The truth behind the Vogue "wine and eggs diet"
"Eat breakfast, you idiot!"
Really Good Tomatoes asks irreverent questions and offers hopeful answers. It’s a newsletter about culture, behaviour, food, art, relationships, pleasure, politics, work, environment, identity, and society. For people who refuse to be fobbed off with crap tomatoes.
**I originally wrote this post for the Mag Hags newsletter. I’m resharing it here because a) I had a lot of fun writing it and b) I thought it potentially had crossover appeal.**
One of the things I’ve noticed, since working on
, is the attitude of superiority with which many people talk about the past. There’s a tendency, particularly on social media, to talk about historical trends, cultural narratives, political opinions and even the laws of the time as though they were entirely without dissent, as though the people living through them were compliant idiots who didn’t know any better.We touched on this a few times in Season 1. There was, for example, no evidence of the huge social shifts of the early 70s, in our 1972 issue of Woman’s Own. It was all tripe pancakes and tips for painting your hairbrush. (I am absolutely going to make that tripe pancake one of these days and I will document the evidence here!). It would be too easy to conclude that readers of Women’s Own did not, therefore, care about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, or the coal miner’s strikes. It’s tempting, too, to assume that people sitting at home pondering “how to give meat a built-in-bonus,” had not read The Female Eunuch, which came out two years earlier and were not interested in women’s lib. In reality, we don’t know the full picture.
None of us can be defined based on a single piece of reading material. Are you only a person who reads Substack newsletters about vintage magazines? No, of course not. Just as I am not a person who only reads the “quick weeknight meals kids will actually eat” section of the BBC Good Food website. Although if you haven’t tried Rupy Ajula’s carrot and sweetcorn fritters, I do really recommend giving them a whirl.
It is entirely possible to love celebrity gossip, knit your own twinset, and bake a mean rabbit and mustard pie while also fighting for worker rights. And maybe when the kids have gone to bed we can smoke a reefer and kick back with Dark Side Of The Moon.
Contrary to the Tik Tok school of thought, people in The Past™ were not all simpleminded folk who just wanted a nice cup of tea in the morning and their meat and two veg for supper. They too had rich inner lives—passions, conflicts, hobbies, outrage. They were intelligent and radical and willing to confront the bullshit they saw going on around them. We encountered this again when we looked at Marie Claire’s story about “living with lesbian parents.” As we discussed on the pod, it’s not uncommon for people to look back at the 80s and 90s and think everybody just shrugged when Section 28 was introduced, or when lesbian mums had their kids taken away by social services. But, as our guest, Lotte Jeffs, pointed out, “the women at the helm of these magazines were actually open minded and deep thinkers and interesting, intellectual, politically aware people.”
This simplification and dismissal of what came before annoys me. But what annoys me more is the implication that nobody in history ever had a sense of humour. There’s a creeping idea that everything was delivered entirely po-faced and with received pronunciation, and I think one of the things Season 1 has already shown us so clearly, is that people making magazines in the 70s, 80s, and 90s were fucking funny. All of the writing we’ve encountered has been not just erudite, but witty, irreverent and fun.
So when a friend recently sent me the infamous “unhinged Vogue diet” on Instagram, I got curious. If for some reason you’re not familiar, allow me to introduce you now to the “wine and eggs diet.”
The diet, which was featured in The Vogue Body and Beauty Book in the 70s, found its way to social media in 2018 where it went viral, and was picked up by everyone, from VICE to The Sun and, of course, MailOnline. It now resurfaces periodically and everybody laughs anew at how AWFUL women’s magazines are and how fucking credulous and vain their readers must have been back then.
The trouble is, I happen to vehemently disagree with this assessment. And so, I reasoned, there had to be more to this story. I found it hard, based on what I’ve learnt about women’s mags in the 70s, to believe that this diet would have been trotted out uncritically, without even a whiff of commentary or contextualisation. I decided to look into it.
