Stay Fit And Healthy Until You’re Dead Read online

  Stay Fit And Healthy Until You’re Dead

  Dave Barry

  Dave Barry.

  Stay Fit And Healthy Until You’re Dead

  Foreword

  Inspirational Opening Anecdote Explaining the Author’s Lifelong Personal Commitment To Health and Fitness

  Thirty-one years ago, when I was a mere boy of seven, my mother fell very, very sick. She called me to her side and, in a voice weakened by pain, said, “Bob, whatever happens to me, I want you to remember that ...

  “David,” I corrected. “My name is David.”

  “I know that, you little snot,” she said. “I’m your mother.”

  I have always remembered those words, despite the fact that my mother recovered completely and is fine today.

  Hi, Mom.

  Introduction

  Four Reasons Why You Must Get Fit Immediately

  1. YOU OWE IT TO YOUR COUNTRY. You can bet that the enemies of your country are fit. People in Communist nations are on a strict fitness program of waiting in line a lot and darting their eyes about nervously. We, too, must be fit, in case these Communists invade us. We must be ready to fight them in the streets and the alleys. The problem is that many of you have eaten so many Enormous Economy Size bags of corn chips and so much bean dip that you probably couldn’t fit into the alleys without the aid of powerful hydraulic devices. So you’d have to fight them in the streets, where you’d be easy prey for their blimp-seeking missiles.

  2. YOU OWE IT TO YOUR CAREER. In the old days, your successful business executive was generally a spectacular tub of lard who had to be transported from business deal to business deal via private railroad car. But today’s top executives are lean, sleek, and fit. They eat nutritionally balanced meals, run ten miles every day, play tennis and racquetball, and work out regularly on Nautilus machines. Consequently, they have no time whatsoever for their work. Many of them don’t even know where their offices are. This is why the entire U.S. economy is now manufactured in Japan.

  3. YOU OWE IT TO YOUR SELF-ESTEEM. There is no feeling in the world quite as wonderful as the feeling of being physically fit, except the feeling of eating pepperoni pizza. No! Wait! Disregard that last remark! What I’m trying to say is, when you become fit, everything about you changes. You have to buy new pants, for example. And you develop a whole new attitude about yourself. Instead of constantly thinking, “I am pasty and flabby and disgusting and nobody likes me,” you think, “People like me now, but only as long as I can keep from becoming pasty and flabby and disgusting again. I wish I had a pepperoni pizza.”

  4. YOU OWE IT TO YOUR FUTURE. There’s nothing like regular, vigorous exercise to prepare you for the pain you’ll inevitably have to endure when you get older. Let’s say you’re in your mid-20s to mid-30s. Most of the time you feel pretty good, right? The only time you feel lousy is when you ingest huge quantities of alcohol and wake up the next day in an unfamiliar city naked with unexplained chest wounds. But as you grow older, you’re going to start feeling more aches and pains caused by the inevitable afflictions of age, such as the Social Security Administration, condescending denture adhesive commercials, and your children.

  People who exercise regularly are prepared for this pain. Take joggers: you see them plodding along, clearly hating every minute of it, and you think, “What’s the point?” But years from now, when you’re struggling to adjust to the pains of the aging process, the joggers, who have been in constant agony for 20 years, will be able to make the transition smoothly, unless they’re already dead (see Chapter 12, under “Fitness and the Afterlife”).

  How Insects Stay Fit

  We can learn a great deal about fitness from observing insects. You have probably noticed, for example, that most ants are in excellent shape. You almost never see a fat ant. What makes this especially interesting is that ants are always lugging around disgusting junk food, such as discarded Cracker Jacks many times the ants’ own size.

  So how do ants stay so fit? The answer is surprisingly simple: they have no mouths. And this is a good thing, really, because it means they can’t scream when you spray them with Raid, although they do their best to writhe around in a piteous manner.

  So anyway, what we have, in the ant, is a creature that engages in strenuous physical exercise all day long and never eats any thing. This is Nature’s Way to fitness, and we should emulate it if we wish to have the kind of taut, firm bodies that make ants the envy of the insect kingdom. Of course, we must always weigh this against the fact that they have a life span of maybe six weeks and are subject to attack by vicious beetles.

  So the Bottom Line Is ...

  ... now is the time to start that fitness program! Fitness is more than just another new “craze,” like flavored popcorn or parenthood. Fitness is a philosophy of life, a revolutionary new concept in personhood, and, ultimately, a way for people like me to become wealthy via the sales of fitness-related items such as this book.

  But people like me can do only so much. We can take your money. After that, it’s up to you. If you don’t follow the diet and exercise program outlined in this book, it won’t do you a bit of good. Even if you do follow it, it may not do you any good. Nobody really knows what will happen. You’ll be the first person who ever actually tried this particular program. I meant to try it myself, before the book got published, but I had to buy snow tires. So maybe it would be a good idea to have a friend try it first, as a sort of test, and watch to see whether he actually does become fit, or starts lapsing into lengthy comas or something.

