People are always sending me ideas for the Skeptoid podcast. One that I got this week was too good to pass up: the ejaculation diet.

Yes, that’s right.

Superficially, it might make some sense. When you’re dieting, or especially when you’re fasting, your body tends to slow down its metabolism to reduce the consumption of resources. This keeps you alive longer than if you continued burning your energy stores at the normal rate. So, in effect, your body has a built-in mechanism to defend against your diet. How, then, does one get rid of those energy stores that the body is trying so hard to keep?

Ejaculate it out, of course.

Your body’s normal secretions, sweat, #1, and #2, are not naturally high in fats and sugars, which are the things you want to get rid of by dieting. Fortunately, one particular secretion is: semen.

One of the main ingredients of semen is fructose, a monosaccharide that’s found throughout your body. Extra fructose is stored in your fat cells, and most of us have more of that than we wish we did. The gonads manufacture this by drawing the needed ingredients from the blood. The blood then replenishes itself from whatever you eat. But, if you’re not eating enough, your blood will go elsewhere for that fructose: the fat cells. Ejaculate a few times a day, and don’t eat any sugar, and you will indeed force your body to draw directly from its fat.

Beats a day at the gym, doesn’t it?

Is this indeed the super-optimal path to weight loss? This isn’t really my line, so I wouldn’t make any such assertion. I do know that semen is also high in protein, and when your body is low on incoming food, muscle is the source from where your body will draw most of the proteins in semen. So, while I suspect that the ejaculation diet truly is a pretty powerful draw on your body’s resources, I’m not convinced that fat cells would be targeted more than other stores. I’m also not convinced that the average guy can muster enough frequent output to match what would normally be metabolized by a decent exercise schedule. Maybe it would, I just don’t know. I invite anyone with any special… um, expertise in this… to give this question their best shot.

(For those interested in how women might benefit from this, I invite adventurous readers to follow up on their own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_ejaculation)