Many of the outlets who picked up the story in 2018 reported that the diet originally came from Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl. (Gurley Brown later became the editor of Cosmopolitan and is credited with coining the phrase “Having It All,” as you’ll know from the show). This is true. It was then adapted and printed in the Vogue book which was authored by Bronwen Meredith and published in 1977. According to numerous outlets, the diet was marketed as “a three-day plan that promises a weight loss of up to five pounds and for women to feel ‘sexy, exuberant and full of the joie de vivre’.” And this is where the modern day retelling starts to diverge from the truth.
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While it is true that The Vogue Body and Beauty Book dedicated an entire section of its “Slimming” chapter to crash diets (of which the wine and eggs diet is really the least of them… raw meat for breakfast, anyone?), it would not be fair to suggest that the book’s author or its editors presented them as healthy habits.
“These are drastic reducing regimes that most women resort to as an emergency measure,” wrote Meredith, having already spent sixteen pages discussing diet and nutrition in far more sensible terms. “Do not extend the number of days,” she cautioned. “It could impair your health.” However, she did then go on to say that, “a crash diet can be used as an encouraging preliminary course before a long term dietary plan.”
Obviously, promoting the idea of crash dieting at all feels icky in today’s context, but is eating eggs and steak for three days really any worse than keto, which people follow for FAR longer, and which is the highest trending diet on both Instagram and Tik Tok? I also wonder if a crash diet such as this is all that different to intermittent fasting, which gets quite a lot of medical support, albeit most plans don’t involve a bottle of wine.
Because, yes, there is also the alcohol. The idea of being advised to drink an entire bottle of wine a day is absolutely baffling to us in 2025. I confess I was hoping for some more illuminating context for this and, at least as far as the VB&BB goes, there was none. Although it did acknowledge, earlier in the chapter, that when it came to weight loss, “doctors are not in agreement over alcohol.” Indeed.
I will also concede that, having harped on about what great craic writers were in the 70s, this book is dry. It’s got some measured stuff in it, and for the most part it spits era-specific facts on matters of health and fitness, but it’s all very earnest. Which makes it all the more curious that the diet under investigation actually originated in Sex and the Single Girl, a book that is so riotously silly that it’s hard to imagine the wine and eggs diet was intended as anything other than a bit of a joke.
Like the VB&BB, Gurley Brown spent most of her weight loss chapter, entitled “The Shape You’re In,” describing what we would all recognise as a balanced diet and how to maintain it. Start by ensuring you’re getting enough protein, she advised, then “fill up with fresh fruit, raw or lightly cooked vegetables, a little oil [...] whole-grain breads are fine if you make them yourself or get them at the whole foods store.” Her tone, however, was decidedly more cheeky than Vogue’s, to the point of occasionally being flippant. “Eat breakfast, you idiot!” she counselled at one point.
With Gurley Brown, a healthy lifestyle was not something to be endured but to revel in. “I have been pestering George the biochemist in Pasadena,” she offered brightly later in the chapter, “for a list of foods that would increase sexiness in a person. I thought it would be fun to keep these aphrodisiac items in a cupboard just for special occasions, or merely for a conversation piece.” Gurley Brown, one gets the impression, lives for the conversation piece. She wants to acquire them, curate them, heck she wants to be a conversation piece. You can hear her delight at her own boldness on every page. To be honest, it’s kind of contagious. “A mountain climb is the greatest way to work off a rage at a man who has done something awful,” she wrote in a section on exercise. “Don’t take him with you, of course.” Oh Helen, you’re a scream.
As you might expect with a book entitled Sex and the Single Girl, Gurley Brown’s focus was less on educating as on demonstrating, via her own breezy train of thought, what a bloody good time a gal could have if she made an effort, got clued up and channelled her energy into being smart and having fun. It’s living your best life, but for 1962. And it is in this spirit that I believe we need to take the wine and eggs diet.
“This book,” she began by saying, “tells you how to stay on a kind of painless diet forever and deliciously.” However, and I can almost see the glint that would have been in her eye at this point, “if you’d like to crash away six pounds in two days, here is a diet men like. Invite one to join you.” The sass! Having outlined the diet, which she recommended following for no more than two days, unlike the three proposed by The VB&BB, she suggested the weekend might be the best time to give it a whirl. “Sufficient nutrition is here, but you get fuzzy,” she deadpanned.