  Well, that’s enough of a pep talk. Let’s square our shoulders and take that first step toward Becoming a Fitter You. Those of you who are unable to simultaneously square your shoulders and take a step may do them one at a time.

  How Fit Are You?

  The first step in your new fitness program is to take the three simple tests below so we can find out how fit you are right now. Be sure to write down the results as you go along, so the police will be able to figure out what happened.

  1. BODY FAT TEST

  You’ll need:

  A swimming pool

  A dozen concrete blocks

  Some stout rope

  A knife

  A primitive denizen of some remote fungal island in the South Pacific

  Directions: Fat tends to make you float, so the idea here is to determine how many concrete blocks have to be lashed to your body to make you stay on the bottom of the pool for at least a minute without bobbing to the surface. Have your denizen perch by the side of the pool with the knife clenched in his teeth so he can dive down to cut you loose after the minute elapses.

  (Caution: Some of your more primitive denizens have no understanding whatsoever of time, so their concept of a minute may in fact be closer to what we in Western Civilization think of as a fortnight. Also, whatever you do, don’t give your denizen one of those Swiss army knives with all the various confusing attachments. You don’t want him swimming down there and sawing at your rope with the spoon.)

  How to score: Count the number of blocks required to keep you submerged. More than eight is very bad.

  2. HEART TEST

  You’ll need:

  A friend

  A job at an office building with elevators

  A scorpion

  Directions: Give the scorpion to your friend, and instruct him or her to wait a couple of weeks, until you’ve completely forgotten about it, then sneak up behind you at work and hurl it into the elevator with you just as the doors close. What we’re looking to determine here is whether your heart is strong enough to handle the rigors of an exercise program.

  How to score: Give yourself a 5 if your heart
continues to beat unassisted. If you score any lower than that, you probably shouldn’t do this particular test.

  3. AEROBICS TEST

  You’ll need:

  A stopwatch

  Gerald Ford

  Directions: The word “aerobics” comes from two Greek words: aero, meaning “ability to,” and bics, meaning “withstand tremendous boredom.” This is the difference between a world-class marathon runner and a normal person: a world-class marathon runner has undergone sufficient aerobic conditioning that he can run for nearly three hours without falling asleep, whereas a normal person will quit after a few minutes and look for something interesting to do.

  What you want to do in this test is start your stopwatch, then see how long you can listen to Gerald Ford discuss the federal deficit before you doze off. If Gerald Ford is unavailable, you can use televised golf.

  How to score: 15 seconds is excellent. More than 30 seconds indicates some kind of brain damage.

  Calculating Your Final “Fitness Quotient”

  Divide your age by the number of blocks it took to hold you on the bottom of the pool, then add the number of seconds it took for Gerald Ford to sedate you multiplied by your scorpion score, unless you are claiming two or more exemptions. This will give you your “fitness quotient”; store it wherever you keep the instructions for operating your various digital watches.

  Important Medical Note

  Before you begin any fitness program, you should, of course, have your doctor give you a thorough physical examination in which he shoves cold steel implements into your various bodily orifices and sticks needles directly into your skin and makes you put on a flimsy garment apparently made from a cocktail napkin and parade through the waiting room carrying a transparent container filled with your own urine past several people you hope to someday ask for jobs. Or, if you’d prefer not to undergo this procedure, you may simply send your doctor some money.

  Chapter 1. How Your Body Works

  Your body is like a superbly engineered luxury automobile: if you use it wisely an maintain it properly, it will eventually break down, most likely in a bad neighborhood. To understand why this is, let’s take a look inside this fascinating “machine” we call the human body.

  Your body is actually made up of billions and billions of tiny cells, called “cells,” which are so small that you cannot see them. Neither can I. The only people who can see them are white-coated geeks called “biologists.” These are the people who wrote your high-school biology textbooks, in which they claimed to have found all these organs inside the Frog, the Worm, and the Perch. Remember? And remember how, in Biology Lab, you were supposed to take an actual dead frog apart and locate the heart, the liver, etc., as depicted in the elaborate color diagrams in the textbook?

  Of course, when you cut it open, all you ever found was frog glop, because that is what frogs contain, as has been proven in countless experiments performed by small boys with sticks. So you did what biology students have always done: you pretended you were finding all these organs in there, and you copied the diagram out of the book, knowing full well that in real life a frog would have no use whatsoever for a liver.

  Anyway, biologists tell us that the human body consists of billions of these tiny cells, which combine to form organs such as the heart, the kidney, the eyeball, the funny bone, the clavichord, the pustule, and the hernia, which in turn combine to form the body, which in turn combines with other bodies to form the squadron. Now let’s take a closer look at the various fitness-related organs and see if we can’t think of things to say about them.

