Don't Try This Diet At Home…
…or anywhere else, actually. What diet, you ask? Why, a little something called the Tapeworm Diet. Where, presumably, YOU SWALLOW A FUCKING TAPEWORM.
Now I have provided this very short and rudimentary background to helminth therapy to create the idea of “good” worms versus “bad” worms… The beef tapeworm, in addition to immunoregulatory properties, produces a symptom of infection that some people find very desirable – weight loss.
It terrifies me that there is apparently a name for this “therapy” and that… well, that anyone would actually do this. It is called “infection.” You are “infecting” yourself with, again, let me point out, A FUCKING TAPEWORM.
And it just gets creepier, including answers to questions like “I have a cyst and I am sure it is from a cow. Do I just swallow the cysts now?” and “Will I keep the weight off when I kill my worm?”
How much weight can I expect to lose?
Weight loss varies from individual to individual, but for a single tapeworm you would expect between one and two pounds a week as the worm matures. I know of instances where individuals have super-infected themselves and lost weight at a faster rate, but have also suffered a much higher incidence of side-effects. It is important to be realistic about weight loss and a rate of a pound to a pound and a half a week is ideal.
Bolding, and shudders of horror, mine. Thanks to Melinda for the creepy and traumatizing link.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Eating Disorders, Food, Health, Science, Weight Loss
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The site says you kill the worm at week ten. So you lose 10-20 lbs? Seriously? That’s it? No Thanks. Oh, and cow cysts? Blech.
OK…I’m not hungry just reading about it. So gross.
Please, please, please tell me that site is meant to be some sort of joke. *sigh*
That’s just gross. Then again, it’s like Botox – inject yourself with disease and no more wrinkles! People will go to crazy lengths to be more “attractive”.
Oh dear FSM. When I teach about tapeworms I can barely get the kids to stop shrieking in horror. People infecting themselves on purpose? Gross.
This is the best part:
“It is important to be realistic about weight loss and a rate of a pound to a pound and a half a week is ideal.”
Anyone who would willingly infect themselves with a tapeworm to lose weight is not going to be realistic about weight loss!
It does sound pretty crazy, but I thought the Science article they linked about that Japanese researcher was pretty interesting. He thinks that tapeworms, in addition to their weight loss properties, might be protective against allergic diseases like asthma. Anyone who’s ever got a yeast infection while taking antibiotics is aware of the fact that all of us are host to microbes that live in our bodies and protect us against other, more harmful microbes, so this is not such an off-the-wall idea, given that tapeworm infection is pretty benign.
Then again, the guy sounds like a bit of a crackpot, and he and his wife have both infected themselves with tapeworms. I’m always skeptical of anyone who is quite so evangelical about an unproven idea. As we science types like to say, “it’s OK to sleep with a hypothesis, but you should never marry one.” Or swallow one, I might add.
This guy seems completely batty. He lectures on about how we evolved with worms in our systems and therefore they are good for us. When people use this particular argument, they are usually conveniently forgetting that with the eradication of parasites and other infections we have greatly increased our lifespan in the past 100 years, even.
So, no.
You mean…they still do this? I thought it was only something they promoted like in the 40s or 50s or something…
okay that is just gross .. do i vomit now o r later? ohhh why.. oh hell i am not going to even ask why… I gotta link this to my blog though.. am going to put it in todays post .. just to show people what is going on out there.. geezz…
My mom did this when she was growing up because her doctor said she was fat. PASS.
I have serious doubts about this site. There are way too many spelling and grammar errors. Although I don’t doubt there are people out there who would be more than willing to have a 30-foot worm living inside them if it meant they’d become thin, sadly enough.
Maybe the “diet” here is that this idea is so disgusting that you are dropping pounds from all the shuddering and “oh dear god”-ing and the complete loss of appetite from reading about injesting *beef cysts*.
Gross.
I remember hearing about people doing this back in the 70s, and I seem to recall it was nothing new then either. There is never a shortage of quack answers for weight loss. If we wait long enough, maybe those big fat-shaking belts will come back too. Or the giant vibrators that you use to massage trouble spots and the fat is supposed to melt away. (Makes hair grow on bald heads as well!) There was a time when I thought, “You know, that would be OK – eat and eat and eat, and get skinner and skinner. Wonder how they remove it, though?” Then I met some people who’d had large tapeworms (not through their own choice) and heard what it was like to pull the thing out because the end was coming out anyway…and yeah, that ended up sounding really horrific. The boy said his was something like 11 feet long by the time he got it all out. Ew.
