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How to Really Screw Up Your Diet in the New Year . . .and Wind Up Healthy Anyway

Americans face every January with renewed resolutions to fight the fat, battle the bulge, handle the love handles.  And yet, every year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tell us that our obesity rates are increasing.

What’s wrong with this picture?

We are either the very definition of insane – doing the same thing each year and expecting a different result – or perhaps we just need to turn our thinking upside down regarding these annual New Year’s resolutions.

Think about this logically.  We subscribe to the new “Top Ten Tips” for living a healthy life every single year, and fail and flail each time.  So for 2013, let’s apply a little reverse psychology. This year, let’s try to really screw up our diets.  If we – in typical fashion – fail to keep these resolutions, we’ll mess up “the screw up” and, voila, end up healthy!!

I love logic.

THE TOP TEN TIPS "TO AVOID"

So here are my “Top Ten Tips” for royally screwing up your diet in the coming year, with my deepest hopes for you that you will give them your very best efforts … and fail miserably:


1 Follow the fad. Be on the lookout for the newest of all the new diets – the more esoteric and absurd the better.  Think cabbage soup, peanut butter and fat-be-gone rings.  Statistically speaking, these have failed so often that sooner or later they must finally work. This is your year! 2 Master speed eating. When you sign up for your new diet, you want to speed-eat so your food spends more time in your gullet than in your mouth.  Otherwise, you’ll taste your low-whatever, cardboard-flavored food product.  Remember, your goal is to do anything but enjoy your food, so be sure to gobble it down in 10 minutes or less. 3 Find the food condoms.  Plastic-wrapped food is what you’re seeking. If it’s found in a pre-packaged form, eat it.  If you have no idea how long it has been on a shelf, eat it.  If all of the items in the case look exactly the same, like they are all stamped out of the same food widget mold – go for it. 4 Eat all the time.  Graze.  Think bovine thoughts.  Once you get a little mouth momentum, just go with it.  Start with five to six small meals, and work up from there.  Again, work the logic: if you just keep going you’ll basically eat all day.  Thus, at that point, you’re really only having one meal per day.  Keeping snack foods in your desk – not to mention your vehicle – will really help in this dietary effort. 5 Eat on the go. Eat in your car, on your feet, wherever. Just keep moving so you burn the calories as you shovel them in.  Eating in a rush and huff is fantastic because it never allows your body to slow down enough to digest your food – no digestion, no calories! 6 Lose your mind. Eat at your desk, alone, doing your job as you mindlessly eat and eat. Eat while watching TV at night, so you can be distracted by the latest episode of “The Biggest Loser. 7 Pursue platter portions. Serve meals on the largest plate you own.  Turn over a garbage can lid if you have to, and make sure to completely fill the space with whatever you can ladle onto it.  Remember this equation: more diet food = more diet = more weight loss.  Do the math. 8 Bite the big one. Take huge bites.  If you feel that you may have to unhinge your jaws like an anaconda, you’re doing it right.  Squirrel-packing your cheek pockets will ensure that you not only lose more weight, but that you lose it in time to fit into your fantasy bathing suit by June. 9 Practice gastro-physics. Remember that if you eat a candy bar you can always annihilate it with diet products.  Diet sodas and Snickers, for example, are dietary matter and anti-matter.  They cancel, so if you have something naughty, just chase it with a Diet Coke and some fat-free cheese “food” product. 10 Go for the glo. Focus on foods that look like they come from outer space.  Think day-glo pink, and neon orange.  Those nuclear-yellow marshmallow “peeps” are an ideal screw-up-your-diet food.  What’s the reasoning?  The people on this planet are too fat.  Now, have you ever seen a Martian who was overweight?  Bottom line: If you eat food that looks like it was shipped here from Mars, you will be thin like them … albeit a tad orange with a bulbous head.


Good luck, and best wishes on your miserable failure to adhere to these tips.

Wishing you a happy, healthy New Year!!

Dr. Will Clower is an award winning author, media personality, CEO of Mediterranean Wellness, and the founder and director of the Mediterranean PATH.

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