It just keeps getting better.
For eight months now, I’ve been telling you all the things I can do for you. I can make you smarter. I can entertain you. I can clean up your language. All you have to do is read The Johnston Papers.
But it’s even better than I imagined. It turns out that I can give you the one thing that Americans want more than anything else.
I can make you thin.
And it’s easier than you might think. Here’s all you need to do to get thin: adopt me as your friend.
A study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine followed a large social network of over 12,000 people for 32 years to study the secondary effects as individuals gained or lost weight. What the researchers discovered was that a person’s likelihood of becoming obese increases by 57 percent when someone whom that person considers a friend becomes obese. When both people consider themselves friends (shouldn’t that be the case most of the time?), the chance that one will become obese increases by 171 percent if the other goes first. And this is true even if they live hundreds of miles apart.
Yes, after 32 years, the researchers—one a Harvard professor and the other an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego—concluded that one’s friends can influence one’s shape. The explanation is that if all of your friends are overweight, that will affect your idea of an acceptable size, and you’ll inflate as well. To which I have this to say:
Duh.
Let’s see: my friends influence my political beliefs, my religious beliefs, my fashion sense (glad to have someone to blame), how I talk, how hard I work, what I do for fun, what kind of car I drive, what I read, what I eat (brussels sprouts may yet be in my future), and how often I exercise. But, gee—who could ever have imagined that they would influence how much I weigh?
Once again, thank God for experts.
Some have expressed concern that publication of these conclusions will cause people to shun their overweight friends. But the researchers say that is the wrong message, because the loss of a friend creates its own health problems (including, of course, increased risk of obesity). Instead, Dr. Nicholas Christakis, the Harvard professor, offered this suggestion in a New York Times interview: Why not make friends with a thin person?
Oh, yes.
How beautifully ironic. Remember those Charles Atlas ads, making fun of the 98-pound weakling? Nobody wanted to be skinny. If you were skinny, you got sand kicked in your face at the beach, you never got the girl, and you didn’t have any friends. And of course, fat jokes were considered insensitive, but skinny jokes (“He has to run around in the shower just to get wet”; “If he stands sideways and sticks out his tongue, he looks like a zipper”) were always a hit.
The worm, it appears, has turned. Skinny people are in demand. Funny thing, that.
Now, you might wonder: does it necessarily follow that if people gain weight when their friends gain weight, they also lose weight when their friends lose weight? The answer, the researchers say, is yes—although this was a little more difficult to prove, presumably because they had trouble finding an American who had lost weight in the last 32 years.
So, people, it seems that I have something you want. For those who don’t know me personally, let me just cite a few numbers: 6 feet 3 inches and 157 pounds. You want thin? I got thin.
Understand that I’m not saying thin is better, or that you should want to look like me. (Lord knows, it wasn’t my first choice, either.) I’m merely observing that, for whatever reason, many Americans want to be thinner. And, as it turns out, I hold the key.
There is an expression that applies here, and I believe it goes something like this: what goes around comes around. However, I harbor no hard feelings toward, for example, my football-playing high school classmates whose bulky torsos may not have aged particularly well, or the curvaceous cheerleaders who, I now realize, did me a favor by ignoring me.
No, no. Bygones are bygones. I hear your cries, and I want to help. If you need a thin friend, I’m here for you.
But there is, well, one tiny complication: as it happens, I have enough friends. In fact, it’s getting a little crowded, to the point that I’ve been looking to set a few of them free. So, frankly, there needs to be something in it for me.
The good news is that the law of supply and demand works just about universally. Everything is available at the right price. I may not be looking for new friends, but if someone makes me the right offer . . . .
So let’s start the bidding at, say, $1,000 per month. I’ll take the three highest bidders. Here’s what the lucky winners will get: (1) one personal e-mail every week, in which I will tell you what I’ve been up to and perhaps forward the latest jokes; (2) one phone call per month, during which we will talk about old times and all the fun we’ve had together, as if it were really true; and (3) best of all, a photograph of me (electronic or hard copy) wearing a t-shirt that says, “This is normal.” And, of course, I will grant you the right to refer to me as your “close personal friend.”
And you will lose weight. The experts say so. If you have a better plan, go for it.
Wait a minute. Isn’t it just as likely that you’ll end up making me gain weight? Well, if that happens, I guess I’ll just have to track you down and kick sand in your face.
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Editor’s note: The Johnston Papers is taking a well deserved vacation. Barring developments that demand commentary, the next edition will be published sometime in October. Approximately.
