Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

It sounded like the headlines from Weekly World News:

• DailyMail – ‘I have plastic sewn to my TONGUE so it hurts too much to eat solids’, reveals extreme beauty queen desperate to stay thin

And the pictures were gruesome.

I nearly dismissed it as untrue until I saw the BBC symbol on the pictures. They are from an episode of Extreme Beauty Queens on BBC.

• BBC Three – Extreme Beauty Queens: Secrets of South America

You can see the video here:

At the 2:36 minute mark, she talks about the work she has had done to her body, nose and teeth, but the mesh comes at the 3:11 mark. She said:

Yes, I’ve had a mesh put on my tongue.

The plastic patch is sewn onto the tongue, making it too painful to eat real food. My stomach turns just looking at the video.

The worst part is that it wouldn’t work for me. I would cut the thing off myself or keep eating despite the pain. In fact, during the worst of my gluten days, I kept eating bread and pasta until my intestines bled. I would have never lost weight with a torture device like this. I would have just melted down milkshakes or blended up Big Macs.

Devices like that mesh plastic approach the problem the wrong way. Just like having your jaw wired shut or your stomach torn apart and sewn smaller, that plastic mesh sewn on the tongue is a torture device, plain and simple. It’s almost as if we feel that it’s a proper punishment for gluttony. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. I don’t know the right way, but that is certainly wrong.