Blessed by the Potato

Calories are little things that live in food. They’re tasty and give your body energy. Things without any calories aren’t really food at all. In small amounts, calories are great things. Trouble arises when large groups of calories get together though. They start getting mischievous ideas, and once inside your body avoid getting burned, instead turning into fat — which is not what we want. There are a great many resources out there to help you diet, to find ways to count the calories in things, and limit how many you allow to get together at once in your body. But why give them that kind of power over you? Did you know that calories are just as afraid of you as you are of them? This handy guide will show you the many unknown facts about calories so that you can keep them in line and eat whatever you want — without getting fat.

First, threaten your food. It’s never polite to threaten other people, but calories aren’t people. Severe threats or growling noises can scare away calories, and other people at the diner. Just be sure to leave them a safe place to run to, or they’ll be back with a vengeance! (True for both groups).

Calories are afraid of heights. If you put your food in a high place, such as on top of the fridge, the calories will get scared and jump out. This is best facilitated by giving them a ramp or ladder to climb down from. Calories are small, with hundreds of them fitting into a single cookie, so even a piece of thread looks like a grand staircase to them. They’ll have no trouble making their way down if they’re scared enough of being up high. Even if they have to jump. They hate heights that much, and do not have logical responses to stressful situations.

A corollary to this is that food in low places may collect the fleeing calories from the food in high places. This is why even when you’re following your diet and only eating the lettuce in the crisper drawer of your fridge, you always seems to gain weight anyway. The calories from your butter have snuck down there! Lettuce, by the way, is secretly evil. Under controlled lab conditions, it presents itself as largely free of calories, hardly associating with them at all. But out in the wild real world, lettuce readily aligns itself with calories, harbouring them and building them up within its nested leaves as some kind of highly fortified barracks, turning those mindless loitering calories into a highly trained force to be handled with extreme caution and delicacy.

Calories have weak grips. If you shake your food before you eat it, you can loosen up the calories and even shake some out entirely! They can’t hold on to the delicious food with their weak grips, and will fly away. A good way to facilitate this is to break your food in half: the calories will just come pouring out! Combine this tip with the previous one, and shake your food above your head — just watch out for crumbs and sloshing.

Calories go on vacation. They don’t want to work at making you fat any more than you want to work on TPS reports when on vacation. Take them out for a nice trip by the river, and lay out a picnic under a shady tree. Who can think of work in situations like that?

To be continued tomorrow…

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Almost three years ago I created a video called Little Known Facts About Calories. I had planned to make a whole series of such videos, but the first two had such a cold reception and so few views that I gave up — making those flash videos is a fucktonne of work, and after three years it still hasn’t even hit 100 views (though to be fair the subsequent installments would have been easier after I had climbed partway up the Flash learning curve and had created the base shapes for the calories and other elements). So here, with minimal editing and embellishing, are the notes that would have formed the basis for the planned ten-episode run (would have been about 6 minutes of animation all-together).