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Losing weight for a wedding has been a rite of passage for many a bride for longer than we'd like to admit, maybe even forever, and there are stats to back up the fact that a majority of engaged women want to drop as much as 20 pounds before they walk down the aisle. But there's a newer, more disturbing ante-up at work. Pre-wedding diets have become extreme. Linda Lee writes of this awful new bridal "trend" in The New York Times Friday using the headline "Bridal Hunger Games." Katniss would not approve, though, to be honest, weight loss by feeding tube and the injections of a hormone associated with pregnancy do sound pretty dystopian.
Meet the brides!
- Jennifer Derrick, who had gained nearly 35 pounds and wanted to fit in her grandmother's 1938 wedding dress. She "took prescription pills, had vitamin B shots and made weekly $45 visits to a Medithin clinic in Janesville, Wis."
- Jessica Schnaider, who prepared to shop for her gown by consuming only 800 calories daily under a doctor-supervised diet that involved the insertion of a feeding tube up her nose.
- Lindsay Gardner, who lost 14 pounds on injections of human chorionic gonadotropin, a pregnancy-related hormone. Even though in 2010 the FDA declared the use of the hormone "fraudulent for weight loss and illegal," Gardner was prescribed it, and used it, anyway—pairing the hormone injections with a 500-calorie diet.