ABSTRACT
In 2012, The New York Times published an article titled “Bridal Hunger Games”. The article analysed the trials and tribulations of women seeking to lose weight in time for their wedding day. Various experts on bridal weight loss training contributed reflections on the most effective ways for women to downsize, detox and thereby reinvent their bodies. Typical weight loss for contemporary “training brides”, so the article reported, is 15 to 20 pounds. The contemporary bridal training menu is one focused resolutely on reinvention; from detoxing cleanses to fatbusting diets, training brides are out to demonstrate to others a complete transformation of their bodies. Downsizing yourself for the big day involves a curious kind of devotion to the task at hand, one in which denial and deprivation are central to the mantras of reinvention. Yet in current times it helps, in reinventing your body, to be assured that the desired transformation can be achieved the speediest way possible. It is for this reason alone that drastic diets – designed to deliver super-fast weight loss – have become all the rage in the current regime of bridal hunger games. Even so, drastic reinvention can always be pushed further.
Transgression is, as it were, built in to the very logic of makeover culture and reinvention society. One latest fad amongst drastic diets involves daily injections of a hormone associated with pregnancy – human chorionic gonadotropin. Notwithstanding various health
