If you secretly crave the humiliation and debasement that comes from being a contestant on a Fox reality show, but want even tougher odds of winning, then you should skip the television audition and just try to eat healthy foods. People will still stare at you, and laugh at your futility. For me, watching what I eat usually consists of scraping the mold off leftover Chinese food, but I wouldn't mind losing a few pounds. As long as I don’t have to make sacrifices, like starting an exercise program or eating fiber.

I’ve been looking at labels, which all the leading health experts recommend, when they aren't chortling at their own absurdity. It's a process that works like this: Look at the label and read all the nutrition information. Frown, and then frown some more. Then flip a coin. Tails means you should put it back on the shelf because it’s full of fat and will make your butt look big. So does Heads.

Consider the instructions on one Lean Cuisine meal I saw recently:

Step 1: Remove frozen food from cardboard box.
Step 2: Throw away frozen food.
Step 3: Eat the box.

I’m kidding, of course. No self-respecting dieter would eat a box; it’s waaay to high in cardboard-hydrates.

Which leads me to the Atkins Diet (not to be confused with the Chet Atkins Diet). If there were a Heavyweight Competition for diets, this is the one that would be wearing the Championship Belt — though they would need to keep cinching that belt tighter and tighter. The Atkins Diet claims that "fat", despite being called "fat", doesn’t make you "fat". Carbohydrates are to blame, meaning my mother’s brick-like biscuits really WERE hazardous to my health, and not just to the lineoleum when dropped.

Atkins will let you eat all of the sausage, cheese, ground beef, and fried pork that you want, but traditional low-fat health foods, like pasta, are off limits. Dr. Atkins died recently, after suffering a fall, but I’m convinced that irate Italians tripped him and left him to die with Penne holding his eyes shut.

Eating all the greasy, fatty foods you want sounds too good to be true, so I turned to Wally for advice. My friend Wally Basmati’s dieting habits are rivaled only by a Tommy Smothers yo-yo routine; he weighs either 320 pounds or 195, depending on which month you choose and how many Cheetos are in his pocket at the time. He’s tried every diet ever published in a lifestyle magazine — poker night at his house uses Deal-A-Meal, and his orange juice comes from a bottle of Celebrity Miracle Diet. If anyone could give me the lowdown on Atkins, it would be Wally.

Unfortunately, Wally was unavailable. He’d been on the Carnie Phillips Diet and was still recovering from bariatric surgery.

Common sense dictates that tons of fat can’t be good for you, and thanks to a recent study at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, we are one step closer to knowing for sure. They found that rats fed a diet of high-fat foods became slow and stupid, which is why cheese makes such good bait for traps.

The researchers forced rats to swim through watery mazes and locate dry platforms. The rats that had been gorging on the rodent versions of Big Macs and Quarter Pounders had a harder time remembering where the platforms were, possibly because they kept getting pulled underwater by the weight of their super-sized bellies.

Though the results indicate that a lot of fat could contribute to cognitive decline, the scientists caution that what happens to rodents doesn’t necessarily happen to humans, unless we're talking about rat-people, or just lawyers. But I think high-fat diets really might cause people to get stupid. I’ve been to college, where I have seen, with my own eyes, the decline in mental abilities caused by the “freshman fifteen”.

A year of unlimited intake of pizza and corn-dogs left me and my fellow students dazed, and more than just a little confused. Navigating the maze of campus and finding the right classroom, once a relatively easy task, soon became too cumbersome, compared to, say, staying in bed. By the end of my first semester, I had already forgotten, completely, such basic life skills as how to do laundry, or how to pick up after myself. My stupidity grew with my girth.

I don’t want to degrade my brain any further, so the Atkins Diet is out. And I think that Wally has proven the only thing that experiences permanent weight loss with a diet fad is your wallet. In fact, Wally has shown me that there is only one proven way to maintain a healthy weight without making major sacrifices:

Surgery. Unfortunately, they won’t staple your stomach if you’re only a few pounds overweight. You have to be obese, which is why I’m paying so much attention to what I eat. I’m eating lots of carbohydrates, and plenty of sugar and fat.

If I keep watching what I eat, I should be heavy enough for liposuction in about a year.

Copyright © 2005 Andy Murphy
Please do not remove the copyright from this work.

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