Extra Help

Losing weight is easy. Just burn more calories than you take in. That’s it. Problem solved. Never mind that the actual burning of more calories than you take in is the difficult part. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen thousands and thousands of so-called solutions hit the market all designed to attack this singular problem. And it’s safe to say that many of us here have tried a large percentage of them in pursuit of this seemingly simple yet always elusive goal.

Sometimes I wonder what future generations will think of us. Will they look at Acai banner ads and laugh so hard they plow their hover cars straight into trees? Will they shoot space beer out their noses when they unearth ancient evidence of pink “diet” patches? Will viral emails spread all over the solar system that depict videos of twenty-first century dieters trying to swirl the pounds away? Please click that link and watch the video. I’ll wait.

Of course, they’ll come up with equally stupid stuff which their future generations will look back and laugh at. I’m sure in the twenty second century, some snake oil salesman will be peddling a special umbrella you wear on your head to concentrate radiation from solar flares directly at your fat cells. And the twenty third century people will have an absolute gut-busting laugh over it.

I say this with all certainty because if one thing’s certain it’s the more things change the more they stay the same. We tend to think of all these crazy, oddball weight loss solutions as some sort of modern invention. It’s almost as if weight problems weren’t invented until after WWII and before that everything was perfectly fine (most likely due to heavy use of The Charleston). Prior to 1950 people could eat whatever they wanted and could still be light and trim enough to be carried to the top of the Empire State Building by a gorilla.

So with that in mind, check this out:

“No Diet, No Baths, No Exercise! No Ill Effects! Easy to Swallow!” Sorry, but I find this hard to swallow. But I guess it just goes to show P.T. Barnum was right. There’s a sucker born every century.

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