Dave Barry - Bad Habits

In the television commercial, Victoria walks around a health club striking various bodily poses and saying something. You can’t hear what she’s saying, because when you see this particular commercial your brain tends to devote all available nervous-system resources to your eyes, but the gist of it is that if you join a health club and exercise a lot you will look like Victoria Principal or one of the major hunks of manhood behind her.

This is a lie, of course. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has decided that only a select few people can look like Victoria Principal or the hunks, and you are not one of them. These select people are destined to have swell bodies even if the only exercise they get is eating Slim Jims and drinking cheap whiskey. Certain other people can exercise constantly and eat nothing but grapefruit rinds, but they will still have the bodies of water buffalo.

This is probably for the best. Think how dull the world would be if we did not have wide variations in our bodily formats. We’d be like ants. If you’ve ever taken a good, close look at a batch of ants, you’ve probably noticed that they’re all equally attractive. You never see any fat ants, or buxom ants, or lean, sinewy ants. They all have identical, perfect little ant bodies, and consequently they find each other boring. Put yourself in their position: how would you feel if you lived in a world where every member of the opposite sex had a perfect body? You’d crave something different. You’d start casting a speculative glance toward the larvae, or even the pupae. If you were a male ant, you might even make a pass at, say, a queen termite, despite the fact that she is about sixty times your size, lays thirty-five thousand eggs a day, and tends to devour her sexual partners. Or is that spiders? No matter. The mere fact that you would even consider making a pass at a termite is proof of my point, which, if I recall it correctly, is that Mother Nature wants us all to be different, which means that if you are basically a squat person, you can exercise all you want, and you will still be basically a squat person.

This does not mean you shouldn’t exercise; it merely means that you should understand the real reason you should exercise, which is to prepare your body for the pain you’ll inevitably have to endure when you become older. Let’s say you’re in your mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Most of the time you feel pretty good, right? The only time you feel really lousy is when you attend a major party and ingest huge quantities of alcohol and wake up the next day naked in an unfamiliar city. But as you grow older, you’re going to start feeling more aches and pains caused by the inevitable afflictions of age, such as arthritis, the Social Security Administration, condescending denture-adhesive commercials, children who call only when they want to borrow money for down payments on houses much nicer than the one you live in, etc. You need to prepare your body for this pain. This is why exercise is so important.

Take joggers. You see them running along the street, clearly hating every second of it, and you say, “What’s the point?” Ha. Years from now, you’ll struggle to adjust to the aches and pains of growing older, whereas the joggers, who have been in constant agony for fifteen or twenty years, will be able to make the transition smoothly, unless they’ve committed suicide.

So don’t delay. Start an exercise program today, the more painful the better. If you don’t like to jog, buy the exercise book that Jane Fonda, the noted critic of capitalism, sells for $17.95, and do the exercises in it. Or just hit yourself repeatedly in the head with it.

Okay! Today’s the day you start on your physical-fitness program, the program that’s going to make you slender, healthy, and attractive, like the people in cigarette advertisements.

Step one is to take your pulse, because a healthy heart is the key to physical fitness. If your heart is healthy, you can continue to collect Social Security long after your other major organs have become senile and are wandering around aimlessly with no idea what bodily functions they are supposed to perform. The best way to understand the relationship between your heart and your health is to examine an actual heart. You cannot, of course, examine your own heart, unless you have a high threshold of pain, so instead you should trot down to the grocery store and ask the butcher for some surplus hearts from an assortment of animals—a cow, a pig, a fish, an earthworm, etc. Most butchers will be happy to give you the hearts for free, just to get you to go away.

Now take your hearts home, spread them out on a clean, level surface, such as a Ping-Pong table, and examine them closely. You’ll notice that the hearts differ in size, but they have one important thing in common: the animals they were removed from are all dead. This tells us that hearts are extremely important for physical fitness. Now place your hearts in Tupperware containers and store them in your freezer in case your children ever need them for science-fair projects or practical jokes.

Now you’re ready to take your pulse. The traditional method is to locate the major artery that goes through your wrist and press your thumb against it. The only potential drawback to this method is that you might squash the artery flat with your thumb, causing the blood to back up so that eventually your arm explodes like a party balloon. A safer way is to drink gin and tonic until you can actually hear your pulse pounding in your head, then walk or crawl to a nearby store and tell the salesperson you want to buy a stopwatch so you can count the number of pounds per minute:

YOU: I want a stopwatch.

SALESPERSON: We don’t sell stopwatches. This is a grocery store. You (picking up an eggplant): Oh yeah? Then what do you call this?

SALESPERSON: That’s an eggplant. Say, you’re the guy who was in here earlier asking for fish hearts. Are you drunk or something?

YOU: Certainly not. As any idiot can plainly see, I’m taking my pulse.

SALESPERSON: With an eggplant? Why don’t you just squash your thumb against your artery like everybody else? You (with great dignity): If I wanted a squash, I would have selected a squash, wouldn’t I? I’ll take this eggplant, and make it snappy.

Next, using a stopwatch or an eggplant, count the number of times your head pounds in a minute; if you’re a healthy person, this should be a two—or three-digit number. Now you’re ready to start your exercise program. Turn on your television and watch one of those programs in which people in skimpy outfits leap around in time to recorded music under the direction of a cheerful leader.

Notice I say you should watch the program: under no circumstances should you actually do the exercises, because all that leaping around will reduce your brain to tapioca pudding. You’ll wind up like the people on the television programs, smiling vacantly and doing whatever the cheerful leader tells you to:

LEADER: Okay! Let’s kick those legs up high! Great! Now let’s bend way over! Terrific! Now let’s all say “I pledge allegiance to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.”

EXERCISERS: I pledge allegiance to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

LEADER: Okay! Now let’s all hop on one foot and put our fingers in our noses’. Great! Now let’s all take out our checkbooks and ...

After your exercise program, take your pulse again, then go into the kitchen and prepare a large, nutritious breakfast. You may not feel hungry, especially after all the pulse-taking, so to boost your appetite, think about how important good nutrition is to your heart. Think about what will happen to you if you don’t take good care of your heart. Think, as you chew your food, about what happened to the cow, the pig, the fish, and the earthworm whose hearts are sitting in Tupperware containers only a few feet away from your breakfast, sheathed in frozen slime. This should give you all the incentive you need to eat a hearty breakfast, after which you’ll be ready to face the day or go back to bed.