Many women look back at their younger years and scoff at the ridiculous diets they put themselves on to lose weight – when they didn’t even need to.
But no food plan united women more than the ‘Special K diet’, it seems.
The challenge, which gained popularity in the early 2000s, suggested people could drop a jeans size in two weeks if they ate just Special K for breakfast and lunch. Kellogg’s, which owns Special K, has since abandoned the plan.
But the diet poppped up again, when Kayleigh Ann, 29, from Manchester wrote on Twitter: “Does anyone remember in the early 2000s when Special K brought out a “diet” where you just ate Special K for breakfast and lunch and then had a small meal for dinner? Wtf was that all about? Fucking hell.”
Speaking to HuffPost UK, Kayleigh says the memory just “popped into [her] head”, and she thought she’d see if anyone else had done it. In secondary school, she said she’d carry around a sandwich bag full of special K “to lose weight”, at just 14-years-old.
Her tweet quickly garnered thousands of likes and encouraged other women to share their stories. “Apparently the diet was popular with school girls,” she said. “I remember being a teenager and trying this for a week,” one wrote. “Yep, I remember that – I was in school, too,” wrote another.
Another woman said her 13-year-old self was “constantly” on the special K diet. “I felt v guilty if I broke from it,” she wrote. “I think a lot of teens were in a similar boat. I hope teenage girls now aren’t being suckered in to something similar.”
Others remembered the ad for the diet with its “red swimming costume lady” – an ideal that many girls aimed for. “I think about this ALL the time,” one woman tweeted. “I remember being a kid and watching this thinking I’d always be slim like the lady on the Special K advert as I will do that diet when I’m older.”
Some said they kept to it, despite being “starving” during the day, because their friends were doing it, too.
Kayleigh’s shocked at how many people have replied to her saying they also did the diet – and at such a young age. “It’s upsetting that we felt we had to change our bodies at all, let alone as teenagers!” she tells HuffPost UK.
A spokeswoman for Kelloggs previously said the challenge is “just a two-week kick-start, not a permanent way of eating”.