I Can't Weight—One Man's Diet (From the book Spider’s Big Catch) Gary E. Anderson www.abciowa.com

Like many people, I've decided I need to take off a little weight from the holidays—the holidays of six years ago. But I've never dieted before, so being a conscientious kinda guy, I logged into my favorite web browser for some advice.

I found 3,978,158,342 sites offering help with losing a few pounds. (In fact, I was so overwhelmed, I had to grab a sandwich before even tackling the search.) As a public service, I'll try to encapsulate what I learned, although I may have gotten a little confused by some of the terminology.

Most of the sites spent considerable time talking about calories, so maybe we should start there. As far as I could make out, a calorie is defined as the amount of heat it takes to raise a gram of water from 58 degrees to 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

Immediately, that fact brought several questions to mind. First, who decided that? Why 58 to 60? That’s not even hot enough to take a bath in! Next, if one calorie raises the temperature of water 2 degrees, and the human body is 90% water, why don’t millions of Americans boil over during the holidays, after consuming billions of calories at one sitting? That definition implies that a person should be able to eat a million calories a day, as long as he spaced them out, to avoid boiling over. You could eat, let your body cool back down, then eat a bunch more, and never gain any weight – it made sense to me. That concept must be common knowledge to the world at large, which would explain why you so rarely see people boil over in public. But since I’m new to this dieting business, it came as exciting news for me. It’s amazing how one fact like learning how calories are measured can make so many other things fall into place. Based on that knowledge, one could offer an explanation for one of the strangest mysteries affecting human beings -- spontaneous combustion. I’m willing to wager that if investigators carefully checked the area next to the easy chair where the victim had burst into flames, they'd find a half-eaten chocolate éclair or cream-filled doughnut. That last rush of calories was probably just what it took to send that poor person's body over the edge. The result? A pile of ash, and a half-eaten bear claw.

Based on my research, here’s my recommendation: I call it my "Don't Boil Over" diet. You can eat all you want, as long as it doesn’t contain enough calories to push your temperature above 212 degrees Fahrenheit. And be careful not to drink too much hot stuff while you’re eating, since you never know when you might be going too far. And one last caution: by all means, if you smell smoke, back off!

There you have it. Feel free to pass it on to your friends, especially those who’ve looked like they might be smoldering from time to time. Who knows? You just might be saving them the embarrassment of bursting into flames at the next church potluck.

© 2004. Gary E. Anderson. All rights reserved.