175 years ago, Sylvester Graham, inventor of the Graham cracker and old-time diet kook, told us we could be healthier and less beholden to our sexual desires if we would only follow his diet. Now I have put it to the test and I have good news and bad news for the ghost of Mr. Graham.

First, I lost about 5 pounds over the four diet. That’s the good news. The food was so universally unappealing that I had pretty much no desire to eat. The Graham crackers themselves weren’t bad at all. But I have a feeling they’re not exactly the same as the ones Sylvester was rolling out all those years ago. Mine were sweet and chocolatey and sometimes in the shape of teddybears.

The bad news is the diet seemed to have no effect on the frequency or intensity of my sexual arousal. In honor of Sylvester Graham I remained chaste throughout the duration of the diet, but the thoughts still existed, if not the deed. In fact, by the end of the four days, Graham himself was starting to look good to me. I’m so ashamed.

So hey, if you’re looking to drop a few pounds I think the diet would work for a little while. And if you want to indulge in some hot erotica, you’d love Graham’s sexy book: A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity. Which contains such steamy gems as…

“Hence, therefore, SEXUAL DESIRE, cherished by the mind and dwelt on by the imagination, not only increases the excitability and peculiar sensibility of the genital organs themselves, but always throws an influence, equal to the intensity of the affection, over the whole nervous domain ;—disturbing all the functions depending on the nerves for vital energy, which is thereby increased upon, or distracted from them—and if this excitement is frequently repeated, or long continued, it inevitably induces an increased degree of irritability, and debility, and relaxation generally throughout the nervous and muscular tissues, and especially the nerves of organic life. And hence, those LASCIVIOUS DAY-DREAMS, and amorous reveries, in which young people too generally—and especially the idle, and the voluptuous, and the sedentary, and the nervous—are exceedingly apt to indulge, are often the sources of general debility, effeminacy, disordered functions, and permanent disease, and even premature death, without the actual exercise of the genital organs ! Indeed, this unchastity of thought—this adultery of the mind—is the beginning of immeasurable evil to the human family : and while children are regularly, though unintentionallytrained to it, by all the mistaken fondness of parents, and all the circumstances of civic life, it is but mockery in the ear of Heaven to deprecate the evil consequences ; and folly, little short of fatuity, to attempt to arrest the current of crime that flows from it.”

Oh Sylvester, you dog!