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New Diet Alert: Lose weight before your wedding with a feeding tube
By Sean MorrowApril 17th, 2012, 6:45 pmComments (13)
Hey guys! I saw this awesome episode of The Twilight Zone last night. So, you see this room full of women with feeding tubes attached to them, right? And you figure they all have some awful disease that forces them to sit in chairs attached to feeding tubes, and it's really evocative of how awful it must be to be hooked up to these things instead of eating. But then, the twist is that they're not sick: they're in some crazy society where women use feeding tubes to lose weight so they look pretty at their weddings.
Oh, wait. My bad. That wasn't an episode of The Twilight Zone from last night. It was a report from ABC News I read five minutes ago.
Apparently it's a new fad for women preparing for their weddings to go on a feeding-tube crash diet so that they can lose twenty pounds in ten days. The feeding tube pumps zero carbs and 800 calories a day in through their noses, making "The K-E diet" the second-most effective weight-loss method involving inhaling something through your nose.
"It is a hunger-free, effective way of dieting," Dr. Oliver Di Pietro said. "Within a few hours and your hunger and appetite go away completely, so patients are actually not hungry at all for the whole ten days. That's what is so amazing about this diet."
It's impossible to find the logic behind something this insane, but it seems like the argument is that there are people out there who feel pressured to fit into wedding gowns — more pressured than they feel about doing silly things like eating and being healthy.
Maybe it's just me, but this diet seems like a great symbol of the type of person who puts more value in weddings than marriages. Your wedding shouldn't be the most important day of your life — I think the day you meet the person you're marrying is more important, or maybe the day you realize you love them. If you're one of those people who has a wedding planned years before you even meet the person you're going to marry, maybe question whether you're emotionally mature enough to get married. You might accomplish what you want by having a Disney Princess birthday party.
And for the grooms of the women on this diet, here's a little advice: run. Run as fast as you can. You have ten days.
Commentarium (13 Comments)
It is dangerous to lose more than 3 lbs/week. Obesity is a serious medical issue that affects immunity, the heart and can lead to type two diabetes.
Too, many people are thirsty and need to drink much more water. Try a full glass before breakfast and a full glass before every meal. If one is using caloric restriction then more water will sate hunger. If you feel hungry drink a glass of water.
Have a scale handy to weight in daily. Try using it before breakfast when you may be 4-5 lbs lighter.
Now a sexist ???, why are the men not reducing those extra lbs themselves?? Same health issues apply.
Depending on your starting weight it is absolutely not dangerous to lose more than 3 pounds a week.
actually, the recommendations are 1-2lbs per week. some people who are morbidly obese lose more than that easily, but for the general populations that is only somewhat overweight 1-2lbs is the max. 20lbs in 10 days is absolutely horrendous. do these women not realize their bodies are starving and they'll put that weight back on in a matter of months? true weight loss comes with lifestyle change - i.e. eating more fruits/vegetables/whole grains, consuming smaller portions, and getting more physical activity overall. these nutso diets drive me insane.
I wonder how much of a hot new fad this really is, or if it's just a really small group of people, but the media has blown it up because it's just so weird, and people like reading about weird. It also makes me cringe, as a woman, whenever I see this kind of thing getting a lot of coverage. It's like "Look! See how crazy/stupid women are! Let's all talk about that!"
Yuuuuuup.
I don't see what this has to do with gender. This is about how crazy/stupid PEOPLE are. The doctors performing the procedure are men. The story would have been handled the same way if it was about men. Not everything has to come back to gender.
The doctors performing the procedure are the smart people taking advantage of the crazy women. And you don't see too many trend pieces on the crazy, idiotic fads of men. I can't think of any, in fact. Compare that to how women are made to seem completely unhinged in terms of both weight and weddings, both highly gendered in our culture (not to mention how craziness is, itself, gendered).
Look at the way women have been portrayed in both the article and the comments: Frivolous, superficial, stupid, capricious. If a "trend piece" seems to serve to rev up old stereotypes, maybe it's good to think about why that trend piece so appeals to us, rather than just shutting down the idea that gender matters.
Sean, I would go ahead and back up my position, but nope seems to have already done it for me. And honestly, maybe I'm expecting too much, but I thought a more nuanced response would come from a Nerve writer.
@Sean Morrow If this were a story about the number of women who crash diet to the point of becoming anorexic before their weddings, would you take the same tone? Doubtful. Because we're used to hearing about anoreixia and what a serious problem it is. This bizarre diet springs from the same impulse.
An article about a group of women who are obsessed with mainstream culture's insane expectations of women is absolutely "about gender". Statistics about plastic surgeries or anorexia and stories about the lengths women are willing to go to in order to adhere to a nearly impossible aesthetic DO say something about society. But what they say is that our society is not so kind to women, not "hey look, lot's of people are stupid".
"If you're one of those people who has a wedding planned years before you even meet the person you're going to marry, maybe question whether you're emotionally mature enough to get married. You might accomplish what you want by having a Disney Princess birthday party. "
Can we hack E!, MTV, TLC et al. and put this sentence on a crawler?!
These women make me want to barf on their wedding dresses. My father-in-law suffered a major stroke, and for eight fucking miserable years, until the stroke that ended it, had to be fed through one of those tubes because his swallow reflex had gone. Of all the dimwitted bone-headed fads of recent years, this one really pisses me off.
Not so shocking. How many women (yes it's always the women, come on) do you know who have fainting spells in the weeks before the wedding? Or whose hair starts falling out? I've known a few and it's because they stop eating. At least these women are presumably getting nutrients.