If you’re secretly worried about your smartphone addiction, then the new NoPhone might be just the thing you need. It’s the perfect smartphone placebo – it looks and feels exactly like a smartphone, but it does nothing. It’s just a piece of plastic that you can carry around in your hand to fool yourself.

NoPhone is currently a prototype that will cost a measly $12 once it hits the market. Its makers are trying to raise $30,000 on Kickstarter in order to cover production and marketing costs. They describe the device as a ‘technology-free alternative to constant hand-to-phone contact that allows you to stay connected with the real world’.

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19-year-old Danny Bowman is England’s and perhaps the world’s first self-confessed selfie addict. It might seem funny, but this addiction is every bit as serious and dangerous as any other. In fact, the young boy almost lost his life over his obsession of taking the perfect selfie photograph.

Danny used to spend about 10 hours taking over 200 selfies on his iPhone, every single day. At one point, his addiction got so bad that he stopped going to school and didn’t leave his house for six months. He even lost almost 30 pounds trying to make himself more photogenic. When his parents tried to stop him, he turned aggressive. And in a final, drastic attempt to cure himself of his disease, Danny overdosed on drugs.

“I was constantly in search of taking the perfect selfie and when I realized I couldn’t, I wanted to die,” he said. “I lost my friends, my education, my health, and almost my life.” Fortunately, Danny was saved by his mother Penny, before the his selfie addiction claimed his life. He is now being treated for technology addiction, OCD and Body Dysmorphic Disorder, which is an excessive anxiety about personal appearance.

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They say junk food can kill you. But then you get to hear stories of people who eat nothing else and are doing just fine. Like this one guy who has been eating pizza exclusively for the past 25 years. Dan, a 38-year-old woodworker from Maryland, hates veggies so much that he won’t even use them as pizza toppings. The only spice he can tolerate on his pizza is oregano.

“I’m not just talking about a slice of pizza every day,” he said in an interview. “I usually eat an entire 14” pizza, and I only eat cheese pizza. I never get sick of it. If I go to one pizza shop or another brand, it’s like eating a completely different meal.” Dan made his bizarre food choice when he was just 15 years old. That’s when he decided to go vegetarian for ‘ethical reasons’. “I still loved the taste of meat, and I still love it to this day, but due to my beliefs, I gave it up. That was about 23 years ago. I also hate vegetables.”

My guess is that Dan’s body can metabolize food like crazy. How else can a person eat just pizza (essentially bread and cheese) for years and still stay so slim? But Dan’s weight is no indicator of his health. The man suffers from type 1 diabetes and his blood sugar drops quite frequently. It gets so bad at times that he blacks out on the kitchen floor in his underwear. One time, he blacked out while driving his new car home.

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A promise made to his mother determined 75-year-old Pero Ajtman to drink only Coca Cola for the last four decades. The Croatian gave his word not to drink alcohol ever again, so he replaced wine and spirits with the popular fizzy drink.

“My mum didn’t like me drinking when I was a young man as she was very religious. She made me promise never to drink again and Coca-Cola was the only thing that tasted as good as wine so I started drinking that”, Pero Ajtman explains. The pensioner from Croatia’s Karanac village told reporters that drinking several glasses of the sugary soft drink every day has kept him from going back to his boozy ways. “Now I have a glass in the morning, before and after lunch, with my dinner and then before I go to bed. I never drink anything else,” the man swears. Doctors generally advise against drinking large quantities of carbonated sugary drinks on a regular basis, as it can have a devastating effect on our health, but 75-year-old Pero says he has yet to experience any serious problems. He does admit to being hooked to it now, saying “Coke is my drug now, and I’ll drink it till I die”.

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Ismail Jasim Mohammed, a farmer from Samara, Iraq, claims he consumes at least one live scorpion every day, and experiences symptoms of withdrawal if he goes three days without eating a nasty stinger.

When people like David Gracer started preaching about the benefits of eating bugs, I don’t think they meant potentially deadly live scorpions. But that hasn’t stopped 34-year-old Ismail Jasim Mohammed from feasting on them for the last 15 years. Tired of getting stung by scorpions around the village of Agelam, near the Iraqi city of Samara, the farmer decided to turn the tables and give them a taste of their own medicine. One day, he caught a live scorpion, put it in his mouth and ate it alive. He actually liked the taste and he has been snacking on them ever since. Obviously, he was stung in the mouth a few times throughout the years, but Ismail says that helped him develop an immunity to the scorpion venom. These days, the man is addicted to his unusual diet, and says he eats at least one scorpion a day. If he goes three days without consuming a nasty critter he experiences signs of withdrawal.

