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

Over the many years, the idea of weight loss has fascinated writers. If you have ever wanted to lose weight quickly, all you need to do is look to fiction for fantastical stories about easy weight loss. The problem is, each of these stories is a morality play, warning you against quick fixes.

• The Truth About Pyecraft by HG Wells: Mr. Pyecraft is named the fattest clubman in London. When Mr. Formalyn comes back from India, he offers him a special dish from that exotic land that is supposed to help you lose weight. Mr. Pyecraft DOES lose weight, but not mass. He finds his baloonish body floating to the ceiling and ends up wearing lead underwear to prevent himself from flying off into the sky.

• The Iron Chancellor by Robert Silverberg: In Robert Silverberg’s classic 1958 story, the family’s robot, the roboservitor, prepares your diet and prevents you from cheating. Unfortunately, the robot keeps you on this limited diet, even if you’re starving to death. It is a typical “robots are bad” story that filled science fiction in the fifties, but it also is a morality play to those who are willing to relinquish control over to others when they can’t control themselves.

• Doctor Who “Partners in Crime” 2008: The new miracle diet pill, Adipose, promises to cause weight loss without exercise or change in diet. Very much like Alli, there is a frightening side effect. Instead of intense gastrointestinal distress, the fat literally pops off your body, creating little sentient fat creatures. Unfortunately, your entire body can be reduced, leaving nothing but your clothes.

• Thinner by Stephen King: Billy is a high powered lawyer who accidentally caused the death of an old gypsy woman. Instead of serving his time for vehicular manslaughter, his skills in the court room got him off with not even a slap on the wrist. The old gypsy man touches him and utters the word, “Thinner.” From that moment onward, Billy drops weight. He eventually becomes a skeleton of a man, eating as much as he can to just stay alive while he searches for the gypsy to reverse the curse, losing everything he loves in the process.

• Tales from the Darkside “Love Hungry”: In a twist of irony, Betsy, a telemarketer, becomes a marketing victim by “Your Weight Is Over” for weight loss, they send her a special ear plug and glasses. When she wears them, all her food looks as if it’s alive and sentient. Every bite becomes murder and eating is a lesson in sadism. Just watching the Mexican Restaurant scene was enough to put me off enchiladas for a long time.

• Star Trek’s Food Replicators: They were created to provide the perfect nutrition for those traveling on Federation starships. No matter how unhealthy the food that you request, the replicator will make it out of healthy nutrients. Of course, there is some disagreement about whether the taste is the same as “real” food. Considering how fulfilling fake food is right now, the Federation has a lot of inventing to do to create replicated food that is healthy AND tastes good. Oh, and the food is created using the waste products from the ship and energy.

In the end, all of these fictional weight loss options are just warnings in disguise. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you lose weight without diet and exercise, then you have to pay the price. The price may be your life, your sanity or merely your enjoyment of food. There is only one true way to get fit and healthy and that’s to eat less and move more. In the future, they may invent an easier way, but I don’t want to be first in line to try it, do you?

Via: io9 Triviagasm: Fantastical Ways to Lose Weight in the New Year