The Mama Cass Elliot Diet

Throughout her career, Cass Elliot had to face cruel, constant and pervasive fatphobia. She tried to use humor and laugh it off, her friend Sue Cameron recalled, “She covered it up. She was the ‘funny one.’ It was horrible for her to be thought of as ‘the fat one’ and Michelle [Phillips] as the pretty one. People would say that to Cass’ face. She had to suck it up and laugh.” Cass was even mocked in her own band’s songs: “Nobody’s getting fat, except Mama Cass,” the Mamas & the Papas sang in their 1967 song “Creeque Alley.”

Rumor has it that, in the early days, the band didn’t want her because she was overweight. The quartet’s founder, John Phillips, confessed that peer pressure to lose weight took its toll on Cass, leading her to go on diets that were as extreme as they were dangerous. These diets ended up irrevocably damaging her cardiovascular system. In 1968, after fasting four days a week and losing up to 55 kilos (about 121 pounds), Elliot was admitted to the hospital. “I’ve been fat since I was seven and being fat sets you apart,” she said.

“I’ve invented a fabulous new diet. It costs only $2,000 for each pound you lose. It also weakens your natural resistance to disease. I can’t guarantee it, but the Mama Cass Diet can give you acute tonsillitis, hemorrhaging vocal cords, mononucleosis and a dangerous case of hepatitis. At least that’s what it did for me. I lost my health–and more than a quarter of a million dollars in earnings as a singer.”

Mama Cass was both sassy and painfully candid in her talks about her unhealthy approach to weight loss in this 1969 article from March issue of The Ladies Home Journal. She could have chosen to keep her health problems a guarded secret, but obviously she chose authenticity. She admitted that she didn’t consult a doctor about her drastic approach to weight loss because she knew starving herself “was wrong” and she “was in a hurry to weigh 110 pounds.”

Although 1969 was still a time when the majority of Americans were not overweight or obese and whose daily (non-reducing) diet and lifestyle kept their figures, fad diets, starvation, gimmicky gums, magic couches and dangerous drugs were gaining popularity. They were dangerous and/or expensive carrots dangled in front of those who did need help.

Cass in 1969, after losing around 100 lbs.

Sue Cameron, who worked as a journalist for The Hollywood Reporter at the time, wrote the article that linked her friend’s death to the ham sandwich. She was commissioned by the singer’s manager, Allan Carr, who was trying to save the artist’s reputation and avoid hypotheses that associated Cass’s sudden death with drug use. The autopsy did not find any narcotics in her system or food lodged in her mouth or trachea. “Many people don’t realize that [the ham sandwich story is] not even true. Even though I have said — and written — it’s not true, it still goes on. I never thought it would last as long as it has,” Cameron says apologetically.