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China’s growing problem with internet and video game addiction is probably best described by the case of Li Meng, a young man who has virtually been living in an Internet cafe for the last six years, leaving only to buy food and take the occasional shower.

According to Chinese media, Li Meng graduated from university six years ago, but unlike most of his peers, who went on to look for jobs, make a name for themselves and start a family, he opted for a life in the fantasy world of online gaming. Ever since he finished school, Li has spent most of his time in one of the many internet cafes in China’s Northeast city of Changchun. The owner of the place says he’s been there for such a long time that he’s basically part of the furniture, and doesn’t even notice his presence anymore. He spends every day and night tucked away in a corner, with an open bag of food by his side, staring at the monitor and mashing the keyboard and mouse buttons, leaving for brief periods of time to catch a bite to eat and take a bath. Reporters who visited the young Chinese gamer at his “workplace” described him as a pale “bespectacled youth that clearly hadn’t been to a hairdresser for a long time”.

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There’s a new way to beat your addiction, but it hurts, a lot. Psychologists at a Siberian drug clinic are using corporal punishment to help drug, alcohol and even sex addicts get their lives back. The bizarre treatment involves lashing patients’ buttocks with sticks and canes.

“We cane the patients on the buttocks with a clear and definite medical purpose – it is not some warped sado-masochistic activity,” Professor Marina Chukhrova told The Siberian Times. Apparently, there are some sound scientific principles behind these beatings. Chukhrova and fellow practitioner Dr German Pilipenko claim addicts suffer from a lack of endorphins, known as the “happiness hormones”, and the excruciating pain stimulates their brains to release endorphins into the body, making them feel better about themselves without having to use any other stimulants. “The caning counteracts a lack of enthusiasm for life which is often behind addictions, suicidal tendencies and psychosomatic disorders,” Pilipenko says. He admits their technique gets a lot of skepticism from fellow doctors, but insists the pain acts as an injection against stress. Read More »

I know what you’re thinking, we’re all pretty much addicted to water, but we don’t feel like drinking it every moment of every day, and we certainly don’t consume over six gallons of it, daily. But Sasha Kennedy does, and that definitely makes her a water addict.

Drinking plenty of water is generally regarded as healthy advice, but they say too much of a good think can sometimes be bad for you, and 26-year-old Sasha Kennedy, from Essex, England, is certainly overdoing it. The young mother of two says she drinks about 25 liters of water a day, and can hardly go one hour without water, even at night. Because of her strange addiction, Sasha is forced to carry bottles of water with her, everywhere she goes, and has to use the bathroom up to 40 times a day.

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Philippa Garfield, from London, England, loves mayonnaise so much she will eat it with pretty much anything, and even wash her hair with it.

We’ve featured some pretty weird addictions here on Oddity Central, from the guy addicted to sausages, to the woman who loved drinking her own urine, but Philippa Garfield takes things to a whole other level. While mayo might not be the strangest thing a person can become addicted to, it’s the way she uses it that makes her story really bizarre. Although she loves eating mayo and pours it over anything she eats, and even in her morning coffee, Philippa also uses the fatty condiment as a cheap moisturizer and conditioner for her hair. She also sees it as the perfect alternative to shaving cream.

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Trisha Paytas is a blonde lingerie model from Los Angeles who has recently made headlines after being featured on TLC’s show My Strange Addiction for her unhealthy obsession with tanning.

Lots of girls out there put their health on the line every time they lay on a tanning bed, but Trisha Paytas takes artificial tanning to a whole other level. She’s been visiting tanning salons almost every day, sometimes twice a day, ever since she was 14 years old. The bubbly blonde, 24, says she has so far spent over $52,000 on keeping her skin tone dark, and doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. She is fully aware of the risks she takes every time she goes into a tanning salon, but says she’d rather look good dead and tanned than pale and alive. Way to think positive…

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If I had to eat the same meal for as long as 3 – 4 days in a row, I wouldn’t want to be touching it again for a long time . That’s why I cannot understand how 19-year-old Sophie Ray, from Wales, has been eating only Margherita Pizza for the past 8 years. The teenager hasn’t had a nutritious meal since she was two, and has survived on nothing but the cheese-and-tomato pizza since she was eleven.

