Reading Hollywood: Elizabeth Taylor’s Diet Book is All Kinds of Fascinating

The glamorous queen of Hollywood shared her weight loss tips in the ‘80s, and they’re both weird and sad.

Content warning: This issue dives into topics of fatphobia and disordered eating.

When I was a kid, I remember being barraged by celebrity diets. I saw endless TV specials and magazine articles dedicated to Slimfast, the Atkins diet, the cabbage soup diet, the baby food diet, and any number of fad starvation plans. I recall the shelves of my local supermarket being full of exercise DVDs endorsed by celebrities A-List to Z. It seemed as though it was an expected part of being famous (at least if you’re a woman): be hot and thin, and whenever you put on a few pounds or your body changes as it usually does, turn that into another opportunity to make money. Get-thin-quick schemes were so omnipresent in my youth that I remain surprised that anyone of my generation has a decent relationship with their body.

This hasn’t gone away in the age of Ozempic but it feels as though there’s less of a celebrity-led industry around this. Influencers lead the way, whether it’s Peleton instructors, meat-chewing incels, or crunchy tradwives. This isn’t good, obviously, because the diet industrial complex is cruel and ineffective and dependent on normalizing disordered eating. But it does feel notable that celebrities, especially major ones, are much cagier about how they “maintain.” They don’t open up about the diets, the exercise, and the surgery in a way that is designed to be aspirational to their fans. It’s more about keeping up the fantasy we all know is fake.

In the 1980s, when Elizabeth Taylor released a diet book, she was part of a mini-trend of the decade that included the Jane Fonda workout video empire and the creation of Slimfast. But this was different. Liz was no ordinary celebrity, and her decision to tell her story through a guide to her own exhaustively detailed weight loss, was headline news. Elizabeth Takes Off was part memoir, part diet book, part motivational speech. And it’s bananas. Since I got a copy from eBay for like £3.50, I thought I’d give it a read and see how bad it really was.