  The Skin

  Your skin performs several vital functions. For example, it keeps people from seeing the inside of your body, which is repulsive, and it prevents your organs from falling out onto the ground; where careless pedestrians might step on them. Also, without skin, your body would have no place to form large facial zits on the morning before your wedding.

  But for fitness-oriented persons like yourself, the important thing about skin is that it acts as your Body’s Cooling System. Whenever you exercise or get on an elevator, sweat oozes out of millions of tiny skin holes so it can evaporate and cool the area. Unfortunately, virtually all of these holes are located in your armpits, which is stupid. I mean, you hardly ever hear people complaining about having hot armpits. So what we seem to have here is one of those cases where Mother Nature really screwed up, like when she developed the concept of nasal hair.

  The Muscle System

  Your muscles are what enable you to perform all of your basic movements, such as bowling, sniping, pandering, carping, and contacting your attorney. Basically, there are two kinds of muscle tissue: the kind that people in advertisements for fitness centers have, which forms units that look like sleek and powerful pythons writhing just beneath the surface of the skin, and the kind you have, which looks more like deceased baby rabbits.

  The beauty of muscle tissue, however, is that it responds to exercise. In a later chapter, we’ll talk about how, using modern exercise equipment, such as the Nautilus machine, in a scientific workout program, you can stretch those pudgy little muscle tissues of yours to the point where you won’t even be able to scream for help without the aid of powerful painkilling drugs.

  The Skeletal System

  How many bones do you think your skeletal system has? Would you say 50? 150? 250? 300? More than 300?

  If you guessed 50, you’re a real jerk. I would say it’s around 250, but I don’t really see why it’s all that important. The only important part of your skeleton, for fitness purposes, is your knees.

  Knees are God’s way of telling mankind that He doesn’t want us to do anything really strenuous. When we do, our knees punish us by becoming injured, as you know if you’ve ever watched professional football on television:

  ANNOUNCER: The handoff goes to Burger; he’s tackled at the six. ... Uh oh! He’s hurt!

  COLOR COMMENTATOR: Looks like a knee injury, Bob, from the way that bone there is sticking out of his knee.

  ANNOUNCER: Burger’s teammates are bending over him. ... Uh oh! Now they’re down on the field!

  COLOR COMMENTATOR: Looks like they’ve all injured their knees, too, Bob.

  ANNOUNCER: Here comes the team physician, who is. ... Uh oh! Now he’s down on the ...

  So one of the things we’re going to stress in our fitness program is knee safety. We’re going to get you so aware of this important topic that you won’t even discuss racquetball over the telephone without first putting on knee braces the size of industrial turbines.

  The Digestive System

  Your digestive system is your body’s Fun House, whereby food goes on a long, dark, scary ride, taking all kinds of unexpected twists and turns, being attacked by vicious secretions along the way, and not knowing until the last minute whether it will be turned into a useful body part or ejected into the Dark Hole by Mister Sphincter. You must be careful about what you eat, unless you want your body making heart valves out of things like bean dip.

  The Central Nervous System

  The central nervous system is your body’s Messenger, always letting your brain know what’s going on elsewhere in your body. “Your nose itches!” it tells your brain. Or, “Your foot is falling asleep!!” Or, “You’re hungry!!!” All day long, your brain hears messages like these, thousands of them, hour after hour, until finally it deliberately rests your hand on a red-hot stove just for the pleasure of hearing your nervous system scream in pain.

  Your Respiratory System

  Your respiratory system takes in oxygen and gives off carbon monoxide, a deadly gas, by a process called “photosynthesis.” This takes place in your lungs, yam-shaped organs in your chest containing millions of tiny little air sacs, called “Bernice.” In a normal person, these sacs are healthy and pink, whereas in smokers they have the wretched, soot-stained, anguished look of the people fleeing Atlanta in Gone with the Wind. This has led many noted medical researchers to conclude that smoking is unheal
thy, but we must weigh this against the fact that most of the people in cigarette advertisements are generally horse-riding, helicopter-flying hunks of major-league manhood, whereas your noted medical researchers tend to be pasty little wimps of the variety that you routinely held upside down over the toilet in junior high school.

  The Circulatory System

  This is, of course, your heart, a fist-sized muscle in your chest with a two-inch-thick layer of greasy fat clinging to it consisting of every Milky Way you ever ate. Your heart’s job is to pump your blood, which appears to be nothing more than a red liquid but which, according to biologists (this should come as no surprise), is actually teeming with millions of organisms, some of them with tentacles so they can teem more efficiently.

  The only organisms that actually belong in your blood are the red cells and the white cells. The red cells are your body’s Room Service, carrying tiny particles of food and oxygen to the other organs, which snork them up without so much as a “thank you.” The only reward the red cells get is iron in the form of prunes, which the other cells don’t want anyway. If you don’t eat enough prunes, your red cells get tired—a condition doctors call “tired blood”—and you have to lie down and watch “All My Children.”