The Feeding Tube Wedding Diet

There’s nothing surprising about pre-wedding dieting -- most think of bridal bootcamp simply as that nasty little step between engagement ring and wedding. But, ladies, wedding-dress anxiety has reached a new low if we’re resorting to a feeding tube diet.

Reported The New York Times: “In March, Jessica Schnaider, 41, of Surfside, Fla., was preparing to shop for a wedding gown by spending eight days on a feeding tube. The diet, under a doctor’s supervision, offered 800 calories a day while she went about her business, with a tube in her nose.” 

Nutritionists and doctors have long decried dangerous dieting fads like juice fasts and pregnancy hormone injections. And this one doesn’t sound much different. As The New York Times explains, a tube that goes through the nose and into the stomach is inserted to provide all nourishment sans carbs for 10 days, during which patients have to be monitored for problems like dizziness, constipation and extreme-dieting side effects like kidney stones and dehydration.

The diet has been commonly used in Italy and Spain for years, and was introduced in England last year. In the states, the “diet” costs around $1500 and a person’s reputation for being sane. It is insane that a woman would care so much about what she would look like on one day (I get it, photos are forever) that she’d be willing to look ridiculous for 10 days. One mom quoted in the story said she avoided picking up her kids from school during her tube time because the children “would be scared.” Yeah, they would be!

And doctors agree that its benefits are more fiction than truth. “The novelty is, they shove a tube in your nose,” Dr. Scott Shikora, the director of the Center for Metabolic Health and Bariatric Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston says in the article. “It doesn’t matter if it’s through a tube, a straw, a meal plan. They all work, if someone goes from 3,000 calories a day to 800."  

Now, I’ve seen plenty of brides watch what they eat in the months leading up to the wedding, but it seems like the pressure to be the perfect bride has finally driven us all mad.