A heated controversy erupted recently over the “extreme diet” of Candace Cameron Bure, who was one of the kids on Full House. I know. There’s been an outbreak of Ebola, women and children are getting slaughtered all over the Middle East, and Walgreen’s is threatening to move to Switzerland.

No one cares.

Not when Candace Cameron Bure is dieting, er, I mean cleansing. Says Candace herself, “I’m excited to start my 5 day cleanse, not to lose weight but to get my body back on track, ridding all the toxins and unhealthy stuff I’ve put in it the last few months.” For those of you not in the loop, Candace picked up her “toxins and unhealthy stuff” from “a very indulgent week in Napa.” So stay out of Napa or you, too, may be forced to drink expensive shakes and eat vegetables for dinner.

Of course, Candace isn’t the only Hollywood native who is “cleansing.” That’s right, my gal Gwyneth is also a cleanser. Of course, Gwyneth can be counted on to approach cleansing creatively and cluelessly. Here’s her day one menu, which according to the article, serves four: “some water and tea, a lunch of one cup chickpeas, six cups water, one large onion, juice from three lemons and salt and pepper. Why an onion? A cucumber has the same number of calories and tastes better. And what’s with the salt and pepper. If your entire day’s worth of calories is coming from an onion and a handful of chickpeas, is salt and pepper really going to help?

The better question is how did she come up with this menu. What did her kids say when they saw a raw onion and the juice of three lemons on their plate. Did her husband scurry off to work so he could grab a burger at lunch?

Another star, Anne Hathaway had to lose 25 pounds for a movie role so she ate “two thin squares of oatmeal paste a day.” At least she called it dieting. But she was not without her share of drama: “I couldn’t react to the chaos of the world without being overwhelmed.” What does that even mean? Should we forbid presidents to diet lest he be overwhelmed by chaos? Why does Anne need to “react to the chaos of the world”?

Here’s a few other fun “diets.” Jennifer Aniston does the “baby food” diet, which consists of small amounts of pureed food. The article doesn’t say whether she actually eats baby food from the supermarket, but  my money is on a high-priced chef since I’ve tasted regular baby food. Then there’s Renee Zellweger who “reportedly likes the ice cube diet.” Is that really a diet? Don’t you have to at least eat a chickpea or a jar of baby food for it to be a diet? Eating ice cubes is just starving yourself.

Which brings me to my own diet experience. This goes back a few years … after I’d just finished eating several ice cream bars and was checking my profile in the bathroom mirror. “I really need to lose a couple pounds,” I said to myself. I had just read somewhere that you could only gain weight from eating fat, so I decided to put the theory to the test. I discovered that Triscuits don’t have any fat so I figured I could eat as many as I wanted and never gain a pound. Over the course of my diet, er, cleanse, I went through several boxes of Triscuits, but ate NO fat.

Two days later I weighed more than when I started out.

Maybe my brain needed cleansing. Pass me the chickpeas!