At the risk of turning this otherwise mundane and generally pointless blog you’ve come to know and expect into a worthless compilation of diet news, I can’t resist linking to this story about the latest Beverly Hills weight loss craze–the tongue patch.  The way it apparently works is they sew a plastic patch onto your tongue which makes eating solid food extremely painful.  The doctor selling this $2000 surgery reports his patients lose up to 30 pounds a month.  That’s the power of a liquid diet so he says.

Of course, my problem is I’m drinking too much liquid–mostly of the beer variety.  I’m quite certain those Korean beers I consumed in great quantity are what caused my massive weight gain to begin with (light and/or low carb beers are not commonly found and the American imports cost twice as much as the local brews).  So, the tongue patch is not really an option for me, especially given my well-developed aversion to pain.

Today I took Jee Yeun to the GNC store so she could restock her supply of fish oil.  She also bought something called Biotin, which is apparently some kind of B-vitamin supplement.  According to Jee Yeun that 100 year old woman we met (I wrote about her here) swears by the stuff.  I guess we’ll see, but I reckon it can’t hurt either.

Anyway, I browsed the store while Jee Yeun found her stuff and came across these:

By golly, “a clinically studied white kidney bean extract” that “decreases the caloric impact of carbs!”  Does it actually work?  According to Wikipedia in three double blind studies folks who used Phaseolamin lost significantly more weight than the placebo group.  Will it work for me?  I don’t see how it could hurt.  Mind you, I’m sticking with the low carbohydrate regimen but hopefully this will help counter my “liquid diet” problem.  And if it assuages the pangs of guilt when I have the occasionally slip (did you know Wendy’s is selling soft-serve ice cream in a waffle cone?) then it is worth it at twice the price.  Truthfully, the bottle only cost me 23 bucks for 120 humongous tablets, which is just about the price for two buckets of beer.  And who can put a price tag on peace of mind?