After these little cattle prods are firmly embedded in your gray matter, you spend a week in a special metabolic chamber while doctors fiddle around with the system, stimulating your metabolism by tweaking your brain's settings like it's a video game. The end result is that you feel satisfied after eating much less than you ordinarily would, because your brain is now a rat in a Skinner box that gets zapped when it gets too greedy.

Three human subjects have already undergone this procedure, and all have lost a considerable amount of weight. More experimentation is required to determine how much of the effect is attributable to the electrode stimulation and how much is due to the robots hollowing out your body and replacing your organs with carbon fiber.

For those who lack the willpower required to insert something like this before each meal, there's a more permanent option: orthodontic jaw wiring. Basically, it's a set of braces that looks like it was installed by Steve Martin's character from Little Shop of Horrors.

gorancuk/iStock/Getty Images
Part lockjaw patient, part Flavor Flav.

The braces wire your jaws so that you can't open your mouth more than a quarter of an inch, preventing you from eating anything but pureed goop for the duration of the experience, which lasts somewhere between the time it takes to lose weight and the time it takes to start showing signs of insanity. No, seriously -- one condition of orthodontic jaw wiring is that you carry a pair of wire cutters with you at all times, because apparently it can lead to panic attacks and nausea, and vomiting with your mouth wired shut is a recipe for disaster. Fatal disaster.

Beyond impairing your ability to breathe, talk, and perform oral sex (unless your partner drives a Hummer), you'll also have to worry about bad breath, chapped lips, and sneezing (because it might damage the wiring). On the plus side, orthodontic jaw wiring patients have attested that it is no worse than a tooth extraction, a comparison that assures us that 100 percent of them are insane masochists.

Participants are fed a low-carb diet through their nose for 10 days, shedding pounds via a process known to scientists as "ketosis," and to the rest of us as "starvation." Depriving the body of carbohydrates makes it eat away at its fat stores quickly, so it's actually pretty effective for short-term weight loss. So, you ask, if it's all diet-based, why not just avoid bread and skip the nose tube? Because the inventors feel you need to be punished for being fat in the first place, obviously. How are you going to learn not to do that if they don't waterboard you with chicken puree for most of a fortnight?

Jupiterimages/Stockbyte/Getty Images
There's no way your "dietician" resisted the urge to pee in this.

Wow! A crash diet that both makes you look and is insane? What's the catch? Beyond the price tag of $1,500 for what is essentially the Atkins diet liquefied and pumped through your nasal cavity, there are also some side effects. Constipation, dizziness, and bad breath are what you'd share with anyone who all but stops eating, but the tube brings its own unique twist, with risks of lung infection and the erosion of tissue in the nose and throat. But everybody knows that hacking up blood is hot. Look at Val Kilmer in Tombstone!

And there are other ways to thwart your all-consuming voraciousness. For example, one reason you get hungry again only a few hours after your last meal is that the stomach has already dumped that food down into your intestinal tract and sent it off on a magical journey that ends, as they all do, in poop. That's why you need a stomach plug like the TransPyloric Shuttle, which acts like a bouncer at the entrance to your intestines, reducing the torrent of food ceaselessly cascading toward your butthole, thus keeping you sated for longer.

Via Jerome Dargent
Congrats. Your stomach is now a toilet tank.

And if all else fails, there's always the AspireAssist Aspiration Therapy System. This is a surgical procedure invented by the visionaries who gave us the Segway, which probably explains why it's so objectively terrible. The AAATS is a tube directly between your stomach and a "skin port" that has been installed in your abdomen like a Cronenbergian nightmare. After eating a nice, normal meal with friends, you simply excuse yourself to the bathroom, attach a tube to the skin port, and empty the contents of your stomach into the toilet. Then burn any residual calories by violently weeping at what humanity has become.