So I was reading The New York Times a while back when I came across this passage:

“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.”

A couple of things are kind of weird about that. For one, I don’t think whatever this woman was doing could technically be called a “diet.” It seems more like a medical procedure, a grotesque medical procedure.

Another thing, where was she able to find a doctor who would do something like this? Stupid question. Florida.

The story was about women trying to lose weight to fit into their wedding dresses — one of those lengthy trend pieces intended to offer insight into our culture by spelunking into the deepest recesses of our weirdest caves, so to speak. The story contained loads of useful information that makes you wonder whether some women have completely lost their minds and have become so deranged by the possibility of not looking like a Barbie doll that they would do things like stick tubes up their noses.

The story quoted women who were going to extraordinary lengths to drop a few pounds. One used a personal trainer, who specializes in helping brides lose weight and charges between $140 and $200 per session. Others drank elixirs that purported to “cleanse” the body of “toxins” at a cost of $65 a day — in other words, snake oil laxatives. Yet others went for trendy, weird diets where you eat nothing but certain colored foods or something like that.