Stay Fit And Healthy Until You’re Dead

by Dave Barry

  With your Simulated Gaping Chest Wound strapped on, you can jog anywhere you want in New York City, and you’ll attract no more attention than the apparently deceased persons sprawled on the sidewalks, or the random street lunatics holding lengthy debates with individual oxygen atoms. For extra privacy, you can purchase the optional 3,500 Simulated Maggots Eating Your Body accessory.

  These devices, incidentally, are part of an entire Dave Barry line of Traveling Executive Fitness Products, which also includes the Heavy Briefcase. This appears from the outside to be a normal leather briefcase, but hidden inside is a 350-pound weight!

  (There’s also a roomy compartment capable of holding your cigarette, or part of your pen.) Executives who regularly carry the Heavy Briefcase report a dramatic improvement in arm length.

  The In-Flight Workout Device is a portable device that, when folded up, fits inside a handy steamer trunk that can be carried on board a commercial aircraft, provided you purchase two adjacent first-class seats for it, yet unfolds after takeoff to form a complete “airborne gymnasium.” It features a sophisticated electronic digital computer “brain” that not only monitors your pulse rate, but also has a new and improved electronic circuitry design which we sincerely believe and hope will correct the unfortunate problem whereby it was somehow seizing control of the automatic pilot and steering planes into various mountains, which is, of course, a violation of federal regulations.

  Chapter 6. Bodybuilding

  Most of us males, at one time or another, have felt like Joe, the scrawny little wimp in the old Charles Atlas advertisement who was humiliated in front of his girlfriend on the beach when the muscular bully kicked sand in his face. As you’ll recall, Joe sent away for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course, then came back to the beach with large, bulging, rippling muscles. When the bully returned, he was extremely impressed and suggested that Joe should also apply oil to his body so that it would have a satiny gleam, and perhaps shave his armpits. Before long, they were very close friends and often helped each other select posing outfits.

  You may feel that this is the kind of story that “only happens in comic books,” but in fact it can happen to you, too—provided you have the discipline, drive, endurance, and just plain old-fashioned guts required to procure the necessary steroids.

  Ha ha! Just a little fitness humor there. You don’t need to ingest pharmaceutical substances to develop a major body; you simply have to follow the simple-to-follow instructions in this chapter. But first, let’s answer some commonly asked questions about bodybuilding.

  Q. I’m a man. How large should I let my muscles get?

  A. This depends on the size of your head. See, your body has only a certain number (21,796,349,582) of cells. Each of these cells can be either part of your body or part of your head. This means if you make your body bigger, your head has to get smaller. So you should cease your muscle development as soon as you start noticing the warning signs of severe head reduction, such as:

  Buying lawn ornaments

  Having trouble following the plot on “Dukes of Hazzard”

  Answering to the name “Vinnie”

  If you already meet any of these criteria, you probably shouldn’t do any bodybuilding at all. Of course, if you already meet any of these criteria, you’re probably still trying to figure out how to get this book open.

  Q. Can a woman such as myself engage in bodybuilding?

  A. Of course! Although experts have discovered that a woman can never achieve the large muscle mass and definition of a Mister Universe, she can still, with patience, dedication, and hard work, make herself look grotesque. Or she can simply have large, realistic depictions of centipedes tattooed on her face.

  Q. Once I become huge and muscular, will I still be able to operate a telephone?

  A. Push-button, or rotary dial?

  Q. Push-button.

  A. Probably.

  Now that we’ve answered your commonly asked questions, let’s take stock of your current body. Take off all your clothes and stand in front of a mirror, and let’s make an objective, professional, scientific assessment. Go ahead! Don’t be shy! We can’t help you if we can’t see what we’re working with!

  (PAUSE)

  So! That’s your body, eh? Hahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Excuse me. I’m not (choke, gasp) laughing at you, really. I just, ummmmm, I just thought of something funny somebody said to me in 1967. Anyway, looking at your body, I would hahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahaha! Excuse me. I would say that you hahahahahahahahahahahaha! Whew! Put your clothes back on, okay?

  Using this scientific assessment of your current bodily needs as a guide, let’s look at the various kinds of bodybuilding equipment.

  Weights: A Stupid Idea

  Forget about weights. For one thing, they’re very heavy, and for another thing, they wreck your body. Look at what they do to your big-time weight lifters, who have turned into 400-pound hairy sweaty shapeless grunting masses of tissue. And the men are even worse. No, you want to take the new, high-tech, scientific route to a better body, with Nautilus equipment.

