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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.