32 Easy, Practical Weight-Loss Tips for Your Busy Schedule

by D.T. Bell

Losing weight can be hard, so it’s important that you tailor your weight loss plan to your personality and lifestyle. Here are a few tips to help you do that!

1. Join the Mormon Church.

2. Volunteer to serve as a full-time Mormon missionary.

3. Receive your mission call to Rosario, Argentina.

4. Report to the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, for 12 weeks of language and missionary training. Sit in a classroom for 12 hours a day and eat cafeteria food. This is going to result in a little weight gain, but just keep going!

5. Fly to Rosario, Argentina, in October and discover, to your surprise, that Argentina is just heading into summer. What?!

6. Get assigned to a little town called Funes, Argentina, that consists mostly of weekend homes for rich people from Rosario. From 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. go clap outside the yards of empty mansions and stop people on the street. Try to follow conversations in Spanish between your Uruguayan companion and the people he’s talking to. Wait for the appearance of words you recognize. There’s one! “No!” You know what “no” means! Also quickly come to recognize “Yo soy Catolico!”

7. Eat lunch and study from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Eat the unidentifiable stuff that the Uruguayan buys, because you have no idea what’s available to eat in Argentina and even if you did you wouldn’t know how to ask for it or how much it costs. Start to lose weight.

8. Eat lunch sometimes in the homes of local Mormons. Some of them are very poor. Realize they’re giving you food that they can’t really spare. Hate yourself for not liking it. Lose more weight.

9. Go back out from 2 to 9:30 p.m. It’s so hot. Why is it so, so hot? Discover that the entire country sleeps from 1 to 4 p.m., and that they wouldn’t open the door for someone bringing a Publishers Clearing House check, let alone two Mormon missionaries, one of whose participation in conversations is limited to smiling dumbly, nodding vigorously, and turning his head back and forth like he was watching a ping-pong match.

10. Force yourself to listen to the conversations and try to make sense of them. Force yourself not to think of what you’d be doing at home right now. Of your family and your friends and the food you like to eat and a time when you didn’t always have to be within a few feet of an Uruguayan who plainly hates you.

11. Go home at 9:30, study a little more, eat some more of the weird stuff the Uruguayan is buying (and is making you pay for), say a desperate, longing prayer, and go to bed.

12. Wake up and do this every day for the next five months. Receive virtually no interest in your message from the good people of Funes, Argentina. Figure out that the Uruguayan’s two-year tour is over soon, and that he’s packed it in and is just running out the clock. Start to pick up a little Spanish. Start to figure out how to buy food you like. (They have ham here! For sandwiches! And Sprite!) Start to gain a little weight.

13. Discover alfajores. Gain more weight.

14. Contemplate throwing the Uruguayan through a window. He’s not heavy, and he deserves it. And you’d certainly get sent home . . .

15. Get transferred to San Jose de Feliciano in the province of Entre Rios. Gaucho country. Middle of nowhere country. Get a new companion, a Porteño from Buenos Aires. The Porteño is soft-spoken and committed and . . . nice to you. Love him instantly like a mistreated puppy and realize things are looking up.

16. Work all day but actually get somewhere. The people in Feliciano are more interested in what you have to say, which is great because you now actually have something to say.

17. Meet Hermano Garcilazo, a half-blind former drunk who lives in a little shack and cooks his food over an open fire and spends all his time with the missionaries spreading the good word of how he overcame the bottle through the power of Jesus Christ.

18. Try to make sense of a world where Hermano Garcilazo lives in a shack and cooks his food over an open fire. Try to figure out why he’s so happy about it all.

19. Get fleas. Start to unravel mentally. Have your mom send you flea collars for dogs that you wrap around your wrists and ankles at night, to no avail.

20. Seriously start to freak out about the fleas. Feel them walking up and down your legs all day long. Scratch their bites with your “Elder Bell” name tag until they bleed while you read scriptures in the morning. Feel the itch of those bites every time you take a step. This is tough luck, because you take a lot of steps.

21. Spend your one free day of the week cleaning every surface in your house with Clorox to get rid of the fleas. Put every last possession in a garbage bag and spray it with Raid and seal it shut. Go out and work that night and pray harder than you knew you could that it will work.

22. Come home, get in your bed, feel the fleas, realize it didn’t work, start crying. Really, really crying. Sobbing.

23. Feel the Porteño in the bed next to yours trying to figure out what to say to the crying American. Feel relief when he decides not to say anything and goes to sleep. Cry some more, and then do the post-cry thing where you suck air in really fast for a couple of minutes.

24. Come to terms with the fact that the fleas are here to stay, and start to think of them as your friends.

25. Come in contact with a family who lives on a ranch several miles outside of town who is interested in being taught about your church.

26. Get assigned by the Porteño to go out to this family’s house with Hermano Garcilazo while the Porteño teaches another family in town.

27. Realize that Hermano Garcilazo is really old and can’t walk nearly that far and will have to take his horse.

28. Realize that you are forbidden by mission rules from riding a horse.

29. Jog next to Hermano Garcilazo on his horse on the way to the family’s ranch, and then on the way back.

30. Do this a couple of times a week — jog next to an old man on a horse on empty dirt roads where the moon shines bigger and brighter than the sun. Try to comprehend how you, a kid from a suburb of Salt Lake City, came to be in this place with these people. Start to like it.

31. Lose, I don’t know, 20 lbs. in a month or two.

32. Discover there’s a bakery down the street from your house where the church has a tab. Discover that the bakery sells hot, fresh, scone-like pastries filled with dulce de leche.

33. Visit the bakery every morning for a few months, grabbing a few pastries for you, and a few for Hermano Garcilazo.

34. Gain back the 20 lbs. you lost and then some.

Sorry, never mind! Now that I see it all written down I realize this weight loss plan is highly impractical and doesn’t even work. Maybe cut down on carbs.

D.T. Bell lives in Utah with his wife and dog. He used to blog at dontdodumbthings.com and currently blogs on Mormon stuff at mormonamerican.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @davistbell.