Don’tpoo-pooit! TEEN’S HARD-TO-SWALLOW TRIAL
Mad die’ s tried everything to lose weight, but her latest effort takes real guts
If someone told Maddie Couprie five years ago she would willingly eat human poo, she never would have believed it.
“I would honestly have thought, ‘What on earth are you talking about?’” she laughs. “You have to admit, it sounds absolutely disgusting!”
And yet that’s exactly what the young Aucklander has done in the hope that swallowing faeces – taken in capsule form – will help her win her battle with the bulge once and for all.
Maddie, 19, is one of 80 obese Kiwi teenagers who volunteered to take part in a study into whether changing the balance of microbes in the gut can help people lose weight. International research has already proven that when obese mice are given the gut microbes of lean mice, they lose around 30% of their body weight.
Now the Liggins Institute – the University of Auckland’s elite medical research facility – is hoping to break new ground by testing the theory on humans.
For Maddie, who weighed 115kg at the start of the trial,
being part of the experiment isn’t just a chance to make history – it’s given her hope. The Massey University nursing student has struggled with her weight for as long as she can remember.
“I was around eight years old when I looked around my classroom and thought, ‘All these girls are a lot smaller than me,’” Maddie tells. “It didn’t feel great, but my whole family is big, so I thought, ‘I guess I’m just like them.’
“But as I got older, it just got worse. When I was 10 or 11, a girl poked me in the stomach and said, ‘I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be fat.’ That hurt, but I didn’t tell anyone about it because I was so embarrassed.”
As Maddie reached her teens, her weight problems continued. When she was 14, she lost 15kg on the Kiwi KISS Diet, dropping from a size 18 to a size 14 over 12 months. But within two years, she’d gained it all back – plus some. It had a marked effect on her self-confidence.
“I was always hyper-aware I was the biggest person in the room,” shares Maddie. “And
I was so uncomfortable in my body because I had to heave it everywhere. There was no point clothes shopping because nothing looked how I wanted it to look. And dating was a disaster. I went on a couple of dates, but in the end, I decided to save myself the trouble and the hurt.”
Giveitago!
Last year, aged 18 and wavering between sizes 20 and 22, Maddie despaired she would ever be able to reach a healthy weight. Then she noticed a Facebook ad looking for candidates for the Gut Bugs Trial.
“I figured nothing changes if you don’t at least try, so I sent them my details,” she tells.
Maddie was relieved to learn she would be given her “trans-poo-sion” via odourless, flavourless, double-coated capsules – or “crap-sules” – which would pass into the the small intestine before dissolving.
She immediately signed on to the trial and also agreed to take part in a documentary series following a handful of participants. Called The
GoodSh*t, it starts on Three
on October 2 and viewers will have to wait until the end of the series to find out if she lost weight.
Maddie admits she copped a few cheeky jokes from her brother after signing up for the trial, but she explains, “For the first time in years, I felt hope again – like, what if this is it?”
And if the change in her gut microbes does for Maddie what it does for mice, she’s excited about what her future could hold. “I’d love to go travelling. I’d feel more comfortable on planes. I’d also be a lot happier and healthier. It would change my life completely.”