Losing weight is tough. You've got to eat healthier, start exercising, and just stop being such a lazy, horrible slob in general. That is unless you get a pump that literally sucks food out of your stomach and replaces it with water after the fact. Talk about enabling.


The pump was invented by Dean Kamen, the same man who brought you the Segway, and perhaps more fittingly, a breakthrough dialysis machine. This pump works by routing a tube directly into the user's stomach and then sucking out some of the gooey, masticated goodness. The user then squeezes a little plastic bag to replace that volume of stomach-stew with water. Sounds great, right?

There are some catches though. It hasn't been approved by the FDA yet, and some of the users in the tests had problems with certain foods like "cauliflower, broccoli, Chinese food, stir fry, snow peas, pretzels, chips, and steak." Oh, also there's a tube going into your stomach that you use to pump unpuked vomit into the toilet. Participants in trial studies did manage to lose about half of their excess weight this way, around 45 pounds on average, so apparently it works.


Tech is great, and it can solve a lot of problems, but something about this just seems off. Sure, this isn't going to make you totally svelte and healthy if you're only eating McDonalds, but it still seems to miss the point of healthy eating. Also, it's gross, really gross. Admittedly the idea is to get users to move to a healthier diet, but surely there must be a way to do that without creating another bodily orifice, right? [Popular Science]