Dieting Made Easy

Before I get started, let me say that the movie "Free Willy" was not a documentary about Bill Clinton.
Just thought you would like to know.

But what I really wanted to talk about today is how we senior folks can keep healthy and lose weight. There are many advice columns out there, of course, but most focus on those things that we already know about: you know, the common stuff, like not eating or drinking too much. They often tell you how to be "as young as you feel" by getting enough roughage in your diet. This usually means a daily dose of something that has several pounds of sawdust suspended in it. You get the picture.

My father (a doctor) used to tell a joke about dieting.
An obese patient slumps dejectedly in his physician's office, listening to the doctor sternly tell him that he must cut out all between-meal snacks, eliminate his favorite desserts, stop drinking so much beer, and eat more vegetables and less steak. He should also go out and exercise at least three times a week.
The patient asks plaintively, "Doctor, if I do all these things, will I live longer?"
To which the doctor replies, "Probably not, but it will SEEM longer."

In fact, not all of us can avoid eating and drinking too much, and as we age it becomes harder and harder to keep the blubber from sticking to places where we would really rather not see it accumulate. Dying of heart disease or stroke is one thing, but getting harpooned by Japanese research whalers at the beach is quite another matter altogether.
So what can we do to make sure that the five-burrito meal (with refried beans AND rice) we have just devoured doesn't attach itself like parasitic jellyfish to our thighs? A lot of advice columnists will suggest things like, going out and walking 50 kilometers, or drinking 20 liters of water to flush it all from your system. Thanks a lot! Who really wants to do THAT?!
Ever helpful science brings us a better answer: sleep it off.
Yes! Finally a solution we can live with. No more difficult dieting or painful sacrifice. All you need to do is make sure that you get a good night's sleep every night and your body will AUTOMATICALLY self-tune itself to keep you slim.
But what IS a "good night's sleep", you ask?
Science provides an answer for that too (thank you science)!
Fasting (although it will SEEM slow) for 16 hours between dinner and breakfast has been shown to result in dramatic weight loss. So clearly you need to sleep about 16 hours a day, like a cat. And don't use an alarm clock to disturb that all-important dieting sleep! Using alarm clocks disrupts your natural body rhythms – a kind of "social jet lag" – and will cause you to put on an extra layer of insulating blubber as a protection against those pesky social demands, like work.
I am sure you are already asking, "How can I take advantage of these new breakthroughs in scientific discovery and start losing weight right NOW?"
The scientific evidence, however, is hard to understand for laymen like yourself, so let me outline a typical day for you. In this way you can get a clearer picture of what science is advising you to do to shed that extra lard.
Get up around 7:30 am every morning without using an alarm clock.
Eat your breakfast at 8:00. You can have anything you want! Science tells us that coffee will make you live longer, so why not include a couple of cups of java with your bacon, eggs, hash browns and biscuits with gravy? Might as well have those waffles too.
Eat lunch at 11:00. You will be hungry by then anyway, since a full 3 hours will have passed since breakfast.
Eat dinner at 2:30 PM. Go ahead, don't be shy! Enjoy that steak and those mashed potatoes. Don't cut back on the desserts either, because you will be using the new scientific method for losing calories in just one hour by going to sleep!
Go to bed around 3:15 but make sure you fall asleep by 3:30, so that you can get your full 16 hours in, before waking up at 7:30 the next morning!
Using this easy-to-follow regimen will allow anyone to lose weight the scientific way and bring out a more youthful and active you.