This has got to be a joke. Right? If it’s not, then this world is more f’ed up in the head than I thought it was! A person would have to be mentally fucking ill to purposefully ingest tapeworms. Right???
My brain is smoking right now, like Harry Mudd’s androids when Spock blew their circuits with his illogical statements.
Actually, I also remember reading about tapeworm insertion; it was models who were doing it. That might have been in the early 80s. They said it was the easiest way to maintain the super-skinny model’s figure.
The hell?
One to two pounds a week? Wake up and feel the worm wiggle! If that’s what you want to do, just go to Weight Watchers and have done with it: what a concept: lose that same 1 – 2 lbs a week while eating wholesome food!
The question I’ve always had is pretty simple: If you’re eating like a madwoman just to keep feeding that pesky worm, does the worm itself never gain any weight? I always thought that by the time the worm was removed it would be a 200-pound behemoth of an invertebrate living in a 140-lb. body. This of course means that the total weight of BOTH beings (you & your pet worm) would exceed 300 pounds and seem to defeat the purpose. What’s the answer to THIS one?
This might seem inflammatory but I find infecting yourself with a tapeworm much more natural and less invasive than weight loss surgery.
When I was a teenager, any of us who wanted to lose weight gave ourselves a tape worm. It was actually prescribed by our family doctors (along with a little speed to “give us energy”). Nothing new, just the same old lunacy.
The lengths people will go to in order to be thin are astounding and saddening.
Um.
No.
Just.
No.
Just wonderful. Just goes to show that no one really cares how you lost the weight- they just care that you did.
I’d probably want to name my tapeworm and then I wouldn’t want to kill it after I named it, so I’d keep it for a pet and feed it extra cupcakes. So begins the adventures of Sea Hag and Lucas the Tapeworm.
HAHA!
I’d rather eat the cow than swallow it’s cysts infested with tapeworms. And I’m pretty sure that models did that in the 80’s along with the cotton balls soaked in orange juice. Lemme tell ya, I’d do neither.
Uhh. I hope this is a hoax. I wish it were a hoax. It sounds like a hoax, but it also seems like the status of this thing is actually indeterminated? Whatever. Society is so screwed up these days that I wouldn’t even be surprised if this was true. *shudders*
Well, at least, now I don’t feel like eating at all, so this is probable an appropriate side-effect of that website.
As we say among my friends… “Veni, vidi, vomi.”
WAH.
I remember hearing about this in the 70’s when I was in elementary school. Some freak girl named Belinda came up to me and said her dad made her swallow a tape worm and she was going to get skinny….she suggested I do the same thing (yes I was chubby back then too) I don’t know what ever happened to Belinda, her family belonged to some cult and they moved to South America.
I’ve tried a lot of crazy things but this won’t be on my “to do” list any time soon!
Kari, I don’t know if this particular article is a hoax but I can tell you for sure that inserting a tapeworm is a LONG-honored method of weight loss. It works! The tapeworm basically eats all the food, and you get skinny. This has been done for a long time. Never mind the ill effects, it makes you thin and that’s “all” that matters, right?
It’s a famous urban legend. Snopes and the Brunvand books talk about it.
“Some freak girl named Belinda came up to me and said her dad made her swallow a tape worm and she was going to get skinny.”
Get on the phone and call her up and ask her about it. She’ll say, “Yes, it’s true! But it wasn’t me. It was my friend Carly.” Then have her call Carly up. “True! But it was Danielle.” And so on.
It’s the friend-of-a-friend memory trick. And it never reaches an end.
This does seem to come around every so often. I remember my mum telling me about a colleague who had been taking herbal slimming pills, and then heard a rumour that there was a tapeworm egg at the centre of every pill…
“Helminth therapy” does exist. For example, Crohn’s disease sufferers have had pig whipworms prescribed to them, under strict medical supervision.
Not that that makes the idea any less yucky. I’m sure the people with Crohn’s disease don’t WANT to do it.
I’ve heard of this. Scary isn’t it. If someone is considering this they have a bigger problem than trying to lose a few pounds.
I found some really nice blog themes by visiting some of the webmaster forums.
It seems like after reading this women would understand there is no sensible short cut that will get rid of excess pounds. It takes exercise and focus and commitment, just like anything else that is not on everyone’s I-hate-to-do-this-stuff list.