Suppose you’re worried about your weight. Perhaps you feel you could lose a few pounds. The modern way to deal with these feelings is to smother them with anti-depressants, so you could take a fistful of Prozac washed down with a tub of Ben and Jerry’s and call it irony.

Still, some people are picky and may entertain certain objections with this advice. If you’re one of these people, you will have to investigate other medications. There is a panoply of substances you can take these days, which might seem daunting to the prospective pill-junkie, so I’ve reviewed a few of the current offerings on the market.

Alli is the latest drug to be released, and unusually, it’s actually legal as well, which is of course a bonus. Alli is a lipid-absorption blocker. In other words it’s a Fat-Shitting Drug (FSD). Because fats aren’t absorbed by the digestive system, they will appear in your faeces. This means that you will be curling out oily turds, which, depending on the amount of fat you’ve eaten, can make them so greasy and loose that they can actually slip out during the day. Eat enough KFC and your rectum can get so full of grease that a fart will splatter oil all over your underwear. In combination with white shorts, this is a great idea for a dare.

2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP) was one of the first to be invented and remains the most effective, some consider it a ‘wonder drug’. Your cellular currency for energy is called ATP. Once it is spent, it becomes ADP, which must then be recharged again. The process for doing this, ‘chemiosmosis’, involves a huge cylindrical molecule, rotated about by the passage of hydrogen ions across an electrical potential. As the molecule spins round it adds a phosphate group onto the ADP molecule, turning it back to ATP again. DNP blocks this process, allowing protons to flow unhindered across the potential, doing no work and simply generating heat. Your body then burns more food to replace this energy. Upshot: you get hot, you lose weight. This might make you sweat like a pig. In fact it was banned when people took so much of it that they died of a fatal fever. Also associated with cataracts in women.

Next, there’s Ephedrine. Your nerve cells can’t tell the difference between this drug and adrenaline. However, Ephedrine causes your nerve cells to fire much more rapidly. Upshot: ephedrine makes you hyper, suppresses your appetite and helps you concentrate. Sounds good except you might be busting for a piss which you can’t squeeze out and paranoid that people are laughing at your inability to urinate. Also you can get acne. Or die. Often mixed with caffeine and aspirin to form an ‘ECA stack’.

Get a tapeworm. (Warning: Don’t read this while eating). A Big Mac shared is a Big Mac halved. Imagine you have a tapeworm, whom for sake of argument we’ll call Terry. Terry is like a mate who follows you around all day with a fork picking at your plate of food. The only difference is that he lets you eat it first. He gets fat so you don’t have to. Terry can grow to a metre in length inside your guts soaking up all your Snickers’ and stuffed crust pizzas. The only trouble is that you’ll need to abort Terry before he gets too long because otherwise you might find him burrowing his way out of your abdomen or the walls of your anus. If this happens, wave a banana around your bum-hole, grab him when he comes out to investigate and then slowly wrap him around a pencil. You can decide how lavish to make the funeral.

Try the Atkins diet. The idea is to cut all carbohydrates out of your diet, thereby teaching your body to metabolise fat and protein. So you can eat as much meat as you like. Have the burger, not the bun; the sausages, not the mash. Kebab vendors can be very helpful, and there’s nothing quite like ordering a box of meat. Also, as it’s a carbohydrate, this also means you can’t drink alcohol, which is probably the main reason you actually lose weight. Unfortunately, since your diet will be essentially that of a desert jackal, you can expect to smell like one.

Now, the real boon comes from combining all these at once. Get yourself infected with a tapeworm, start swallowing your FSD, DNP and ECA and don’t even look at a potato. Then you can expect to find yourself pimple-covered, taking a sweaty winter stroll through Hyde Park in your underwear, while you munch your way through a can of Prince’s hotdogs, farting grease into your increasingly transparent briefs so that the seething mass of worm heads poking out of your rectum are on view to passers-by, who will be vomiting in horror and calling the police to have you taken away and sectioned.

But of course, if you find such a prospect horrifically depressing we have a solution for that…