A New Way To Burn Fat

Happy New Year, guys and gals! It is midnight here at the very moment I type this. As I write, fireworks and, sadly, gunshots (!), are going off all around my home.

It's the best day of the year to forget all those "issues" you've accumulated over the last 365 days: the debt you racked up, those Christmas cookies going to your thighs, the bosses who passed you over for promotion again, your secret love of Britney Spears' music (and her thighs) – you know, the usual.

Yes, it's time to look forward to the new year and to make resolutions that, you swear, you'll actually live up to this time. Losing weight is always on the top ten list of yearly resolutions, given that 66% of American adults are overweight or obese. Maybe you'd like to help your environment this year, such as by advocating alternative fuels? Or perhaps you'd like to help do something heroic, such as setting a world record?

Well, good news! Now you can do all three of those resolutions at the same time! All you have to do is get liposuction, then donate your fat to be rendered into biofuel for a speedboat that will set a new world circumnavigation speed record:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=503419&in_page_id=1770

Are you tilting your head in wonderment? Please, please tell me that the previous paragraph wasn't the most surreal thing you've read all year!

What better way to make a statement about saving the world, eh? A New Zealander by the name of Pete Bethune is about to attempt to break the world speedboat record for circumnavigating the globe, and he's doing it in a deliciously alien, futuresque trimaran boat called Earthrace. The kicker is that it is 100% powered by biofuel. Ah, but what makes this story so lip-smackingly yummy is that he is making a tiny portion of that biofuel out of his own liposuctioned fat tissue! But he wasn't a very fat man (he has donated only enough fat to render about 100 milliliters of biofuel), so he is enlisting the additional fat tissue of at least two other, more obese people. In total, so far, they have 10 liters of human fat (picture, if you will, 10 one-liter bottles of your favorite soda).

Now say in unison: Ewww!

That's enough rendered biofuel for only a little more than 9 of the 24,000 nautical miles around the world. It's the thought that counts, don't ya know. Bethune hopes to beat the previous record of 75 days, set in 1998 by the British (and badly named!) boat, the Cable and Wireless Adventurer, an equally-cool spaceship-looking trimaran.

So, did you want to suck off some of your fat for the sake of an environmental message and world record? No? Come on, it's so little for such a big reward!

We've all got to have goals, after all ….