In the Lite’n Up kit you will find a personal notebook, magnets, stickers, and a grocery list. The notebook is your dieting bible. In it, you are to record the date, your weight, what you eat, and gauge your mood. Each page is accompanied by a funny reminder – it may cause you to smile (“If you had to choose, which would you take: a) great sex or b) fettuccine alfredo. Helpful thought: you do have to choose.”), or laugh (“When told that people were hungry with no bread to eat, Marie Antoinette famously said, ‘Let them eat cake!’ Historians now agree that Ms. Antoinette was a horribly vain woman who wanted everyone else to be heavier than she was. A kinder, gentler Marie Antoinette would have said, ‘Let them eat high fiber crackers!’), or groan (A Let’s-Be-Honest-With-Yourself Question: which phrase more accurately describes your rear-end: buns of steel or buns of uncooked dough?”). Take it to heart and hearken back to it at those critical moments when you are about to lose your self-restraint. The magnets, stickers, and grocery list are reinforcement. After all, anyone would think twice about opening a frig with a magnet on it that reads, “The 11th Commandment: thou shall not weigh more than thy refrigerator”, or reaching into a candy jar with a sticker that says, “Is your stomach grumbling? Good – it’s saying, ‘Thank you’”, or purchasing large quantities of carbohydrates when your grocery list tells you, “A bit confusing but true: to have a French woman’s body, you must not eat French bread, French toast, or French fries.”

By the time you complete the Lite’n Up kit, you’ll be slim – it’s so easy, it’s not even funny . . . well, actually, it is pretty funny.

Samara Quirine Klein works as a children’s books sales manager at Harry N. Abrams, Inc., and moonlights as a humorist – winning the first New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest and writing humor for The Boston Globe. Her short stories have been published in the literary journals PIF and Release. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.