It’s bonkers, sure. But nowhere — NOWHERE — in either Sex and the Single Girl or in The Vogue Body and Beauty Book does it claim that eating nothing but eggs, steak and white wine will make you “sexy, exuberant and full of the joie de vivre”. This line came, in fact, a page and a half earlier when Gurley Brown was talking about the benefits of healthy eating. Having established, via George-the-biochemist, that there actually isn’t such a thing as an aphrodisiac foodstuff, she explained that the best thing you could do to boost your sex drive was get enough nutrients. “A strong, healthy body has all the sex drive it can handle,” she quoted George as saying. If the promise of a roaring sex drive wasn’t enough, she also pointed out that sticking to a balanced diet all the time would mean never being tempted to crash diet. “The foods that make you sexy, exuberant, full of the joie de vivre are also the ones that keep you slender.”
Look, I’m not about to suggest there’s nothing problematic about this book (or indeed The Vogue Body and Beauty Book). Gurley Brown did, after all, assert at one point that “men who insist they like plump girls” were insecure in their masculinity. And I did a silent scream when I read the line, “Even women fresh from childbirth have proved they can be slim again quick.” But overall I think the meaning and significance of the “wine and eggs diet” has been a little overblown.
This piece in The Atlantic about “How to Be Excellent At Leisure” felt very Tomatoes-coded. The writer, Arthur C Brooks, talks about how we’ve come to define leisure as the opposite of work. Not only that, we’ve come to think of it as the thing we need to do in order to work better and that, my friends, is all wrong.
“Leisure, in other words, is far from the modern notion of just chillin’. It is a serious business, and if you don’t do leisure well, you will never find life’s full meaning […] true leisure would involve philosophical reflection, deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills, spending time in nature, or deepening personal relationships.”
As a person who is pathalogically inacapable of doing nothing, this is music to my ears. And I really like what it says about structuring your leisure time. I am on board! As I wrote a while back, I am incredibly disciplined about pleasure, fun, and relaxation. This is partly because, as a parent, leisure time does not simply fall into my lap. I have to Carve. That. Shit. Out. But it’s also because I feel better, more rewarded, more replenished, when I fully engage my brain. So when I have a rare chunk of time to myself, off work and away from parenting duties, I want to use it intentionally.
One of the main things I do with my leisure time at the moment is sewing. And I’ve even had conversations with people about the apparent bonkersness of choosing to use my spare time to DO MORE STUFF but I am completely obsessed with it. It’s like I’ve unlocked a whole new part of me. When I’m engaged with a sewing project, it transports me to another place in a way that sitting in front of the telly simply cannot do (see: “deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills”). I have actually been meaning to write something about it for ages so maybe this is the prompt I need.
This piece in The New York Times about the Gen X Career Meltdown was rather confronting. I am not Gen X, I was born in 1984, but a lot of this felt frighteningly familiar to me.
I’m only 41 but I too have been grieving the career I thought I was going to have, in an industry that no longer really exists. I, too, am at a loss as to how to reinvent myself. And it’s made doubly difficult, I find, by the fact that people outside those industries don’t really understand the ways they’ve changed or why it wouldn’t be possible to make a living in them any more. Or, failing that, why you can’t simply take your skills elsewhere.
There’s a bit later in the piece where a former filmmaker describes how, even making a “smart move” into the commercial sector isn’t possible any more. “The cruel irony is, the thing I perceived as the sellout move is in free-fall,” he is quoted as saying.
I’ve been pondering whether to write something on my career situation for a while but it’s such a vulnerable subject that I don’t think I can go near it yet. I try to channel a defiant optimism here at RGT, even when discussing things that are hard, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it up if I start talking about work.
It was my friend Liv’s 40th birthday last weekend and the theme for the party was 80s films. I went as Molly Ringwald’s character Andie in Pretty In Pink and my husband was channeling The Lost Boys. My glasses, which I bought off eBay, had prescription lenses in (which I don’t need) while Rob (who does) was wearing non-prescription sunglasses from Tesco. So basically neither of us could see. Oh, and Rob’s fangs gave him a lisp which was not at all the cool Keifer Sutherland vibe he was going for. Great success all round. At least we looked cute.
