The Botox® diet?

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February 23, 2008 - Follow me on Twitter

Here’s a diet that is surely to cause a lot of controversy. There is a prevailing belief in America where a number of people think that injecting Botox into the stomach muscles may become the next get-thin-quick solution because it is believed that Botox may suppress your appetite.

The biological explanation is somewhat weird and scary at the same time: because the stomach empties by a wave of muscle contractions, the logic here would be that if your muscles are relaxed and don’t contract, food will remain in the stomach longer and you’ll feel fuller … therefore you won’t eat as much during the day.

This new Botox diet is targeted at people who are obese to help them lose initial weight in order to prevent riskier weight-loss surgery such as gastric bypass surgery or lap band surgery.

Call me crazy, but Botox as an appetite suppressant just doesn’t seem natural to me.

I do understand the logic of minimizing the number of people who opt for potentially dangerous weight-loss surgeries, but it does sound to me like a copout in terms of having being accountable for what they put in their mouth. I totally understand that obesity is a mental dependency issue that is highly complicated to deal with, but I also think that the people who have successfully conquered obesity are those who have done it the old-fashioned way: understanding why they overeat, replacing bad eating habits with healthier ones and getting on a life long fitness regime.

Photo by Desi.Italy