Yesterday afternoon, about halfway into my daily naked run thru Centennial Park, somebody commented that it seemed that I had lost a little weight. Actually, the exact words were something along the lines of “Hey!! Naked jackass – nice butt!” I remember seeing that family there before, so I took it as a compliment to my marked improvement in body fat ratios. Regardless, the remark sparked a conversation among the group of people I was trying to keep up with at the time: How did I drop the weight?

In the past I’ve gone on that torturous, week long cabbage stew diet. I always drop about 10 – 15 pounds doing that, but the drawback is that after about day three or four without beef I go completely insane and risk hurting myself and the people around me. It’s not pretty.. when I finally return to lucidity, there’s always the embarrassing realization that I’ve made makeshift torches out of strips of the clothes I was wearing, my body is painted up in tribal designs with some indecipherable gooey substance, and I’m in the middle of an elementary school cafeteria begging for scraps of mystery loaf.

Not this time. No, I’ve been experimenting with a new diet that I think will revolutionize the industry as we know it. I can’t get into all the details here.. I’m in the talking stages of putting together an infomercial to sell my plan to the vast population of tubby lemmings begging for a quick and easy solution. I can tell you some of the basics, though.

The secret is to consume less calories than you burn every day. I have accomplished this by not “eating” any “food.” None whatsoever. I call it the “Starvation Diet.” I kind of stumbled upon this discovery unintentionally.. after I paid my rent (and a few of the more urgent bills close to defaulting) I found that I had no “money” for food.

Normally this wouldn’t be any big deal – I like to keep a well-stocked kitchen. However, my vast supplies have dwindled down to nothing. Gone are the days of steaks, chicken and shrimp on the grill every night. The champagne reserves are dry. The hookers have all left me. It’s just sad. Eventually I was digging around the back of my shelves.. eating up those canned foods that I’ve moved with me from house to house for years. Those random things that nobody really eats.. the kinda stuff you give away during canned food drives. It was no time at all before the Y2K stockpile was reduced to a faint memory of irrational, overzealous paranoia of the past. For about a week my only sustenance was from eating condiments.

Then I set up snares and traps all throughout my yard. I caught a few squirrels, a cat, my dog Guido, and a neighborhood kid. Don’t worry, I didn’t eat Guido.. I haven’t fattened him up enough yet. While living off the land I felt proud of the survival skills I learned in the Scouts.. (and ate well!) but it didn’t take long to hunt and trap the neighborhood dry.

So that was it. From that point on, all I consumed was water. Living off your body fat isn’t such a bad deal (assuming you have some). I look at the über-skinny über-models and think about how they would have died weeks ago. Lesson learned: having a spare tire is your buffer between poverty and death.