by Dave Barry
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:
The Handsome Sincere Random Doctor Medical Diet Poop Yourself Thin The Elvis Presley Memorial Diet The Total Tapeworm Diet How to Lose Weight in the Coming Depression Shed Unwanted Ounces the Orson Welles Way The Dead Preppy Cat Microcomputer Diet Book The All-Goat-Products Diet The Frequent Casual Motel Sex Diet The Amazing Mother Theresa Weight Loss Plan
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.
Common Questions Often Asked about Losing Weight
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!
Announcing the Dave Barry Guaranteed, Surefire, Safe, Proven, Medically Unusual Weight Loss Device For Human Beings Belonging 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!
What the Experts Say about the Dave Barry Weight Loss Device
“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 BritannicaVolume 18 (Taylor-Utah)
Chapter 9. Women’s Beauty And Grooming
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 First Step toward a More Beautiful You
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.
Sometimes, out of the goodness of our hearts, we beauty experts make guest appearances on those morning television shows devoted to a wide range of topics that the folks who run television feel are of interest to women, namely these:
Sex problems Fashion and beauty tips Problems that involve sex Tips on beauty and fashion Various sexually involved problems Discussions of how you can become more sexually fashionable and beautiful by means of certain tips Pasta
What the beauty experts generally do on these shows is select a woman from the audience and point out how she has committed several dozen common major beauty blunders due to the fact that she is not a knowledgeable beauty expert. Their technique is to pick somebody who looks perfectly normal—perhaps even attractive—to the unprofessional eye, then harp away at her until the audience begins to marvel that she managed to get past the studio guards without being mistaken for an escaped boar and shot.
Then they take this pathetic woman, and they give her a completely New Look, offering all kinds of professional beauty tips as they go along:
“Now the most unfortunate facial characteristic of Rhonda here,” they say, “is that she has a nose you could hang a garment bag on, so we are going to begin by applying about five-eighths of an inch of base coat to the rest of her head in an effort to make it appear larger. We’ll top that off with two coats of sealant, then we’ll remove all of Rhonda’s current eyebrows and start applying the first few coats of skin dye while we try to think up something we ca
n do about her mouth.”
And so on, until Rhonda’s face is encased in congealed cosmetic substances to the point where her own dog wouldn’t recognize her. As the studio audience applauds her New Look enthusiastically, Robert Redford walks onstage and asks her to marry him, and they walk off together, living proof of the advantages of knowledgeably applied beauty products, at least until Rhonda’s sealant weakens and her base coat starts falling off in slabs the size of French toast.
What You, Personally, Need to Do about Your Appearance
Unfortunately, we are dealing with the print medium here, so I am unable to consult individually with you in regard to your specific beauty needs, except to say that from this particular angle it appears you ought to give a bit more thought to booger removal. However, I can offer these helpful beauty guidelines for you to bear in mind as you try to achieve your New Look:
GUIDELINE 1: YOUR FACE IS MUCH TOO FAT.
It looks like a weather balloon, for God’s sake. Try some puce blush on your cheekbones, if you can locate them, and accentuate those little lines coming out of the sides of your mouth by filling them in lightly with an Accountant’s Fine Point Bic pen.
GUIDELINE 2: I CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO YOUR HAIR.
I am assuming that you didn’t pay for that cut. I am assuming that a deranged, near-blind, palsied person wielding pruning shears burst into your room in the dead of night and cut your hair after beating you unconscious. The only thing I can suggest until it grows back out is that you join some sort of religious order that has a mandatory head covering. And when it does grow back, you want to decide which of the three common head shapes, you have and choose a hairstyle that compliments it.
GUIDELINE 3: I WOULD SAY YOUR EYES ARE YOUR BEST FEATURE.
This is assuming I have to pick something. You want to draw attention to your eyes through subtle use of your lipstick. Note that when I say your eyes are your best feature, I am speaking of them as independent organs. Taken as a set, they are maybe three-quarters of an inch too close together.
Personal Hygiene
After going to all that trouble with your face and hair, the last thing you want to do is go around smelling like a billy goat with a flatulence problem. This is why good personal hygiene habits are so important. Let’s review them briefly.
TEETH
You should brush them immediately before having conversations, using a tube of toothpaste with these words printed on the side: “The American Dental Association has found this to be an effective tube of toothpaste when squeezed from the bottom in conjunction with a program of regular payments to a member of the American Dental Association.”
GUMS AND ARMPITS
Floss them regularly. If you use the same floss, do your gums first.
HAIR
Shampoo regularly with a shampoo bearing the name of a reputable beauty snot, such as Vidal Sassoon. Also, be alert for dandruff, an incurable disease where little pieces of your head keep falling off until eventually all you have left is two eyeballs on stalks protruding from your neck and you look like a gigantic lobster walking around wearing clothes. Scratching only makes it worse.
FEET
There’s an old saying about feet that goes: “I had no shoes, and I pitied myself. Then I met a man who had no feet; so I took his shoes.” Better than anything I could think of, this saying illustrates the importance of proper foot care. Each day, you should spend a minimum of an hour examining your feet closely under a 200-watt light bulb and picking at your toenails with various foot care implements available at Woolworth’s. This is something the whole family can do together. Stress to your children that they should not mention it to the authorities.
