Dave Barry - Stay Fit And Healthy Until You’re Dead

To answer that question, locate yourself on the medical chart provided here. Chances are the chart shows that you’re above your proper weight. The reason is that you eat too many foods that are high in “calories,” which are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so that mankind would have a way to get onion dip into his mouth at parties, has none.

AGE FEMALE SMALL AVERAGE BIG MALE SMALL AVERAGE BIG 18-25 E F A B C D 26-31 F A B C D E 32-39 A B C D E F 40-50 B C D E F A Over 50 C D E F A B Dead D E F A B C

A—You could definitely stand to lose weight. B—No question about it, you have a weight problem. C—Based on your weight, you should get on a diet. D—It would certainly not hurt you to lose some weight. E—You are carrying too much weight for your body type. F—You must make more of an effort to control your weight.

Obviously, the only sane way to lose weight, and to keep it off, is to ... Hey! Who are you guys?!! Wait a minute!! You can’t just barge in here and ...

So as I was saying, the only sane way to lose weight is to get yourself on, and then stick to, a regular, planned, conscientious program of purchasing newly published diet books. Here are some that I especially recommend:

All of these books are very excellent, and there are thousands more that are just as good, many of them offering such proven and time-tested features as consecutively numbered pages.

Perhaps the best diet book is Dessert Makes You Fat , by Ernst Viewfinder, who has several credits toward his Associate’s Degree in Motel Food Administration from Southwest Buford County Community College (“Where the Leaders of Tomorrow Are Frowning at Blackboards Today, Visa and MasterCard Accepted”). His theory is that people get fat because they eat too many desserts, so he has developed a diet designed to encourage you to skip the dessert. Here is a typical day’s menu:

BREAKFAST

Froot Loops Eclairs with side orders of bacon

DESSERT: One slice whole wheat toast

LUNCH

Snickers Fries Any number of cheeseburgers

DESSERT: Cottage cheese

DINNER

Dixie cup filled with sugar Melted Turkish taffy soup Big lumps of chocolate with fudge sauce

DESSERT: That really pathetic lettuce that looks like lichen, festooned with clearly visible insect eggs (no dressing)

I personally tried this diet for several weeks, and I found that not only was I able to skip many desserts, but I didn’t need to sleep at all, although near the end they tried to make me.

Q. Do I actually have to read my diet books?

A. No. There is no medical evidence that reading leads to weight loss. Simply keep the books in a prominent location in your home, and occasionally press them against your thighs and buttocks.

Q. Is there any kind of operation I can have that will help me lose weight?

A. There are quite a few such operations, but probably the most effective one, with the fewest negative side effects, is to have an airline pet transporter bonded to your skull with fast-drying epoxy cement. This encourages you to eat only those foods which will pass through the mesh door, such as fettuccine and licorice.

Q. What about absurd mechanical weight loss devices, such as those motorized belts that were always shown jiggling the massive hips of pasty middle-aged female character actresses in comedy movies and television shows up through the 1950s?

A. These devices are extremely effective. The fat just melts away. Two of those character actresses, in fact, went on to become Bo Derek and Victoria Principal. This is why you never see those machines in health clubs any more: the clubs took them out because their members were leaving at an alarming rate to accept lucrative film contracts. This is a shame, really, because it leaves the weight-conscious person without any kind of guaranteed, surefire, safe, proven weight loss device. If only somebody would make such a device available to the general public!

The concept for this truly revolutionary device, which came to me one evening while I was throwing up on my shoes, is amazingly simple: If you go around with an object that weighs approximately 350 pounds strapped to your body, you can’t help but lose weight! Assuming you don’t have a serious accident! So I designed this device with You, the Consumer, in mind, such that you can wear it virtually undetected to work, around the home, on the tennis court ... even to executions, if these are permitted in your state!

“Yes! Okay! It is very good! People should buy it! Now please, let us go!”—A team of leading physicians speaking in unison from inside a concrete structure

“The water used in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, and other parts of the metropolitan area is supplied by aqueduct systems!”— The Encyclopaedia Britannica Volume 18 (Taylor-Utah)

Thus far in this book, we’ve concentrated on improving your body. But let’s face it: having a great body does you no good whatsoever if you have the kind of face where people are always saying you have a Nice Personality, meaning you can cause crops to fail just by looking at them.

So in this chapter, we’re going to take a look at some of the things you can do to your face and hair to give yourself that feeling of inner confidence that says, in the words of the song Maria sang in West Side Story just before her lover stabbed her brother to death, “I Feel Pretty.” You’ll see that you don’t have to have been born with great genes to look beautiful; there are lots of simple little “beauty secrets” that can turn even a real woofer into an extremely presentable person, although in your case I would not necessarily rule out plastic surgery.

The most important step, of course, is to recognize that whatever you’re currently doing is totally wrong. What you need is a New Look, as you know if you read any of the major women’s beauty magazines. Month after month, year after year, they publish the same article, which is “Several Dozen New Ways to Put Makeup on Your Face and Style Your Hair in a Lifelong Futile Effort to Look Like the Model on the Cover.”

The reason the beauty experts keep coming up with new looks is that the old ones are all repulsive. You look back at your high school yearbook or, heaven help you, your mother’s yearbook, and you see the Looks that were popular years ago, and you wonder how the human race managed to reproduce. You wonder why men and women didn’t take one look at each other and sprint in opposite directions until they dropped from exhaustion. Someday your children will say the same thing about the way you look today, which is why we here in the beauty industry are always pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, coming up with New Looks, with no real hope of personal financial benefit beyond the sale of beauty products that cost more per ounce than all but the finest narcotics.