I'd Do Anything To Lose Weight...Except Excercise

By Pauli Poisuo via cracked.com)
In a landscape littered with unscientific and downright stupid weight loss products, it takes something extra stupid to get our attention. Fortunately, weight loss is a big business, and some of the products on the market today seem purely intended to find out how far they can go before we call bull. After all, surely nobody is really out there buying ...





#6.Weight Loss Sunglasses
One of the nicest gifts our ancestors left us is our sense of disgust. Not the look-at-that-tramp-Betty White-who-does-she-think-she-is kind of disgust -- though most of us have that in spades -- but our gut-churning sense of revulsion at the sight of spoiled food. Not just the smell, but the color of food is huge when it comes to our appetites. It keeps us from getting sick.

And according to some color theorists, blue is the most unappetizing color, partially because it's rarely found in food in nature, but also because blue food makes us think we're eating mold.

So, if blue ruins our appetites, it only make sense that turning all our food blue would help us lose weight. Thus the Diet Sunglasses were birthed.

The makers of Diet Sunglasses stuck blue lenses where cool mirrored ones should be because blue food looks gross, and who wants to eat stuff that looks gross?

Right?

The really crazy thing is it might actually work ... just accidentally. There's no scientific data saying that blue is the least appetizing color ...
And about one thousand blue M&Ms that call bull.

But there is data that suggests it's the most relaxing color, and scientists think you're more likely to eat well if you're relaxed. That makes sense when you look at this testimony from a user. While her appetite wasn't exactly squelched, seeing the world in blue did relax her, and a relaxed belly is a less ravenous belly.

So basically, you could get the same effect by just playing Enya music while you eat. Or, you know, change your diet and try to exercise.

#5.Diet Dinnerware
On second though, exercise is hard. And let's face it, you're never going to be able to hear the soothing sounds of Enya over the loud and unsettling sounds you make when you're feeding. Maybe what you need is just some means of eating in a more controlled and civilized manner. Maybe you should try to get yourself a fork with traffic lights or talking plate that watches what you eat for you.

Ha, we bet you thought we were kidding about the traffic lights! Meet Diet Dinnerware:

The way the product works is pretty simple: Every 40 to 60 seconds the red light on the shaft turns green, indicating it's OK to have a mouthful. Then the light turns red again, leaving you to masticate like a farm animal while waiting patiently for the green light. Repeat until plate is empty / dinner is cold / you throw the fork out of the window.

Another fun feature of the product is its "stealth" restaurant mode, where the blinking signal comes from an external object on the table instead of the fork (because that would be just embarrassing). Said foreign object would be the blue fish thingy you see in the picture. Which you place on the table. Where it will flash red and green. STEALTHY.

It makes every meal as relaxing as gridlock traffic!

Another product called the Smart Plate, will talk to you once the dietitians have given up. Fortunately for fans of The Biggest Loser and intensely sad meals, the plate is programmed to insult the person eating off of it.

See, the Smart Plate is equipped with a weight sensor, which is connected to small speakers that will berate you with pre-recorded phrases such as "Where's your willpower?" and "Stop right there! What about excess weight?" whenever the pre-programmed weight limit is reached.

While dieting tends to be all about self esteem issues, the Smart Plate is designed to take whatever little crumbs of self-worth you have left, and make you beg for them because they know you like crumbs. But who are we to argue with the man who invented the musical condom?

Some men are too brilliant for any time.

#4.Ear Stapling
If you've ever been a little girl or a guy with earrings, you've probably experienced the rite of passage of going to the local mall to get your ears pierced. And when you did, you probably remember that thing that they used to stick pretty little studs into your ears. It kind of looked like a cross between a stapler and a nail gun and was less painful than a quick immunization shot.

And if that was your ear piercing experience, you're probably thinking that "ear stapling" for weight loss isn't the craziest thing in the world. The Chinese have been using acupuncture for a kajillion years, right? Isn't this the same thing?

If jamming needles into your back is healthy, stapling your earlobes HAS to be?

In a word, no. Not at all. Because even though ear stapling is loosely based on auricular acupuncture (which isn't an actual science, by the way), we're pretty sure practicing acupuncturists don't leave needles in their patients ears for weeks at a time.

Pierced earlobes, though nasty if infected, are soft tissue and tend to heal even if the guy doing the piercing is picking his nose and eating a hot dog during the procedure. Staples, however, need to be placed at the exact right spot so that they hit the correct acu-points. Said points are located in the hard cartilage of the ear.

Piercings in the area will hurt like hell and heal much more slowly. Plenty of people have also had to deal with permanently disfiguring infections thanks to the stapling process. Oh, and the holes caused by the procedure are also very likely going to be there forever.

So, potential pain, infection, scarring and the fact that you have staples in your ears? All risks totally worth taking for a diet procedure that has absolutely no scientific studies whatsoever to back up its effectiveness. But it beats switching to salad and going for a jog every now and then, right?

