I have found a diet that seems to suit my purpose. : Savoring the Tasty Fish Split

I have been on a diet most of my adult life due to genetic traits inherited from my parents that left me with short legs and a pot belly.

There was nothing I could do about the short legs back then, although I read recently in the National Enquirer that scientists added a foot of height to a dwarf by stretching him.

The process, according to the Enquirer, wasn’t as simple as “You take one end and I’ll take the other, and we’ll pull.” Au contraire.

They deliberately broke the dwarf’s legs, opened a gap between the bones and let the natural healing process add height.

It is a painful and complicated operation and should not be tried at home on your little friends.

The dwarf in the before-and-after photographs, by the way, ended up not only a foot taller but better dressed.

Even if the story is true I’m probably too brittle to be stretched at my age and do not savor the notion of having my legs broken. I have ambled along on short legs this long and will make it the rest of the way without additional height.

Always, however, I have felt there was something I could do about my tendency toward obesity, especially as I began to drift toward the cruel middle years.

I was motivated by a vision of myself as one of those old men you see shuffling around Chatsworth with a pot belly and skinny legs, wearing red checkered shorts with an unzippered fly.

I tried every diet that came along with varying degrees of success from Scarsdale to Pritikin, losing and gaining an accumulative total of about 600 pounds in the past 10 years. None of them worked over the long haul.

But at last I have found a diet that seems to suit my purpose and I want to share that with you today. Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, the Burbank Diet.

That is not only the name of the diet but the title of a book by Lola Peters who created the diet in the spirit of Burbank after moving here from Bub’s Crossing, Utah, wherever that is.

I was attracted to the book not only by its title and by a desperate need for a column but also by the cover picture of something the author calls a “fish split.”

The fish split is a banana split in which the banana is replaced with a whole cooked fish lying between mounds of ice cream. The fish has a cherry in its mouth and whipped cream along its unscaled back.

It was such an abominable collation that I couldn’t wait to read the book, which belonged to Greg Braxton, our man in Burbank. When I asked if I could borrow it he said, “You can have the damned thing.”

I learned from reading “Burbank Diet” that the fish split is symbolic of its basic strategy, which Lola Peters calls “noxious combining.”

The idea is to make food so unpalatable that even the crudest of individuals will not want to eat it. There are some things that even catsup won’t save.

In addition to the fish split, Peters offers a variety of other possible combinations that are equally offensive. Under a category of “Down Home Noxious,” for instance, she includes strawberries and cream combined with prairie oysters, and under “Gourmet Noxious,” chocolate mousse and headcheese.

The “hearty-man Jello platter,” pictured on Page 26, features such a vile compost of foods that I will spare you a precise description, except to ask that you imagine yourself eating a live monkey smothered in peanut butter.

An equally significant section of the book quite properly suggests that no diet is effective without exercise. True to the nature of the Burbank Diet, Peters offers some untypical methods by which one might exert one’s self in the name of good health.

This ranges from the calories burned in a family feud (138 for jumping up and down, 249 for faking a heart attack) to a less strenuous form of “air walking” which, as the author points out, builds delusions of grandeur even as it sheds pounds.

My favorite is called “Putting on the Dog.” It goes as follows:

“1. Muzzle dog. 2. Heft dog lightly in the air. 3. Settle dog around your shoulders like a shawl. 4. Walk 20 paces with dog draped around shoulders so that front legs hang straight down.”

The amount of calories burned range from 12 for using a Pekingese to 227 for a Saint Bernard.

Finally, the author suggests sex as a means of weight control, to wit: “Sex is fun, sex is fulfilling and best of all, sex is nonfattening. The Burbank Diet endorses sex and plenty of it, especially at mealtimes.”

There is no specific benefit mentioned, but I recall reading in Life magazine several years ago that the normal sex act burns 150 calories, give or take one’s general interpretation of normal.

If, however, you hold sex on a more spiritual plane and reject its application as a function of dieting, and if personal ethics forbid tossing dogs around, just go for the fish split on a regular basis and you will no doubt be down to skin and bones in no time.

And meanwhile, of course, bon appetit .