  How Nautilus Equipment Works

  Originally designed as a way to keep professional football players from having sex before a game, Nautilus equipment has become an extremely popular bodybuilding aid that not only is costly but also takes up a lot of room. This is because it’s actually a series of machines, each specifically designed to develop one of the major muscle groupings (the abductors, the transponders, the trapezoids, the isobars, the quatrains, the bivalves, the Social Democrats, and the gerunds). The idea is that you work a grouping until it can no longer respond to signals from your brain, then you move on to the next machine, and so on until you’ve worked all your muscle groupings, at which time you signal the attendant, by blinking in a prearranged code, that you wish to be bathed.

  I can’t go into great detail here about how the various Nautilus machines work, because it would soon become obvious that I don’t know.

  The Trouble with Nautilus Equipment

  The trouble with Nautilus equipment is that to use it, you have to join either a spa or a professional football team, which means you’re going to spend a lot of time enveloped in other people’s bodily aromas. So what would be ideal, if only such a thing were possible, would be if somebody would develop a totally new amazing scientific affordable bodybuilding device that you could use in your own home.

  Announcing a Totally New Amazing Scientific Affordable Bodybuilding Device That You Can Use in Your Own Home

  I am very pleased to be able to announce at this time a major breakthrough in the field of home body devices: the Dave Barry Total Person Workout Device. I’d tell you how good it is, but I’d be violating numerous federal statutes, plus I think you’ll be even more convinced by these actual testimonials from imaginary satisfied customers:

  “Your Total Person Workout Device has completely changed my life! For example, I can no longer discern colors!”—A.B., Detroit, Michigan

  “I was being constantly hassled by vicious youths in my urban neighborhood. I sent away for your device, and within a week they had stolen it!”—C.D., Toledo, Ohio

  “What have you done with my wife!”—L.M.N.O.P., Eau Claire, Wisconsin

  What’s the cause of all this excitement? It’s a device that actually costs less than a new home yet yields results.

  Both models come in an attractive designer cardboard box telling you which end is supposed to be up and whether or not you should drop it (no). The price is just $799 for the Basic Model and $1,099 for the Really Nice Model, the main difference being that we check the Really Nice Model for vermin. Of course, if you are in any way the least bit dissatisfied with your Device, you simply have to write an angry letter to the employees at your state Bureau of Helping the Consumer, who probably won’t be there because they get just about every other day off for cretin holidays like Arbor Day.

  Chapter 7. Nutrition

 
Why You Should Watch What You Eat

  In your great-great-grandfather’s day, nobody had to worry about proper nutrition, because people lived on farms and ate wholesome, natural foods. Whenever they needed meat, they just went out and whacked off a sector of the family cow. When they needed bread, they just cut down some wheat, then they threshed it, then they took the grain and started grinding it up, then they said, “Nah, the hell with it; let’s just eat sector of cow tonight.”

  Today, unfortunately, most cows are grown by giant multinational corporations, who feed them harmful preservatives day and night for the express purpose of killing innocent consumers. Many cows are so full of toxic chemicals that they explode right in the pasture, leaving behind only billowing clouds of greenish fumes, which cause acid rain. You have the same kind of problems with white bread and refined sugar, both of which, if eaten, cause death within hours. This is why it’s so important in today’s world that you watch what you eat, at least until you get it inside your mouth. After that, it gets pretty disgusting.

  How Your Digestive System Works

  Your digestive system’s job is to turn food into useful body parts. To save itself a lot of aggravation, your digestive system has a policy whereby it turns a given food into the body part most similar to it. Thus hard-boiled eggs become eyeballs, cauliflower becomes brains, mixed vegetables become the pancreas, Polish sausages become male sexual organs, candy canes become bone, little yellow-covered marshmallow Easter chickens become pus, beer becomes urine, and so on. If you eat a kind of food that does not resemble any known body part, such as a pink Good ‘n’ Plenty, your body turns it into fat.

  Eating a “Balanced Diet”

  To make sure your digestive system gets the “raw materials” it needs, at every meal you should eat at least 1 food from each of the 15 Basic Food Families: Fruits, Vegetables, Meats, Fishes, Loaves, Hors d’Oeuvres, Canned Goods, Jellies, Snacks, Shakes, Additives, Eels, Those Little Wax Bottles Filled with Colorful Sugar Water, Pez, and Spam.

  What You Can Learn from Reading the Labels on Foods

  Virtually nothing. I mean, if the product contains some dangerous chemical, you don’t think the label writer, who has a mortgage and kids with braces just the same as you do, is going to risk his job by saying so, do you? Of course not. This is why all labels are written in label jargon, such as “This product contains not less than 0.02 percent of rehydroxylated glutonium or abstract of debentured soybean genitalia, whichever comes first.” The more of this kind of jargon you see, the more likely it is that the label writer has something to hide.

