Flashback Friday: From meat to veggies; A look at Marilyn Monroe’s bizarre diet that helped her stay in shape

Before we came up with carefully designed diet plans and low fat food products to keep women in socially acceptable shape, women would experiment with food and create their own diet charts to keep those curves in check. Especially the women in show business. Crumbling under the pressure of maintaining a desirable body for a successful career, women would devise their own approach to healthy eating. One which was mostly just based on the idea of eating as little as possible. 

Although they all follow a routine, celebrities rarely spill the secret behind their fitness. I recently stumbled upon an exclusive interview of a celebrity who took pride in sharing her diet secret with the world -- Marilyn Monroe. The breathtakingly stunning, glamorous and iconic Hollywood actress who ruled the world of entertainment for decades and is still celebrated as one of the greatest stars in the industry. More than a movie star, Marilyn was a fashion trend everybody wanted to follow. From her white halter dress, to her hairstyle, to that mole on her lower left cheek, everything about the actress defined the style statement of that era.

As I read about the body and beauty regime that she used to religiously follow to stay in shape for her audience, I realised just how hard she used to work to maintain her beauty. It was during an interview with Pageant magazine in 1952 that the actress opened up about what she ate to maintain the perfect figure, that made her fans go crazy. The actress detailed her bizarre diet for the world in a feature story that was titled ‘How I Stay in Shape,’ and it blew me away.   

For starters, is followed a strict liquid diet rule for breakfast. They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day and many of us also believe that a happy breakfast leads to a happy but not Marilyn. When I say liquid diet, I don’t mean yummy fruit juice, smoothies or shakes. ‘The Seven Year Itch’ actress used to kick start her day with two raw eggs and a glass of milk. “Before I take my morning shower, I start warming a cup of milk on the hot plate I keep in my hotel room. When it’s hot, I break two raw eggs into the milk, whip them up with a fork, and drink them while I’m dressing,” she revealed in her interview.

But that’s not all. For her “nourishing breakfast” the actress mentioned that she supplemented her liquid diet with a multi-vitamin pill. “And I doubt if any doctor could recommend a more nourishing breakfast for a working girl in a hurry,” she said. As boring as it sounds, trust me, the actress’s breakfast was the least of my concerns with her diet chart. For her dinner, Marilyn used to go for a combination of meat and raw veggies, mostly carrots. 

“Every night I stop at the market near my hotel and pick up a steak, lamb chops or some liver, which I broil in the electric oven in my room. I usually eat four or five raw carrots with my meat, and that is all. I must be part rabbit; I never get bored with raw carrots,” she told the magazine. But don’t lose hope, just like all of us, Marilyn too had her cravings and took them very seriously. She used to regularly treat herself to ice-cream sundaes.

Every evening, she would stop off at a Will Wright's ice cream parlour for a hot fudge sundae. “I'm sure that I couldn't allow myself this indulgence were it not that my normal diet is composed almost totally of protein foods,” she noted. In addition to eating healthy, she also followed a regular “bust-firming” exercise schedule to stay in shape. “consists of lifting five-pound weights from a spread-eagle arm position to a point directly above my head. I do this 15 times, slowly. I repeat the exercise another 15 times from a position with my arms above my head. Then, with my arms at a 45-degree angle from the floor, I move my weights in circles until I'm tired,” she shared. The stunning actress defined the beauty strand for years and clearly worked very hard to do so.

On August 5, 1962, at the age of 36, the movie star was found dead in her Los Angeles home. Marilyn was discovered lying naked on her bed. She had a telephone in one hand and an empty bottles of pills, prescribed to treat her depression, in the other. When the police concluded its investigation, it was announced that the mode of her death was “probable suicide”.

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