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.

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!

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!

“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)

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 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 can 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.