This article references eating disorders and disordered eating.
What's the craziest thing you've done in the name of weight loss? Ask any woman and prepare to be seated for the wildest 40 minutes of your life. But forget cabbage soup; the latest so-called health trend is the ‘tapeworm diet’. You heard. New research by Asda Online Doctor shows that 1 in 40 women have given this “highly dangerous” diet a go – all in the name of weight loss. Can't afford Ozempic? Simply ingest a life-threatening parasite.
A tapeworm infection is usually caused by accidentally touching faeces from a person or animal with worms or eating undercooked beef, pork or fresh fish. Once inside the body, the worm resides in the intestine, where it feeds from the food being digested. This causes stomach pain, particularly nasty diarrhoea, and, yes, weight loss. It can also lead to appendicitis, blindness, and even death.
Here, my instinct is to say that wilfully swallowing a ‘tapeworm pill’ is akin to self-harm, not going on a fad diet. But is there even a difference between the two?
Warning signs to look out for and advice on what to say.
Fad diets, defined by The Association of UK Dietitians as diets that “promote results such as fast weight loss without robust scientific evidence to support its claims,” are a fast track to a lifetime of disordered eating.
You spend the ‘good’ days of the diet feeling smug – like you've been let in on a big secret. You're excited to fall asleep so you can wake up thinner. When the ‘bad’ day arrives – which it always, always does – you have a moment of weakness. You eat something you shouldn't have, which gives you licence to eat everything you shouldn't want. You eat. You feel bad about eating. You resolve to start afresh tomorrow. You eat again, while it's still allowed.
Fad diets don't tend to result in long-term weight loss. They have, however, been linked to headaches, dehydration, constipation, blurred vision, irritability, depression, anxiety, fatigue, nausea, reduced bone density, irritable bowel syndrome, anorexia, diarrhoea, menstrual disturbances, binge-eating disorder, bulimia, vitamin deficiencies, bad breath, hair loss, kidney stones, weakened immune system, infertility, and death.
Now, in big 2025, we're meant to have moved on from fad diets. We don't do that sh*t anymore. We eat lunch and harp on about ‘body neutrality’ whenever anyone in the office complains about feeling fat. We exercise for the mental benefits – honestly! – and tell anyone who'll listen that the BMI is outdated nonsense. We're over it. At least, we thought we were – until the celebrities started shrinking again.
The increased availability of Ozempic – or semaglutide, prescribed for weight loss under the brand name ‘WeGovy’ in the UK – has sent shockwaves through the retired neural pathways marked ‘DIET’ in our brains. We forget everything we've ever preached about diets, quietly recalibrating our priorities around that one goal that has always eluded us: the one where we do the weight loss, the one where it actually works, the one where we're finally thin. Suddenly, a tapeworm doesn't sound all that extreme.
I was prescribed Wegovy and Orlistat online with few checks.
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It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to be a post-00s-thinspiration woman in an Ozempic era. Diet culture has me in a headlock.
I love my body. In fact, I reckon it's one of the greatest bodies of all time. It's strong, having survived half-marathons, alcohol poisoning, multiple rounds of heartbreak, and even a near-fatal car accident. It looks alright, too. I can grab handfuls of each breast, see my quadricep muscles through my jeans, and my clavicle is practically Baroque. But if you told me I could lose ten pounds without even tweaking my lifestyle? Well… forget tapeworms; diet culture is an earworm burrowing deep into my skull.
We tend to think of diet culture as a fairly modern beast, but it's not. An infamous Victorian weight loss ad reads, “FAT: The ENEMY that is shortening your Life BANISHED!” But how? “With sanitised TAPE WORMS… jar-packed.” Mmmmm.
Whether or not Victorian women actually ingested tapeworms to lose weight, they certainly lived in a society that valued their smallness above all else, both physically and politically. Just as celebrity culture fetishised anorexia in the late '90s/early '00s, the Victorians romanticised tuberculosis in the mid-1800s. In both periods, to be beautiful was to be deathly thin.
We like to think we've come a long way since the Victorian era, not being the literal property of our husbands and all that. So why are we allowing these ancient fad diets to make a comeback?
Every day, I'm reminded that my body is a stroke of luck – not a given. It may have survived the fad diets of the ‘00s, but I'm not sure how it would fare against a tapeworm. And that's something I'm not particularly sure I want to find out.
For more information and advice, call Beat's helpline on 0808 801 0677.
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
Welcome to the second instalment of Body Talk.
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