FEMININE HYGIENE
At one time, this important subject would have been considered “too delicate” for a book like this, but all that has changed, thanks to the efforts of the fine people who sell vaginal deodorants via television commercials featuring two Good Friends having a Frank Discussion:
DEBBIE (hesitantly): Sue, may I ask you something?
SUE: Sure, Debbie. What is it?
DEBBIE: Sue, are you aware that for the past seven years, including at formal affairs such as funerals, you’ve been emitting an aroma that would fell a buffalo at 90 feet?
SUE (frowning slightly): Why no, Debbie, I didn’t know! Perhaps that is why I have remained a housewife, rather than winning the Nobel Prize for Physics!
DEBBIE: Why not try this?
SUE (examining the label thoughtfully): Hmmm. New Improved Crotch Bouquet. By golly, I’ll try it!
DEBBIE: Not here, for God’s sake!
Chapter 10. Men’s Beauty And Grooming
As recently as 20 years ago, a man was considered well-groomed if he remembered to remove the little pieces of toilet paper he stuck on his face where he cut himself shaving. But today we live in a liberated era, an era in which men are not afraid to make themselves more attractive by means of beauty aids formerly limited to women—hair coloring, makeup, totally alien plastic substances inserted into the body so as to form bulges, designer dresses, etc.
This is basically a healthy social development. For, as the saying goes, “A man who cares about his personal appearance is a man who is always checking his reflection in store windows.” So in this section, men, we’re going to suggest some grooming “tips” to help you look more like the lean and cruelly handsome male models in the “Fall Fashion Supplement,” and less like the people in your immediate gene pool.
Hair
I will assume that you already shampoo your hair at frequent intervals, that you are not one of those repulsive males who, apparently feeling that there is some sort of grave threat to the world’s grease supply, let their hair go for weeks at a time without washing it, such that if one of their pillows ever caught fire, it would burn for days. But men, even if you do use shampoo regularly, it’s probably the wrong kind, by which I mean it probably consists mainly of shampoo, with perhaps a dash of pH.
This is not good enough. Women discovered years ago that if you want true hair beauty, your shampoo must contain foodstuffs. Some women prefer fruits and vegetables, such as apricot and avocado; others prefer poultry products, such as egg; others prefer liquor, such as beer. Some even prefer—this is the absolute truth coming up here—human placentas, which makes for a very expensive shampoo because, believe me, the shampoo factory has to pay the workers a lot of money to stuff those suckers into the bottles.
(For a more complete discussion of placentas, see my Babies and Other Hazards of Sex, which many experts consider to be, of all the many books available about birth and child rearing, the one that took the least time to write.)
And why is it so important to have foodstuffs in shampoo? I can answer that science question in three syllables: follicles. Follicles are little organs that live in your skull, thousands of them, and produce your hair. To produce hair, they need protein, and to get protein, they need to eat, just as you do. Women are constantly shoving egg and beer down their tiny throats, which is why, as you have no doubt noticed, women generally have gobs of hair. Men, on the other hand, practically starve them to death—you can eat only so much pH, and then you just don’t want to see another bite—which is why so many men go bald.
A Sincere Discussion of Baldness
Too often in our insensitive society, baldness is treated as a joke, so let me begin this sincere discussion by stating that, although I am fortunate enough to be blessed with a very full and attractive head of hair, I am very much aware of the anguish and inner torment experienced on a daily basis by you chrome domes out there. I mean, it’s not your fault you’re bald, is it? Well, okay, it is your fault because you let your tiny helpless innocent follicles, which had never so much as said a mean word to anybody in their whole lives, suffer a horrible death by starvation while you were out laughing and eating pizza with friends, but there’s no point in dwelling on that now. The question is: What can you do about your unfortunate condition?
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br /> One approach, of course, is to get a wig. The advantage of wearing a wig is that you don’t look quite as stupid as you would if you went around with a giant red clown nose on. The main disadvantage is that a wig costs a lot more than a large, hand-lettered sign around your neck that says “WIG,” which is equally effective.
Another approach is to get a hair transplant. This is a procedure whereby a person who has completed all three weeks of Hair Transplant School, which he enrolled in because he flunked Whack-a-Mole-Game-Machine Maintenance School, takes hair from somewhere else on your body and puts it on top of your head. The advantage of this approach is that you do, in fact, end up with hair growing on your head. The disadvantage, of course, is that it has to come from somewhere else on your body, which means either (a) you have hair growing up there that originated in your armpit or some other locale so disgusting I don’t even want to talk about it, or (b) they have to take the hair off the side of your head, which is not necessarily a great stride forward for you in the looks department.
Finally, there are ads for all kinds of alleged “miracle” hair-growing pills, creams, lotions, and potions in the backs of sleazeball publications such as Penthouse and American Beet Farmer, which make all kinds of outrageous claims such as they can “stop the spread of baldness” and “restore lost hair” and even “grow hair on a billiard ball.” These claims, of course, are totally false, except the one about the billiard ball, which government researchers recently discovered is true, the drawback being that many of the balls also developed tumors.
