Humor: Lose Weight Without Really Trying

The Fundamental Law of Weight Loss

I know how to lose weight. What you do is burn more calories than you eat. This is apparently a fundamental law of nature, although people forget it all the time.

That is why diet plans always include a little extra instruction: “When accompanied by exercise and a sensible diet, weight loss may occur.” The truth is that weight loss may occur without the diet plan.

You also have another choice: Do not exercise, but eat hardly anything. I have met several skinny people who stay skinny that way. They do not exercise because they do not have the energy.

Seven Techniques That Almost Work

I am now past 80, and I have learned that as men age, our hairlines and waistlines tend to proceed in opposite directions. The former retreats while the latter advances. So I have been watching my weight lately. It has been going steadily up. I have also been counting calories. So far today, I have counted 3,000.

In my quest to lose weight, I have developed several useful techniques for older men. They are not particularly effective, but they may be enlightening.

1. Never Trust a Scale

Bathroom scales often lie. When weighing yourself, grip the bathroom door handle before stepping onto the scale. Then apply the two-second rule: Read the number quickly and step off before gravity has time to take effect.

The first number you see is your actual weight. Anything that appears afterward is merely the downward pull of the Earth. If the number is still unsatisfactory, move the scale to another part of the bathroom. Floors are notoriously unreliable.

2. Exercise Makes You Hungry

If you are trying to lose weight, never exercise. Exercise makes you hungry, which causes you to eat, which defeats the purpose of exercising. Concentrate instead on reducing your intake: less beer, fewer peanuts and more Diet Coke in your rum. This is called making healthy choices.

3. Subtract the Weight of Unnecessary Body Parts

Your gross weight includes everything in your body, whether or not it should properly count against you. Your kidneys, spleen, liver, heart and—in older men—the prostate gland may add several pounds to the total. When reporting your weight on questionnaires, it is therefore permissible to subtract the estimated weight of these organs. Their function may be vital, but their weight is irrelevant.

Heavy shoes can also be helpful. Weigh the shoes separately and always subtract their weight from yours—even when you were barefoot on the scale. I use a similar method in golf: I count the strokes required to reach the green and subtract the putts.

4. Compare Yourself Strategically

No matter how much you weigh, there is always someone heavier. Feeling discouraged about the five pounds you gained over the holidays? Do not stand next to a marathon runner. Stand next to someone who regards the all-you-can-eat buffet as a personal challenge.

Weight, like wealth, intelligence and golf ability, is best evaluated through the careful selection of comparison groups.

5. Distrust Diet Plans

Why does every advertised diet plan include the warning “Results not typical”? I ask you: Why participate in a program whose desired result is specifically identified as unusual? The typical result I seek from a weight-loss plan is weight loss. “Results not typical” sounds suspiciously like a polite way of saying, “This usually does not happen.”

Prepared diet meals are another questionable idea. Companies charge you more money for smaller portions containing fewer calories. Naturally, you finish the meal hungry, eat a second one and then go out for a hamburger. This is excellent for the diet company, the restaurant industry and the national economy. It is less useful for your waistline.

6. Never Trust a Magazine Diet

Never trust a diet plan advertised on the cover of a magazine. The headline will say, “Lose 20 Pounds by Tuesday!” Directly beside it will be a photograph of a six-layer chocolate cake with instructions for making the frosting thicker.

I see a conflict of interest. It is like a dentist giving children candy so they will remember to schedule another appointment. The magazine wants you to bake the cake, gain five pounds and then buy the next issue to discover how to lose them.

7. Demand Guaranteed Results

Trust only weight-loss programs that work 100 percent of the time. Unfortunately, the only completely reliable plans involve some combination of starvation, hard labor and being held somewhere against your will.

Someday an entrepreneur will recognize the commercial possibilities. Celebrities will appear in advertisements for the Beverly Hills Anti-Obesity Detention Center: “I lost 22 pounds in four weeks. They took my phone, hid my car keys and refused to tell me where the kitchen was.” A company spokesman will explain that everyone entering the program signed a legally binding non-release agreement.

A National Emergency

Now that we have examined the pitfalls of personal weight loss, let us consider the wider problem of obesity in America. This is a serious matter, which means the government should immediately create an acronym.

I propose that the president appoint a Special Assistant for Weight Control and Exercise: the SAWCE. The SAWCE could be assisted by an official slogan: GOYA! Get Off Your Asses! A suitably skinny poster person would point an accusing index finger from government advertisements while the words “GOYA! Lose Weight!” appeared overhead.

The duties of the SAWCE—or GOYA Secretary—would include the following.

Making Childhood Inconvenient Again

In coordination with the Department of Education, the GOYA Secretary would institute programs of increased exercise and improved nutrition for children. The ideal secretary would be an older person capable of saying: “When I was your age, we walked five miles to school through the snow. It was uphill both ways, and we carried the school.”

Possible initiatives would include:

• Reducing unnecessary school-bus trips and creating safe walking and bicycling routes.

• Restoring recess, physical education and other activities that require children to stand up.

• Requiring students to complete one lap around the school each time they claim their phone battery is too low to call their parents.

  
  

School lunches could occasionally feature military-style field rations. These meals are designed to provide nourishment without creating the dangerous expectation that food should be enjoyable. Childhood obesity would decline, although military recruitment might suffer once the children discovered where the recipes originated.

Warning Labels for Dangerous Foods

High-calorie foods should carry prominent warning labels. Before opening a box of doughnuts, consumers would have to break a red seal reading:

GOYA SECRETARY’S WARNING: The contents of this package may cause your bathroom scale to become dishonest.

Fast-food meals could carry a similar notice:

The meal you are about to consume contains enough calories to require exercise. Please retain this wrapper as evidence that you were warned.

Restaurants could also print the number of miles a person would need to walk to burn off each item. A milkshake, for example, might be listed as “Denver to Omaha.”

The National Waistline Service Program

Congress should establish a public-service program combining physical labor with portion control. For three weeks each year, eligible Americans would report to special camps to perform trail maintenance, park cleanup and other useful outdoor work while eating carefully measured meals. Participation would be based on waist size, although Congress would naturally exempt itself.

People within the recommended range would stay home. Everyone else would spend three weeks digging, lifting, walking and remembering fondly the days when exercise consisted of searching for the television remote. The program would improve public lands, reduce waistlines and create thousands of government jobs for people assigned to measure other people.

Additional Measures

Other possibilities include a personal tax based on body weight. This would operate like an environmental tax, except that the expanding footprint would be your own.

There would, of course, be deductions:

• Five pounds for heavy shoes.

• Three pounds for vital organs.

• Two pounds for clothing.

• Ten pounds for retaining water.

• An unlimited allowance for having “a large frame.”

After all deductions, most Americans would report an official weight of 83 pounds.

The Final Recommendation

These proposals may not solve America’s weight problem, but they demonstrate that no difficulty is so personal that the government cannot make it more complicated.

As for me, I intend to continue watching my weight. This requires no exercise at all. I simply stand still and watch it increase. I will also keep counting calories.

Tomorrow, however, I may try subtracting them.