It sounds like South Florida from the very first paragraph.
It's a story from ABC News about a new medical procedure in which women, many of whom are preparing to squeeze into a wedding dress, get a feeding tube stuck up their noses and then walk around with it for ten days, not actually eating anything.
The doctor doing these procedures calls it a "hunger-free, effective way of dieting" and says you could lose 20 pounds in ten days. His name is Oliver Di Pietro, and of all the places in the world to be the American genesis of a fad that's already popular overseas, he's from Miami-Dade County.
His practice is in Bay Harbor Islands, and he's been offering the service ($1,500, por favor) since last July, according to a New York Times piece about the procedure that came out three days before the ABC one.
"I get a lot of brides," Di Pietro told the Times. "Nervous eating."
Patients, who walk around with the tube in their face and a little bag of tube "food," are monitored for side effects ranging from bad breath to constipation and dizziness. A Miami woman who underwent the procedure told the Times that "people think I'm sick, I'm dying" and that she avoided going to her kids' school because "the children, they would be scared."
As for whether the creepy, 800-calorie-a-day "diet" is safe, a doctor and weight control expert told the Times that it was a mixed bag and that crash-dieting in general isn't the best way to slim down.
"Any extreme low-calorie diet is associated with side effects, kidney stones, dehydration, headaches," Louis Aronne said, "and if you lose muscle mass and water, what's the point of that?... You can get to the same place if you started earlier, instead of waiting until the last minute and doing something drastic."
