Looking For Quick-fix Weight Loss: Here’s Another Lazy Option From Our Doctor-Bag Of Medical-Tricks

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We eat too much, but don't want to diet. Instead, we're adopting increasingly radical measures to shed the pounds. Today I'll share with you a new weight-loss fad recently gaining popularity among the ever-growing list of medical short cuts........ I present to you The KEN!!! (Ketogenic Enteral Nutrition diet). It involves eating absolutely nothing at all. 
Not possible…Possible!!

Let me share with you verbatim the Ginevra Tamberi story as she talked to The Guardian Newspaper: Ginevra Tamberi, a 21-year-old film studies student from Rome, born to very tall, very skinny parents. Her brother is blessed with a super metabolism who can eat 4,000 calories a day and remains one of nature's giraffes. But Ginevra is not so lucky. She eats one slice of bread and it goes down her throat and directly on to her neither regions.

Ginevra tried every diet introduced by modern science: the Aktins diet, the Dukan diet, the Scarsdale diet, the Zone diet, the cabbage diet, the onion diet. She saw a private nutritionist and a personal trainer. All to no avail!

Out of desperation she visited the plastic surgeon Marco Gasparotti. According to Ginevra, "Everybody in Rome knows Gasparotti." And everybody does, too: you cannot throw a brick in Italy and not hit Dr Gasparotti demonstrating his innovative techniques on some TV chat show. For Gasparotti is no slouch; he has a liposuction cannula to his name and has patented an elastocompressive cellulite-busting girdle called the Lipo Contour Elite Capri. He has also garnered countless international awards, and is at the very forefront of innovative ways of redraping skin and sucking out and resculpting fat that cannot be described to readers without causing barf attacks. In short he is a all things cosmetic genius!

Ginevra went to Gasparotti for liposuction. She wanted, as it were, to be vacuumed down a couple of dress sizes. But Gasparotti was not encouraging – liposuction. He promoted concept of improving shape and contour, discouraging comprehensive fat removal. Gasparotti had a new and better trick up his sleeve: the Diet Tube. A week later, after some medical tests, Ginevra returned to Gasparotti's clinic and she came out with a piece of plastic tubing sticking out of her nose. One end of the tube went down into her stomach the other was attached to a small electric pump.

For 10 days Ginevra wore the nasogastric tube. She ate nothing and the pump, working day and night, sending tiny amounts of a protein-filled liquid into her stomach to stave off hunger. The tube, the brave wearer says, didn't restrict her lifestyle. When she went out, she just popped the pump into her Prada bag and nobody in the street seemed to notice she had a tube up her nose. Do you find this surprising? I do! Normally you notice when people have tubes up their noses, just as you also notice when they are wearing gas masks. But then Rome is Rome.

On Diet Tube Ginevra experienced occasional moments of lassitude, but mostly she felt great. She says, "It was purifying everything. My skin was, like, unbelievable. It was so clean, so pure, like a baby's. Amazing!" Ginevra grew used to the faint buzzing of the pump, and didn't feel nauseous or hungry. But she did miss chewing. "So I was just having tea – green tea – all the time."

Didn't she get sick of the tea?

Her response, "If I see green tea now, I am going to die."

And what did her friends think?

"They're used to my strange stuff, my weird things." And anything was better than the onion diet…(she got a point there).

By the end of the 10 days, Ginevra had lost 7kg. She gave Diet Tube a break. Six months later, she had another go and lost a further 5kg. She is now a size 14, not a size 16–18. Her friends and family have also tried it. Ginevra's aunt, another of the family's non-giraffes, has lost 30kg. "My aunt is so happy, she could live on Diet Tube. I saw her with it and she was feeling so powerful. She was really putting herself into her cooking, making lasagne and parmigiana and polpettone and Mont Blanc." (Good for the folks around her!)

Last year, 1,500 patients underwent Diet Tube. Numbers are escalating – there are now eight Diet Tube clinics in Italy, centers in Barcelona, Athens and Madrid, and franchise negotiations underway for a dozen other countries, including the UK. The fact that such an outlandish procedure can flourish is hardly surprising. The diet has no significant side effects, and main side effects are just bad breath and some constipation because there is no fiber in the food solution.  However, patients with kidney disorders should not try the nose tube diet.

As a species we are getting fatter and fatter. We are also watching too many makeover TV programs and becoming increasingly susceptible to the idea of the quick fixes. Ten Years Younger, Bridalplasty, I Want A Famous Face, and Extreme Makeover have a lot to answer for. Invasive beauty procedures have been normalized and there are so very many to chose from: tummy tucks, liposuction, laser liposuction, gastric band, gastric balloon, gastric bypass and the gastric sleeve. If, for whatever reason, you are not up to dieting or spending time in the gym, there are so many short cuts. You can experiment with hypnotherapy or with algae or with Peter Foster's spooky remedies. Or you can resort to non-foods: egg white omelets, zero calorie jelly, oat bran, the abominable Dukan pancake. Or, you can take a very big breath, brace yourself and go for weight loss (or "bariatric") surgery.

The question now is where to stop?..... And while we have our thinking caps on why not ponder on  .....Why run from the good old-fashioned combos of healthy diet and exercise? 

.............But, if diet and exercise options fail us and nothing seems to work, now you know about another trick from the doctors bag that could help you.

Over weight is a manifestation of Excess in our lives, in our grocery lists! 
Time to stop, analyze & reflect!