Blame it on Selective Eating Disorder (SED), because Sophie cannot eat anything else without gagging instantly. Even a slice of pepperoni can cause her delicate stomach to turn. She has a phobia of new foods, so she’s pretty much scared to try out anything new. As with several other people suffering from SED, Sophie’s problem began with a bout of Gastroenteritis when she was 2 years old. After recovery, she was able to only consume cheesy pasta, lemon curd sandwiches and chips. As she got older, Margherita pizza became her staple food. “I love pizza,” she says. “Each brand offers a new flavor, but it’s all the same food so I don’t have to try new foods.” But she’s very particular, “It has to be cheese and tomato and it has to be cooked, I can’t eat it cold and I can’t have any toppings on it.”

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It’s disgusting, funny and sad all at once, what 53-year-old Carrie from Colorado Springs goes through. She has been addicted to drinking her own urine for over four years now. Her urine intake amounts to about 80 ounces a day, and since she began she has consumed over 900 gallons. “I drink almost all the urine that comes out of my body. It tastes like water for me,” she says.

What makes Carrie’s condition all the more weird is that she doesn’t just drink urine from a glass. I watched this video of a program about her on the TLC channel, where she gathers up the courage to confess her habit to her friend Denise. During the confession, she describes in detail exactly what  she does with the urine. Some of it goes in the regular way, through a glass. But then she puts some of it in a Neti pot and drinks it nasally. And some, she actually drinks through her eyes using an eye cup. She even brushes her teeth with it, and saves some so that she can rub aged urine all over her skin. Carrie says that it’s the nasal drinking that hurts the most. “The pain is different than any pain you’ve experienced.” Read More »

It isn’t exactly food fit for a queen, but it’s good enough for 33-year-old Claire Simmons. Claire loves cheese and tomato pizza so much that she’s been eating nothing else for 31 years. Which means she’s been eating the stuff since she was about 2 years old. That does sound too young to be eating pizza in the first place. But it’s not that she doesn’t want to eat anything else, it’s just that she can’t. She shudders at the mere mention of other food and will gag if she puts anything else other than plain pizza in her mouth.

What Claire suffers from is actually known as Selective Eating Disorder. Experts say she’s on the road to killing herself with her diet. But she disagrees. According to Claire, she keeps herself healthy by drinking plenty of water and getting lots of exercise. This doesn’t convince her GP however, who says that if she keeps this up, the lack of vitamins and minerals will lead to huge problems in the future, such as a stroke or heart attack. Claire can’t help it though, given that she’s terrified of eating fruits and vegetables. “I get so angry when people think I’m being faddy – this is a real medical condition,” she says. She does seem to have made it through 31 years on just pizza, and is still going strong. I wonder how she isn’t sick of the stuff, though.

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Everyone craves fast food every once in a while, but for 17-year-old Stacey Irvine, chicken nuggets have been a part of her daily diet ever since she was 2 years old. Although you wouldn’t think so by looking at her.

I’m a big cheeseburger fan myself, though I try not to eat more than one a month, but for young Stacey, chicken nuggets are the most delicious things on Earth. Her mother, Evonne, 39, made the mistake of introducing her to the tastiness of chicken nuggets when she was just two years old, and she loved them so much, she refused to eat almost anything else after that. Mum even tried starving her at one time, in an attempt to get her to eat more nutritious foods, but to no avail, so she gave up trying to get her off nuggets a long time ago.  For a while they were all she would eat, but she later expanded her daily diet to fries, chipss and an occasional piece of toast for breakfast.

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Most people check into rehab to get rid of alcohol problems. But here’s someone who wishes for rehab to kick his Diet Coke addiction of over 20 years.

Darren Jones, 38, from Stockport, Greater Manchester, easily consumes 42 liters of  Diet Coke a week. His fizzy addiction costs him around £100 ($155) every week. He first started to drink Cola when he was 13. When the sugary version started to make his teeth ‘furry’, he switched to Diet. He says that in the beginning it wasn’t much of a problem, except that he gained a lot of weight. Things got worse as years went by. Jones was eventually diagnosed with diabetes, high blood pressure and his weight made it difficult for him to move around. Soon he lost his taxi driver job.

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