Each year during the first week of January many of us make New Year’s resolutions. They are a list of promises we make to ourselves in an effort to become better and slimmer people in the upcoming year.
The most common New Year’s resolution is to lose weight. We resolve to somehow shed all those pounds we gained in December as we celebrated the holidays by stuffing ourselves with turkey and dressing and punkin pie and washing it down with gallons of egg nog.
If you don’t believe that this is the biggest (and I do mean biggest) New Year’s resolution this and every year, just turn on your television. You will see an endless series of commercials for diet plans and exercise products that promise to help us shed all those pounds we gained at all those Christmas parties last month.
Yes, it’s the Ultra-Skinny-Fast Diet! Fifty prepared meals that taste wonderful and have absolutely no calories! Call us now! Our skinny operators are standing by!
There are only two problems with the lose-weight resolution. First, the diet meals taste okay the first time you eat one. But by the tenth meal, they taste just like the first nine you ate, and make you long for the punkin pie you ate last month.
Second, most of us fall off this nutritional wagon by February. Not coincidentally, that’s when the Girl Scout Cookies arrive.
Over the years, I have shed many pounds in January, but when the year’s Girl Scout Cookies become available in February, I not only want some, I want Samoas! I also want Tag-Alongs, Dos-Si-Dos, Trefoils, and the ironically named Thin Mints.
The New Year’s resolution to lose weight is reminiscent to what Mark Twain said about smoking. “It’s the easiest thing in the world,” he said. “I have done it thousands of times.”
But the sad truth is that there are no quick and easy diet or exercise plans to enable us to meet our New Year’s resolution to get skinny. As my long-time personal physician, Dr. Killjoy Rubbergloves, told me years ago, “If it tastes good, it is fattening and bad for you. If it tastes bad, eat all you want, or more accurately, all you don’t want!”
Dr. Rubbergloves also told me there is only one exercise that will enable a person to lose weight. It’s called a push-away. You push yourself away from the dinner table after eating a small meal and long before desserts are served, by which time you should be no where near the table.
The other most common New Year’s resolution is to achieve some success in your career or personal life. Make more money, be listed on Who’s Who, win the Cy Young Award, or the Nobel Prize. The problem with this resolution is that it ignores the Haltom Theory of Achievement: A goal is more likely to be achieved if the achievement is not one’s goal.
And so this year, I hereby resolve to not make any New Year’s resolutions other than to do push-aways at every meal until February when the Girl Scout Cookies arrive.