extreme makeover

It seemed like a change was in order, so we're shaking things up here on the Imbecile Sidewalk - a nip here, a tuck there, a slash of lipstick, a more liberal use of the first person plural and voila! a whole new blog. (This is a work in progress, by the way, we realize that you can't actually read the title of the blog as it now stands, and we understand that can severely limited your traffic.)

The inspiration? A Czech TV show called "You Are What You Eat." I watch it regularly with horrified fascination. The premise is simple: each week, an overweight or underweight person is watched as he or she attempts not just to lose or gain weight, but to adopt a more healthy lifestyle.

I've only ever seen the overweight people, so I'm not sure what is done for the skinny ones but I'll happily speculate for you - I sometimes feel that's my purpose here on earth.

With the overweight people, at some point early on, they are blindfolded and led to a table that holds everything they ate the week before - for one guy, this included 15 non-alcoholic beers and 12 liters of normal beer (presented, appetizingly, in those big white industrial-size buckets restaurants buy mayonnaise in, although I don't believe he actually drank it out of these).

They are then shown a table filled with all the healthy things they will now be allowed to eat in a given week.

Speculation alert: I assume for the skinny people they first show them an empty table, then show them the 'before' table of a fat person and invite them to dig in.

There follows (in no particular order) a trip to the doctor; a trip to the grocery store (to buy healthy ingredients for a healthy meal the healthy-meal specialist shows them how to cook); a meeting with a personal trainer; and a trip to the beauty salon where (if you're a woman) your hair is cut, then dyed some unnatural color that doesn't necessarily become you but would certainly draw attention away from the rest of you.

My favorite part of every show is when the host - an actual doctor (pictured below, right, with a featured dieter and one of those tables full of food I was talking about) - sneaks up on the person to find out if he/she is breaking his/her diet. This always takes place when the person is at a party with his/her friends, presumably to up the potential humiliation quotient.

At the end, the weight losing/gaining person is presented with a special oven (I think it works like a normal oven and a convection oven, but remember, I'm watching this in Czech - it may actually be a TV set) and sometimes a more elaborate reward for his/her weight loss (one contestant received the wedding of her dreams - assuming she always dreamed of being married on television after appearing in her underwear in front of the entire nation).

If you're interested, it's on TV Prima every Thursday at 21:10. And if any of you watch it and realize that I have it all wrong, please, keep it to yourselves.