‘Michael Phelps Diet’ and 9 Other Diets Everybody Googled This Year

Google ranks its top searches and trending topics of 2012. Here's what took the diet world by storm.


If you were flabbergasted this year by Olympic swimmer Michael Phelp’s reported 12,000-calories-a-day diet—so flabbergasted, in fact, that you Googled it to read more—you’re not alone. Google just released it’s annual Zeitgeist List, showing the top trending topics and searches on its search engine in the past 12 months. On its Trending Diets list, “Michael Phelps diet” takes the cake.

To refresh your memory, the Internet went bananas in July when it learned about the kind of diet Phelps maintained prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. To fuel his grueling six-days-a-week, five-hours-a-day practice schedule, he downed three egg sandwiches, an omelet, a bowl of grits, French toast and pancakes—and that was just for breakfast. Lunch meant a pound of pasta, one whole pizza (!), energy drinks and shakes; rinse and repeat for dinner. Dieticians grimaced, of course, and someone finally calculated that he was consuming in calories each day what some of us eat in a week. Yikes. But at least he was burning it off almost faster than he was putting it in. The lucky duck.

Here are the other top diets everybody was talking about in 2012:

2. Beyond diet – A gluten-free diet plan that focuses on low-glycemic-index foods rather than calorie counting.

3. Raspberry Ketone diet – Fat-burning in a bottle, endorsed by Dr. Oz.

4. PINK Diet Method – The Power, Intensity, Nutrition, Kardio (yes, cardio with a  k) diet, thumbs-upped by Dr. Phil. I’m seeing a pattern here.

5. Ariana Lima diet – People were apparently very curious about how this Victoria’s Secret model lost 40 pounds of baby weight in six weeks, before walking the runway in lingerie. Come to think of it, I’m curious, too; here’s how she did it.

6. Mirada Kerr diet – Another search trend driven by a Victoria’s Secret model. This one was spurred by Kerr’s insistence that she sticks to Dr. Peter D’Adamo’s Blood Type Diet. Everybody, of course, wondered what the heck that is.

7. NV Diet pill – Ahh, the quick-fix diet pill backed by B-team celebs Carmen Electra and Holly Madison. Can you tell I’m a tad skeptical?

8. Feeding Tube diet – A.k.a. the K-E Diet. And in case you’re wondering, it is exactly what it sounds like. Ick, ick, ick.

9. Juicing diet – No surprise here. We’ve seen this trend explode locally, too, with the super-fast influx of juice bars and juice cleanses cropping up in our city.

10. Marisa Miller diet – Gah! Another Victoria’s Secret model! When will the fascination ever end? (That question’s rhetorical, of course. I know it never will.)

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