MY NAME IS DAVE AND I'M A CARBOHYDRATIC by Dave Berry

This is hillarious!


MY NAME IS DAVE AND I'M A CARBOHYDRATIC


I probably shouldn't admit this to you younger readers, but when my
generation was your age, we did some pretty stupid things.  I'm talking
about taking CRAZY risks.  We drank water right from the tap.  We used
aspirin bottles that you could actually open with your bare hands.  We
bought appliances that were not festooned with helpful safety warnings
such as, "DO NOT BATHE WITH THIS TOASTER."  But for sheer insanity, the
wildest thing we did was - prepare to be shocked - we deliberately
ingested carbohydrates.  I know, I know.  It was wrong.  But we were
young and foolish, and there was a lot of peer pressure.

You'd be at a party, and there would be a lava lamp blooping away, and
a Jimi Hendrix record playing.
 
And then, when the mood was right, somebody would say: "You wanna do
some 'drates?"  And the next thing you know, there'd be a bowl of
pretzels going around, or crackers, or even potato chips, and we'd put
these things into our mouths and just EAT them.  My only excuse was
that we were ignorant.  It's not like now, when everybody knows how bad
carbohydrates are, and virtually every product is advertised as being
"low-carb," including beer, denture adhesives, floor wax, tires, life
insurance and Viagra.  Back then, we had no idea.
 
Nobody did!  Our own MOTHERS gave us bread!  Today, of course, nobody
eats bread. People are terrified of all carbohydrates, as evidenced by
the recent mass robbery at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, where 87
patrons turned their wallets over to a man armed only with a strand of
No. 8 spaghetti. ("Do what he says!  He has pasta!") The city of
Beverly Hills has been evacuated twice this month because of reports -
false, thank heavens - that terrorists had put a bagel in the water
supply.
 
But as I say, in the old days we believed that the reason you got fat
was from eating "calories," which are tiny units of measurement that
cause food to taste good.  When we wanted to lose weight, we went on
low-calorie diets in which we ate only inedible foods such as celery,
which is actually a building material.  The problem with the
low-calorie diet was that a normal human could stick to it for, at
most, four hours, at which point he or she would have no biological
choice but to sneak out to the garage and snork down an entire bag of
Snickers, sometimes without removing the wrappers.  So nobody lost
weight, and everybody felt guilty all the time.  Many people, in
desperation, turned to disco.  
 
But then along came the bold food pioneer who invented the Atkins Diet:
Dr. Something Atkins.  Dr. Atkins discovered an amazing thing: Calories
don't matter!  What does matter are carbohydrates, which result when a
carbo molecule and a hydrate molecule collide at high speeds and form
tiny invisible doughnuts.  Dr. Atkins' discovery meant that as long as
you avoided carbohydrates, you could, without guilt, eat high-fat,
high-calorie foods such as cheese, bacon, lard, pork rinds and whale. 
You could eat an entire pig, as long as the pig had not recently been
exposed to bread.
 
At first, like other groundbreaking pioneers such as Galileo and
Eminem, Dr. Atkins met with skepticism, even hostility.  The Celery
Growers  
Association hired a detective to - yes - stalk him.  His car tires were
repeatedly slashed by what police determined to be shards of Melba
toast. But Dr. Atkins persisted, because he had a dream - a dream that,
some day, he would help the human race by selling it 427 million diet
books.  And he did, achieving vindication for his diet before his
tragic demise in an incident that the autopsy report listed as "totally
unrelated to the undigested 28-pound bacon cheeseburger found in his
stomach."  But the Atkins Diet lives on, helping millions of Americans
to lose weight.
 
The irony is, you can't tell this by looking at actual Americans, who
have, as a group, become so heavy that North America will soon be
underwater as far inland as Denver. Which can only mean one thing: You
people are still sneaking Snickers.  You should be ashamed of
yourselves!  Got any more?
 
Written by: Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.