There are a lot of fad diets, but none of them compare to voluntarily ingesting parasites to help you lose weight. This trend is best known as the Tapeworm Diet. When you ingest a tapeworm, it secretes proteins into your intestinal tract that make food digestion less efficient. And since the parasite is also consuming some of your food for its own survival, this should add up to weight loss for you.
Is this what it’s come down to for some of us? We need to have an alien creature eating inside us to lose weight? While this is a fringe approach to weight loss, it has its devotees. Female Chinese students are resorting to roundworms, another intestinal parasite, to lose weight… but their motivation is to give them an edge in a competitive job market.
The roundworms hatch in a person’s stomach, allowing them to lose weight without exercise or any substantive changes in their diet.
While registered unemployment in China is at a reasonable 4.3 percent, Yin Chengji, spokesman of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS), says that pressure to create new jobs is heavy. Plus, according to a report by The Daily Mail, employment is only at 22 percent of the population, with a labor pool of about a billion people.
Parasites aren’t the only desperate fad diet strategy young unemployed Chinese citizens are resorting to. Apparently there are “special” soaps being used that are supposed to help them lose weight. There are people taking as many as 10 showers a day.
There are also some young people who are staring at pictures of thin people for hours at a time to keep their focus on staying thin.
(via: The Daily Mail)