  So what I recommend is, instead of trying to understand the words on the label, you simply figure out the average number of syllables per word. If the average is two or below, the product is probably safe to eat in small quantities. If the average is three or four, you’re probably dealing with a product that causes grave concern in laboratory rats. If the average is five or more, you should set the container down very carefully and flee the vicinity on foot.

  About Vitamins

  Vitamins are little pills named A, B, C, D, E, and K that the government recommends you have certain amounts of. These recommendations are based on the requirements of the Minimum Daily Adult, a truly pathetic individual that the government keeps in this special facility in Washington, D.C., where he is fed things with names like “riboflavin.”

  Physicians generally pooh-pooh the value of vitamins, but this is because you can get vitamins into your body without the aid of physicians. If the only way it could be done was for a team of eight surgeons to implant a special $263,000 trapdoor in your head, physicians would say vitamins were the best thing since luxury German automobiles.

  The truth is that vitamins are very good for you, and each morning you should take a vitamin A pill, followed by a vitamin D, followed by an E, until you have spelled the healthful mnemonic phrase “A DEAD CAD BAKED A BAD CAKE, ACE.” This will probably be plenty of vitamins for you, but be alert for the Four Major Warning Signs of Vitamin Deficiency, which are:

  Nosebleeds

  A sudden fondness for Wayne Newton

  Unusually thick coats on woolly caterpillars

  Death

  If you notice any of these signs, you should add the phrase “A BEAKED DAD BEDDED A BEAD-BEDECKED BABE.”

  Vitamins in Food

  Foods contain vitamins. Your mother told you this. She also told you that the vitamins are always in the most repulsive part of the food. If you were eating a potato, for example, she’d say, “Be sure to eat the skin, that’s where the vitamins are.” They learn this in Mother School. So with any given food, you should always eat the skin or, if it doesn’t have a skin, the rind, the core, or the pit. If it doesn’t have any of these, you should eat the wrapper.

  Minerals in Food

  Foods also contain minerals such as zinc, iron, magnesium, steel, and aluminum. At least, that’s what I’m supposed to tell you. I personally think the whole idea that there is metal in food, especially blatantly soft food such as Twinkies, is absurd. The only idea more absurd is the deranged notion that eating metal is somehow good for you. If God had wanted us to eat metal, He would have given us much better teeth. Thank you.

  What about Fiber?

  Fiber is definitely the number one hot trend in the world of natural health, threatening to break all the old records set by “pH balance.” Remember, back in the 70s, when every product you bought—food, shampoo, tires—was advertised as being pH balanced, even though nobody ever knew what the hell it meant? Well, it’s like that with fiber today, and so naturally I recommend you eat all the fiber-rich foods you can shove down your throat. These would be mainly your cotton candy and your Slim Jims.

  A Thoughtful Philosophical Discussion of Vegetarianism

  This is a touchy subject for me to discuss without having the vaguest idea of what I’m talking about, but here goes. Many people feel it is wrong to eat animals, on the grounds that animals have souls. I would have to say, although I certainly have nothing but the deepest respect for this position, that this is pretty stupid. I mean, I don’t want to offend any religious group, especially if it is armed, but I frankly don’t see how anyone can say that all animals have souls. Obviously, some animals do: Lassie clearly did, and probably so did Trigger. If anybody ever tries to eat Lassie, I’ll be the first one to attempt a citizen’s arrest.

  But nobody’s going to look me square in the eye and claim that, for example, toads have souls. I am not saying that it’s okay to eat toads, of course, unless the alternative is starvation, or what they serve you under the heading of “snack” on commercial airliners. I’m just saying we have to draw the line somewhere.

  I, personally, follow what I call a “modified vegetarianism” system, under which it is okay to eat meat provided that it has been disguised so you can’t tell what kind of creature it came from. A perfect example is hamburger. There is no way to tell, just by looking at a hamburger, where it originated.

  We believe it is from cows, because we are told this by burly cleaver-wielding men in Chicago with bloodstained garments, but we would not have come to this conclusion independently. So under my system, hamburger is fine.

  Lobster, on the other hand, is out. There is no way you could not know you were eating a lobster. When you walk into a restaurant, often the first thing you see is a large tank containing lobsters wearing handcuffs and trying to scuttle behind each other so you won’t pick them. If you order a lobster, you don’t get to use the kind of euphemisms you use with cows, such as “beef” or “steak”: you say, “I’ll have a lobster,” and when they bring it to you, you just get this naked lobster, and you’re supposed to eat it. I think this is wrong, and I imagine it goes without saying that I also feel very strongly about blatant organs, such as tongue.

  Chapter 8. Dieting And Weight Control

  Do You Weigh the Proper Amount?

  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.

  The Simple, Basic, Obvious Truth about Losing Weight