, K., “Macrobiotic Diet,” WebMD web site; http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/macrobiotic-diet, last accessed August 8, 2013.

Harrington, R., “Madonna’s Diet Is the Hardest I Have Ever Tried,” The Cut web site, July 26, 2013; http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/07/madonnas-diet-is-the-hardest-i-have-ever-tried.html, last accessed August 8, 2013.

Dean, F., “The celeb with the most gruelling diet and fitness routine,” Chatelaine, July 30, 2013; http://www.chatelaine.com/health/diet/celebrity-diet-and-fitness-routine/, last accessed August 8, 2013.