As the highly intellectual person I am, I spend a considerable amount of time in book stores and libraries. I prefer the history section over current events. Simply because by the time a Dilbert cartoon gets published in a book, it’s over a year old. Now, that’s not very current, is it? Therefore, all the books in the humor section can easily be classified as history. Using this rationalization, I can say I’m researching when I’m actually reading the comics. Hey, it works for me.

I developed this technique when I was a teenager. My parents were very big on literacy, so every time I needed a break, I would tell them I had to go to the bookstore. Mom would give me money and I was on my way. I could spend my afternoons leisurely perusing comics in the store’s café, and no one was the wiser. I probably shouldn’t have said that. Mom may read this someday. Oh well.

Moving on. As I said, I spend a lot of time in book stores, and sometimes I look in places other than the “Humor” section. Well last week I ventured into the “Heath & Diet” section totally by accident. I was amazed at how many diet books were there. The thing is, while they were all written by experts and multi-degree doctors, they didn’t agree on anything.

 One of the words that appeared on a lot of book spines was Carbs. Carbs are either the most important part of your diet or a slow poison. Depending on who you want to believe. However, this is all nullified by the next shelf to the right. The books there clearly state, “Carbs don’t matter, it’s all about protein.” Then if you go a little further down, you arrive at the How To Burn Fat books. I was intrigued by those. You see, I know oils and fats are similar. Well this guy I know burns oil to heat his house. Perhaps he could burn fat this winter and be warm and toasty. He’d save money, too. I hear heating oil is expensive, and he could probably go two or three years on his pudgy little kids alone.

Sadly, as I read the book, I found it wasn’t as easy as lighting a match. To burn fat, one must achieve a ketogenic state. Is that anything like Nirvana? Because, according to Buddha, that can take several lifetimes. Then, after skimming a few chapters, I noticed a strange thing. You see, to achieve this ultimate fat-burning state you needed to eat more fat. What? And the kicker is, if you eat less fat your body stores it away in case someday you start eating fat again. I put the book back. This makes absolutely no sense. This would be like if your neighbor, Clem, had a stack of wood in his back yard. The next day he put one more log in the stack, and suddenly the whole pile caught fire. Can’t you just hear his wife screaming, “Clem, you darn idiot! You made that pile too fat and it achieved ketogenesis. You ain’t got any sense at all.”

There were also several books telling you to let your imprisoned gluten go wild. They all seemed to shout, “Gluten Free.” At first, I thought the gluten was a small mammal, about the size of a rabbit. I didn’t know what folks were doing with them, so I opened a book. It appears gluten is a protein. And if you read all the other diet books, protein is good. But not gluten. I guess little gluten must have put tacks on the protein teacher’s chair some time back and was never forgiven. So now, gluten is forever labeled a bad protein, and one must never consume a bad protein or something bad will happen. Don’t ask me, I didn’t write the book.

Something else very unpopular in the diet book world is red meat. They don’t seem to have an issue with any other color, so I guess green meat is ok. The best color for meat is white. This is a little baffling. I don’t pretend to know everything, but I’ve cooked my steaks to varying temperatures and they’ve never turned white. They do get pink, then kind of a darker grayish color but never white. It’s okay though. If only red is a problem, then the pink should be good enough. Seriously, it’s halfway between red and white. Right?

Another biggie in the books is Omega-3. I don’t know what it is, but who came up with a name like that? Omega means end, and end means end. So, what is the 3 for? Is that like a DVD which has the movie with two unused endings in the bonus features? And get this, omega-3 is a fat. Not only is it the end fat, it’s three of them. I’m so confused.

One thing which didn’t confuse me was the number of those books the place was selling. Six people bought books as I was standing there. Trust me, this was not a long time. There was even a lady there who had read all of them and was giving advice to many others. Now, I have heard that avid readers are said to consume books. Well, this lady looked like she consumed all these books and more. She was rather rotund. But let’s drop the subject here. Shall we?

What I’m getting at is, the sales of these books were incredible. If my experience were to be multiplied by the number of stores across the country, those authors have got to be making a fortune. I need to get in on that action. I need to come up with my own diet book. If I can come up with a good one, my future will be lined with gold. Below I have put my first idea. Let me know what you think.

Since I think most diets are bull crap, I have created the BullCrap Weight loss program. The simple idea is, if you put a small piece of animal do-do on someone’s plate of food, they would lose their appetite. Pretty simple, right? Really gives a new meaning to the name Poo-Poo Platter doesn’t it. So that’s the concept. What do you think about the book idea?

No?

I guess I’ll have to do some more thinking to see what else might work.