It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or watch a TV health show without being reminded that obesity is the new American epidemic. In a limited number of cases there may be a medical cause for the obesity but in the majority of people the cause is simple and easy to detect—overeating. If you don’t believe that the number of porkers is increasing just sit along the boardwalk for ten or fifteen minutes and note the number of hefty heifers and bulging bulls parading by. While there are marvelous multi-hued pills and potions designed to relieve an assortment of gastric symptoms, such as the purple pill, Nexium, for indigestion and the green one, Gas-X, touted to relieve that bloated feeling, none of them prevent overeating.

If my friends are any example of what’s normal (and I freely admit that their normality is open to debate), fifty per cent of the population is on one diet or another at any given time. One friend won’t eat carbs after sunset. His partner doesn’t mind loading up on carbohydrates, but he won’t touch fats. It’s the modern version of the nursery rhyme, "Jack Spratt would eat no fat; his wife would eat no lean. And so, between the two of them, they licked the platter clean." It makes menu planning a bitch when it’s dinner party time.

Not long ago my partner’s niece, who’s slender and not overweight at all, was on a rigid and expensive diet, the Zone Diet, where her meals were delivered daily to her condo in order to insure she ate only the right foods in the correct amount. She accepted a dinner invitation to our home but ate nothing. Zero! Zip! Furthermore, she brought her own bottle of water, as if our water was toxic or caloric. I’m not sure whether it was the fact that she’s slender and beautiful to start with, or the insult to our water supply that pissed me off, but I was offended.

What also gets my goat is that friends who happen to be on diets mistakenly think that I’m enchanted to hear about their latest calorie curtailment. I’m not. I’m bored. I’ve heard enough about low carb bagels, sugar free ice cream and no fat margarine to last me a lifetime or two. I’m considering a new house rule that says guests who want to talk about diets should go out on the balcony with the smokers—AND CLOSE THE DOOR!

Every few months or so, when I look in the mirror and recognize that my love handles are less than lovely and that they have achieved an air of permanence, I inflict a diet on myself. Within a few weeks I can peel off ten pounds by eliminating desserts, alcohol and the nibblies that go with cocktail time. And while that exercise in self-discipline is difficult, especially at holiday times, it’s a less stringent approach than the one recommended on a birthday card I received last year which said an easy way to lose twenty pounds was to "cut off your big fat head."

All of the advertised diets work, when rigorously followed and they all fail to keep weight off when the diet ends because I resume gobbling the goodies that I’ve so virtuously denied myself for the diet’s duration. When I stop the diet and return to my sinful ways—a dry Manhattan and some cheese and crackers before dinner and a slice of apple pie for dessert—the weight gradually creeps back on. Refusing ice cream on the apple pie hardly qualifies as dietary self discipline. There’s really only one sure-fire approach to weight loss, and that’s either eat less, or exercise more—or preferably, both.

Go to any book store and you’ll find that there’s a never-ending list of diets to try: Pritikin, Atkins, South Beach. Or you might want to try the cabbage diet, the grapefruit diet, the high carb/low fat diet, the low carb/high fat diet, or the eat-all-you-want-and-call-me-in-the-morning diet. I’m sure that somewhere on the Internet you can find a posting for Diet de Jour, a program that offers a different diet daily and is guaranteed to avoid boredom.

But I have a new one to offer—a diet that’s guaranteed to lose weight. It’s ecologically sound and endorsed by PETA, MEETA and CHETAH. I don’t know what all those initials stand for so you can make up your own organization. What I do know is that my diet is perfect to eliminate the after-the-holidays spread.

It’s the Eggshell Diet.

Since eggshells are generally thrown away as garbage, this diet offers an opportunity for recycling and will be endorsed by all of the green gang. Now eggshells can be reused. You don’t have to buy expensive books or drink prepackaged cans of flavored chalk. You don’t have to pay for sessions where all you receive is a pat you on the back and an appointment for next week’s weigh in. This is the cheapest and most effective weight loss diet of them all.

Think of the money you’ll save by simply going to the back door of the Crystal Restaurant, or the Cracker Barrel, or Bob Evans and cajoling the cook into saving the eggshells for you. It might be a money saver for these venerable institutions because as the diet catches on they’ll have less garbage to dispose of and smaller garbage collection fees.

The chief benefit of this diet is that it has absolutely no nutritional value. You can boil the eggshells with water to make tea. Drink at least two gallons of the tea daily and you’ll turn you into a real pisser. Then put the shells in a blender and puree them until you have a thick white goop. Add a drop or two of vanilla for flavoring and eureka! You have a new diet food with no fat, no protein, no carbohydrate and no calories. Weight loss is guaranteed. Like all new diets, you should not undertake the eggshell diet without first visiting your physician. And if he’s nuts enough to endorse this dietary disaster, this nutritional nonsense, it’s time to get a new physician.

The eggshell diet is high in calcium, so fluid intake is important in order to avoid kidney stone formation. But that shouldn’t be a major problem. You’ll slowly expire from malnutrition before the stones form and you’ll die with the satisfaction of knowing that you have strong bones from all the calcium you’ve been consuming.