Although that’s not really how pull-ups are supposed to be performed

Hey all you fat, pathetic sacks of apathy and sloth! Do you have the energy and vitality that you wish you had? Are you happy with your physiques? Well, of course you aren’t! I mean, look at you. You’re disgusting. How in the world do you get your socks on?

No, it doesn’t matter. I was just wondering out loud. The point is: My name’s Amy and I’m here to help you unlock the secret to a new, fit, fabulous body!

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking inside that massive, neckless head of yours: You’re thinking that I’m going to give you a complicated set of rules for what you can eat, and the difficult exercises you’ll have to do, and you’ll be so overwhelmed that you’ll have no hope of ever following through with my program, and you’ll fail, and you’ll collapse in a blubbering, blubbery heap on your poor, overburdened sofa with a bucket of Ben & Jerry’s, and curse the day you ever met me. WRONG!

My patent-pending weight-loss technique is simple. It’s just two easy steps.

First: You travel backward in time. The beauty of this part is that you don’t have to do it right away—you can get to it whenever it’s convenient for you. Next: You prevent the discovery (or invention, however you want to put it) of cheese.

That second part’s going to be a little harder, I admit. But at least you’ll have the advantage of being received as a god by the ancients, probably. What are the chances a bunch of Sumerian goatherds ever even imagined a man could achieve your girth? Or the ancient Picts, or the early Harappans, or whoever it was that came up with cheese? I don’t know where cheese originated. What do I look like, an anthropologist? DO THESE LOOK LIKE ANTHROPOLOGIST ABS TO YOU? NUH-UNH.

So you’ll maybe have to do some hunting around to find the dawn of the Cheese Age. But once you do, and you prevent it from ever being developed, and you return to your own time, just think how easy it’s going to be to avoid temptation! Imagine! No, I mean right now, imagine. Close your eyes and picture it. Are they closed? I can’t tell, the way they’re kind of squinty all the time from your face-fat anyway.

Think of it! There’ll be no more macaroni and cheese—just macaroni! Which is actually pretty good for you. And you won’t even know what you’re missing. No one will. It never existed.

What’s that? Far-fetched, you say? Implausible, you say? Riddled with paradoxes, you say?

OK, fine, be that way. You can trim down and tone up the old-fashioned way, with diet and exercise. It works, no doubt about it. It’s proven. But I’m warning you: That way involves pull-ups.

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