Before you go on any diet, you should consult your doctor, or at least send him some money.

The principle behind diets is that you cut down on the amount of calories you eat. A “calorie” is a unit of measurement that tells you how good food tastes. Really good food, like steak or fudge, has a very high calorie content; really awful food, like grapefruit halves, has almost no calories. (Now before I get a lot of outraged letters from citrus growers, let me point out that I am not opposed to grapefruit halves, except as food. I think grapefruit halves can serve many useful purposes around the home, such as extinguishing small fires.)

To understand how diets work, you have to understand how your body digests food. The process starts in your mouth, which tastes the food and covers it with spit, then sends it down to your stomach to be broken down for use as bodily parts. This is done by color. Red foods, such as rare steak, beets and Hawaiian Punch, are used to form red body parts, such as the heart; green foods, such as beans and lime jello, are used to form green body parts, such as the kidney; beer is used to form urine; and so on. The problem is that if, on a given day, your body doesn’t need any further parts, it turns the food into fat. Your body fully intends to go back to the fat someday and turn it into something useful, but it never gets a chance because you’re always sliding more spit-covered food down your throat. So your fat just sits there, useless, until gradually it loses self-esteem and, desperate for attention, starts interfering with the other organs. This is why you have to go on a diet.

Another principle behind diets is that you eat things that are so disgusting that your stomach rejects them and goes looking for fat to use as body parts. This is the big problem with diets. You spend a lot of time eating things like Melba toast. Melba toast was developed by the British, and it is not really food at all. You could airlift a thousand tons of Melba toast to some wretched, starving Asian village, and the starving Asians would use it to build homes, or as bookmarks, but it would never occur to them to eat it. This is why diets don’t work. You spend a couple of days eating Melba toast, then you lunge for the Twinkies, and you end up fatter than ever.

The only other way to lose weight is to go on a scientific weight-loss program. These are widely advertised in those newspapers they sell at supermarket check-out lines, the ones with headlines like: BURT REYNOLDS FINDS CANCER CURE IN UFO RIDE WITH PRINCESS DIANA.

You should buy one of these magazines and flip through the pages until you see a full-page advertisement with a headline that says “WOMAN LOSES 240 POUNDS IN 30 SECONDS.” Under the headline are two pictures of a woman’s head: in the first picture the head is on top of what appears to be an industrial boiler wearing a 1952 bathing suit; in the second picture, the head is on top of Bo Derek. Under the picture it says: “Mrs. Earl Clamp of Wastewater, Tex., reports that the Amazing New Brand New Amazing Scientific 30-Second Weight-Loss Program saved her marriage and prevented serious damage to her home. Let Mrs. Clamp tell you about it in her own words: ‘Well, in my own words, I realized I had a serious weight problem one day when my husband, Earl, wanted to take me to the Recreational Vehicle and Rare Gem Show at the mall, and I couldn’t get out the front door, so I decided to go out through the cellar doors, only I knocked over the water heater and the pipes broke and we had water all over Earl’s pelt collection.

SO I said: “Earl, I’m going to try the Amazing New Brand New Amazing Scientific 30-Second Weight-Loss Program.” I didn’t think I could do it, but this program is so scientific that I lost 240 pounds in 30 seconds, right there in the basement. Now Earl is proud to show nude pictures of me to his friends.’”

I’m sure these weight-loss programs work, because they have pictorial proof, and, besides, the supermarket check-out newspapers have a reputation for thoroughly checking everything for accuracy before they print it. Which is a lot more than you can say for this publication.

I bet you rarely stop to think how important your teeth are. This is good. America is in enough trouble as it is, what with inflation and all; we just can’t afford to have people stopping to think how important their teeth are, especially on major highways.

Nevertheless, you owe a lot to your teeth. They are your best friends. Think about it: while you’re out here, playing tennis and reading novels, they’re sitting patiently in your mouth, a foul-smelling, disgusting place almost devoid of recreational facilities, dealing with Slim Jims and Cheez-its and the other crap you give them to chew.

You ought to apologize to your teeth for the way you treat them. You ought to go up to a mirror, right now, and bare your teeth and look them straight in their eyes and say: “I’m sorry.” You may want to practice a bit so you can say this clearly with your teeth bared. Don’t let the children see you.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “I don’t have to apologize to my teeth. I take good care of my teeth.”

That’s what you think. That’s what I thought, too, until I started going to the dentist again recently after a brief absence of about twelve years. I stopped going because I didn’t trust him. For one thing, he wore an outfit that buttoned on the side, the kind the spaceship crews wear in low-budget science fiction movies. For another thing, he and his cohorts always left the room when they X-rayed me. They’d make up flimsy excuses, like “I have to go put my socks in the dryer,” or “I think the cat is throwing up.” Then they’d flip the X-ray switch and race out of the room, probably to a lead-lined concrete bunker.

When he came back, the dentist would jab me in the gums sixty or seventy times until my mouth was full of blood and I had to spit in what appeared to be a miniature toilet. Then he’d show me what he claimed was an X ray of my mouth, knowing full well I would not be able to distinguish an X ray of my mouth from a color slide of the Parthenon, and he’d tell me I had a cavity and he was going to fill it. I would tell him I hadn’t noticed any so-called cavity, and that it was, after all, my mouth. And he would give me this long routine about how if he didn’t fill it all my teeth would fall out and I’d lose my job and end up drooling on myself in a gutter, which is what they taught him to say in dental school. Then he would spend several hours drilling a hole in my tooth.

Answer me this: A cavity is a hole in your teeth, right? So if the dentist is so upset about this hole in your teeth, why does he spend so much time making it bigger? Huh? Does he need more money so he can buy more space-uniform shirts?

Finally I decided I could save some money if I stopped going to the dentist, got a sharp implement and, in the privacy of my own home, jabbed myself in the gums a couple of times a year. I figured I could ward off cavities by brushing after every meal with an effective decay-preventive dentifrice. I mean, that’s what they told us for years, right? “Brush your teeth after every meal,” they said. Parents said it. Teachers said it. Bucky Beaver said it.

Never trust a talking beaver. I found this out the hard way when, after twelve years of brushing like a madman, I returned to the dentist. The Dental Hygienist looked at my mouth the way you would look at a full spittoon. “You haven’t been flossing,” she said.

It seems that while I was home jabbing myself in the gums, the Dental Community was losing its enthusiasm for brushing and getting into flossing. These days the Dental Community regards anybody who merely brushes as a real bozo. This is blatantly unfair. In all those years of going to school and watching Bucky Beaver and Mister Tooth Decay, I never heard one word about flossing.