thin is in

So yesterday I talked to my dad and he said his doctor put him on the South Beach Diet. For those of you out of the loop, it is pretty much the Atkins' Diet with healthier choices. Dad has lost 11 pounds so far and I'm really happy to hear that because he needs to shed some pounds, his health ain't so great. But then I started thinking about all the people I know on the South Beach diet (several of whom need a diet like I need a life-time supply of McDonalds), and then I started thinking about how I know even MORE people than that on the Atkins' diet...which if you ask me (which of course you would because I am all-knowing) is a bullshit diet where you eat copious, revolting amounts of meat and dairy while avoiding UNWISE choices like fruit and 7-grain bread. So I thought that there are probably better and quicker ways of losing weight and being unhealthy:
1) INTESTINAL PARASITES-during Louis XIV's reign, women would swallow sugar cubes with tape-worm eggs inside to maintain their teeny waists in order to enjoy court at the utterly fabulous Versailles. Other than the unpleasant side-effect of wriggling worms crawling out of your asshole and mouth while you sleep, and long, wormy things sucking the nutrition out of your very body leaving you with scurvy and osteoporosis...it is a relatively cheap and easy way to shed pounds.
2) IMPRISONMENT-the best form would be being forced into a well by some homicidal maniac who wants to turn your skin into a transvestite overcoat ala Silence of the Lambs. I myself never have to worry about this because my tats prohibit any real use of my skin. This is probably not the best way because you would have to rely on somebody else of sufficient craziness to accomplish your goal.
3) FRACTURING YOUR JAW-once fractured, preferably by an auto-accident so that your insurance will pay for it and then you can sue the hell out of who hit you, your jaw will be wired shut. While wired you can only drink shit like Ensure, Slim Fast, and the like. While suffering from serious pain and losing nutrients faster than your bowel movements after drinking water in Tijuana, you can lose tons of weight and then have the pleasure of the uber-painful experience of having long wires removed from your face (credit to my friend Angela who told me the excruciating pain of a fractured jaw and wire removal).
4) THE BIG "C"-one of the top five signs of cancer is rapid weight loss. Along with all your fat cells, you have the added bonus of losing your hair, energy, sexual function, and quite possibly your life.
Now I don't say this to diminish the harm of any of the above, I just say it to express my feelings of...What the Fuck? Why do we spend so much time and energy worrying about how fat our asses are? And don't get me wrong, I'm TOTALLY guilty of this myself, having done unhealthy things to my body in pursuit of a socially approved body and having explored the option of weight-loss via surgery. I mean if you are seriously unhealthy then definitely try and lose weight...but whatever happened to small portions and excercise? Can we only think in terms of "drop pounds now, find out how?"