Today’s topic is: Health and fitness.
We all know how important it is to be fit and healthy these days, thanks largely to the miracle of television. We only have to switch it on to see some fitness moron talking about it while demonstrating the latest gizmo to help you “trim down” and “tone up” – thigh blaster, fat blaster, photon blaster… No, wait. That was the Sci-Fi channel.
Naturally, these are the most hated people on television next to Rosie O’Donnell. It’s only a matter of time before someone uses their “three easy instalments” to buy a gun and get them off the air permanently. (Obviously they’ll need to use armour-piercing bullets to penetrate the “rock-hard abs”.)
The good news is these people might be blasting their way to an early grave (“a $50 saving!”) According to a new book, The Joy of Laziness: Why Life Is Better Slower — and How to Get There, the key to a long life is actually to just sit around on your butt all day.
According to its authors – a retired German professor and his GP daughter — we are all given a limited amount of “life energy”, and how long we live depends on how quickly we use that energy. (I should point out that these people were both long-distance runners, so they could just be making excuses for always coming last. “We were conserving our life energy” sounds a lot better than “We got a stitch”.)
I know what you’re thinking. “Okay, so we now have an excuse not to walk to work every day, or even to the front door. But without all that exercise, won’t our stomachs blow up quicker than a drivers-side airbag? How can we keep our weight down enough so we can still see the television?”
Well, some hardworking people at the Eastern Virginia Medical School (who obviously hadn’t read The Joy of Laziness) have come up with a suggestion: sleep in.
You might think they’ve been mixing their medication a bit too much, but apparently they studied 1000 people and found as people’s body mass index (which measures how likely they are to break a couch by sitting on it) increased, their sleep time decreased.
Now they won’t actually come out and say that sleeping longer will help you lose weight, at least not without a large government grant. But the study does say that “an extra 20 minutes of sleep per night seems to be associated with a lower body mass index”.
The obvious question is, can you sleep in longer and lose even more weight? Of course! Sleep in for an hour or two every day, and you’ll really start shedding the kilos, especially when you get the sack and can no longer afford food.
Of course, the real problem with the Lying In Bed Doing Nothing diet is that you risk losing touch with the world, or at least the latest screw-ups on Jerry Springer. Sure, you could get someone to move the television to your bedroom, but you’d still be wasting precious life energy holding your head up.
Well, I’m pleased to announce that your problems will soon be over, thanks to Gary Raynor, an MBA graduate at the Queensland University of Technology (“a university for the real world that costs the earth”). Gary has invented the PillowVue, a small unit that sits on your bedside table and projects the picture onto the ceiling.
But you’ll need to be careful. Before you know it you’ll see a whole new batch of morons on television, selling their exclusive Fat Blaster pillows, as well as the doona that weighs three tonnes so you “get a workout, even as you breathe”.
And you don’t want to be wasting any of that life energy patching up the bullet holes in your ceiling.
