Basic Trope: Weight loss, voluntary or involuntary, goes horribly wrong.
- Straight:
- Bob takes Fat-Away, a new weight loss pill, and his metabolism slowly speeds up to the degree where he can't eat fast enough to keep weight on.
- Bob runs into the superhuman Wither, who has to suck out people's fat to live, and dies from the experience.
- Exaggerated:
- Everyone in town takes Fat-Away, and the next day, they drop dead from extreme calorie deficiency, despite many of them having become Big Eaters to compensate.
- Wither runs through everyone in the town, draining every ounce of fat even from those who have none to spare.
- Downplayed:
- Bob takes Fat-Away and his metabolism slowly speeds up to the degree that he has to spend almost all his time making sure he's getting enough food.
- Bob runs into Wither, and gets so much of his fat drained that he is significantly underweight.
- Bob loses a lot of weight like he planned, but now he has a lot of loose skin.
- Justified:
- Fat-Away was rushed through the safety trials. It wasn't quite ready when it was released.
- Wither can't entirely control his power; once he starts draining a person, he can't stop partway through.
- Bob has cancer.
- Inverted:
- Bob takes Fat-Away, and it works quite well, without any nasty effects.
- Bob takes Simple Dimple to allow himself to gain a bit more weight and quickly becomes so fat it's a threat to his health.
- Subverted: Bob takes Fat-Away and loses an unhealthy amount of weight...but it turns out what he got was a placebo. The weight loss was due to a genetically-enhanced tapeworm.
- Double Subverted: Bob realized within the first month that the medication was a placebo and got the tapeworm as a replacement strategy.
- Parodied: Bob literally turns into a stick figure that is blown away by the first wind gust.
- Zig Zagged: Some characters take on weight in horrifying ways, some lose it in similarly horrifying ways, and some stay around the same weight all the time.
- Averted: Bob does not lose weight.
- Enforced: The authors want to do a sci-fi style Very Special Episode on the problem of eating disorders, so they have Bob try to lose weight in an unhealthy way and write his way of rationalizing it as similar to people with eating disorders.
- Lampshaded:"Goodness, Bob! You lost a lot of weight!""Yeah. I lost a bit too much, though. All I can say is, Fat-Away works...perhaps a bit too well."
- Invoked: The doctor who invented Fat-Away hates people who take weight loss supplements, seeing them as vain and lazy, and purposely makes one that's deadly to "punish" them.
- Exploited: Charlie takes advantage of Bob's extreme weight loss to buy up his old clothes cheaply.
- Bob gets a lot of loose skin from the excessive weight loss, and donates it to his friend Michael, whose face was badly burned in a fire.
- Defied: Bob researches methods of losing weight very carefully and chooses one that is safe.
- Discussed: "You've seen one of these films, you've seen 'em all...who's going to do something so foolish as taking a weight loss supplement in a horror movie?"
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Charlie is investigating Bob's sudden death and asks Alice if anything unusual had happened. She says, "He started a weight-loss program...with some pretty weird salesmen", and shudders.
- Deconstructed:
- Fat-Away quickly gets yanked from the market before it can spread widely.
- Wither's feeding habits leave a very distinctive trail, and it's easy for police to track him.
- Reconstructed:
- However, some people who are desperate to lose weight buy small quantities anyway, and a considerable black market rises up for it, resulting in many more deaths.
- However, while the police can track Wither easily, bringing him in is more difficult.
