Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that will help you lose weight… by making you lose your appetite. I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me is: I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that sex dolls are also alive in the Toy Story universe… This Week’s Beer Hitachino Nest Beer - Redrice Ale RR * Aaron: 10* Shea: 10 Wicked Weightloss Through a combination of poor self-care and anxiety, I have been able to lose quite a bit of weight over the pandemic. So much that I have had to add holes to my belt and have trouble keeping my pants up, I’m not bragging because I know that as soon as I start taking care of myself that weight will come back. But my baggy pants got me thinking, what are some other stupid ways to lose weight? Whether it involves eating "miracle" foods or eating very little food there are various reasons why some of these diets are just the absolute worst. Alas, science proves time and time again that watching what you eat and moving more are the real miracle workers. Still, that doesn't prevent many—and we do mean MANY—fad diets from cropping up, sweeping the nation, and then disappearing into oblivion when they're rooted out as the false prophets they are. These diets attained the title of the absolute worst. If you happen to live in close proximity to a swamp, your obesity might not be your fault. At least according to 17th-century writer Thomas Short who, (inexplicably) observed in his amazingly titled treatise, The Causes, and Effects of Corpulence, that fat people mostly live near swamps, and that moving away from said swamps would cause a decrease in body weight. Crazy? Probably. But it does explain Florida. I’m sure you have all heard of the master cleanse where you drink lemon, honey, and cayenne and pretty much dehydrate yourself skinny, or the cabbage soup diet where you just eat cabbage soup until you're really sad and skinny but have you ever heard of the tapeworm diet? The tapeworm diet works by swallowing a pill that has a tapeworm egg inside. When the egg eventually hatches, the tapeworm will grow inside your body and eat whatever you’re eating. The idea is that you can eat whatever you want and still lose weight because a tapeworm is eating all your “extra” calories. There are a few different kinds of tapeworms, but it’s the beef tapeworm or, Taenia saginata, that is usually used in these sorts of quick weight-loss schemes. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, advertisements touted “easy to swallow,” “sanitized tapeworms” as a weapon against fat – “the ENEMY that is shortening your life,” as one vintage ad recently showcased by the National Women’s History Museum's website reads. Capsules sold in the past by snake oil hucksters, and online today, likely contain the microscopic head of a Taenia saginata. When people would order from snake oil medicine kinds of people a weight loss pill, it would be the head of a Taenia saginata … and it would develop into a 30-foot-long tapeworm in your body, the worm would get into your gut – it’s got little hooks on the head – and it would grab onto your intestine and start growing. And, technically, this parasitic infection, called taeniasis, does cause weight loss. Tapeworms will cause you to lose weight because you have this huge worm in your intestines eating your food. Diet historian Susan Yager, "just cannot believe" people would use tapeworms to shed pounds. Yager, who studied the history of diets in America for her 2010 book, “The Hundred-Year Diet: America’s Voracious Appetite for Losing Weight,