#3.Toe Rings

Show us a girl with a toe ring and we'll show you a girl with a butterfly tramp stamp. (Hint - It's the same girl.) But seriously, toe rings have long been considered the go-to jewelry of sassy broads and floozy foxes alike for years. And we're thinking those girls are going to shit a brick when they find out there are some rings that are specifically marketed to help women lose weight.

Which is more of a bonus than "Making you irresistible to foot fetishists."

Not by forcing them to run from the dozens of suitors chasing them on account of their sexy toe jewelry, as you probably assumed, but by making them silly walk.

Slim Rings consist of a pair of flexible silicone plastic rings that fasten around your big toes. Their main feature is a small bump that points downwards, so each time you put pressure on your foot, you shift the distribution of your weight. This causes the way you stand and walk to change, putting strain on less used muscles and thus supposedly making the muscles from your head to toe work more efficiently. The program is supposed to particularly affect the problem areas of the stomach and inner thighs, making fat people less fat and skinny people even skinnier.

Or photoshopped people even more photoshopped.

Of course, affecting an unnatural walking style can screw up your legs and posture. Or that you're voluntarily wearing the equivalent of a nasty callus on both your big toes instead of addressing any of the actual causes of weight gain, like diet or real exercise. Calorie counting is for the birds. Birds who aren't wearing magic rings on their toes.

#2.Flava Spray
Obviously the biggest downside of dieting is the fact that the foods you're supposed to eat taste like Bland City, USA. But guess what? This is the future, bro. There's no reason you can't get all the taste you want out of a taste can.

Flavor Spray is a calorie-free spray-on flavor by gourmet chef David Burke that claims to add, say, Parmesan flavor to your pasta without all those cheesy calories. There's a range of 25 flavors available, so you can go nuts: root beer float liverwurst, hot and sour oranges, banana split chicken, mango raspberry bubblegum parmesan cheese teriyaki whiskey.

Is anyone else craving a mango raspberry Parmesan cheese salad right now?

And yes, of course there is a bacon flavor, which is probably why Flavor Spray was actually named one of the best inventions of the year 2005 by the Time Magazine.

The problem is unless you're looking to make a minor and inconsequential change to what you're eating (i.e., making your cracker taste like a spicy cracker) eating something sprayed with Flavor Spray would be like having your common sense pelted with monkey butts. You know what you're having, you know what it should be tasting like, yet your taste buds claim it's something completely different. Bacon-flavored celery isn't going to say "bacon" to our taste buds. It's going to say, "Celery dipped in pork chemicals, thanks to the hubris of a man trying to play God."

David Burke is a madman, and he will perish by his own foul creation.

It's at this point you realize, hey, Flavor Spray is just another spice. As this review points out, spices aren't what make your foods fatty. If you want to spice up some plain almonds, you can do that with salt or pepper or chili powder or any number of things in your cabinet without adding calories. But no spray will make your rice crackers taste like a cheeseburger. So selling it as a magical diet product ("Replace Fat with Flavor!") falls into "bull" territory.

#1.Pregnant Lady Pee

So you've tried every weight loss method known to man, outside of diet and exercise. There's got to be something you've missed, some wonder drug that's going to take you back to the measurements where you can fit into your swimming suit or, failing that, even the room where you keep your swimming suit.

We've heard that a few years in a forced labor camp does wonders for your waistline.

And then you find out about something you've not yet tried: losing weight through hCG hormone injections.

Congratulations, you have just won the gold medal in Wrong Olympics! If you'd bothered to Google around a bit before plunging that syringe in, you'd have found that the hCG hormone -- the one now flowing in your veins -- is attained from a very specific source:

Human urine.

Namely, the pee of pregnant women.

A small, sad percentage of you are ordering right now.

While the idea of hCG as a weight loss drug has been around since the 1950s, author Kevin Trudeau was the guy to take this pee rocket to the moon with his best-selling book, The Weight Loss Cure "They" Don't Want You to Know About. The book, by the way, was the latest installment in a line of self help health books that had so far taught us how to rip a new one to diseases such as cancer, herpes, AIDS, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, attention deficit disorder and muscular dystrophy.

Now, there's a few things you should know about Kevin. 1) the man is telling you to syringe pee in your body, and 2) he is a convicted felon with a criminal record the length of your arm who has no medical training or proof of his claims whatsoever. Three, he looks like this:

We might buy drugs from this man, but definitely not medicine.

Kevin's little scam didn't make him a millionaire, it made him a BILLIONAIRE and paved the way for countless hacks peddling hCG as a valid obesity cure. Which it's not, by the way. At the same time practitioners are injecting wee-wee into their thighs, they're also subsisting on 500 calories a day. So yeah, they're losing weight, but it's because they're officially anorexic, not because of the lady lemonade flowing through their veins.

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