Happy April Fools’ Day! Enjoy Our Extreme Diet Club Video

Extreme Dieters Cooking Club Video

It’s tempting to join in and try to be funny on April Fool’s Day. Lots of people are in the mood for silliness and practical jokes. But being amusing is a risky business because getting a laugh is very hard. What if your audience misunderstands and thinks your jesting is serious? What if they know you’re spoofing, but just don’t find it humorous? What if your April Fool’s joke totally flops, and you’re the April fool? How do you know what’s funny, anyway?

The 2 Day a Week Diet Cookbook

My co-author Ruth Glick and I mulled over all these questions the last few weeks as we began creating a special April Fool’s Day YouTube video to promote our new Kindle cookbook, The 2 Day a Week Diet Cookbook. My first step was to search on YouTube for some cooking show parodies and extreme dieting spoofs. I was astonished at how many were out there, and even more astonished at how few were funny. A lot of  wannabe “comedians” aren’t at all amusing and, furthermore, can’t tell that they’ve bombed!

All this was a bit unnerving, but we truly believed our overall concept was quirky, unexpected, and far-out enough to generate a guffaw or two, so decided to press on. One interesting discovery was that we didn’t always agree on what was hilarious and what was ho-hum. I, for example, thought the green teeth bit was funnier than Ruth did. And she thought the trowel bit was a real knee slapper and I was kind of “eh, it’s cute I guess.”

I don’t want to spoil your fun so that’s all I’ll say except that our video spoofs extreme dieting and over-the-top cooking shows and infomercials. Basically we demo several “amazing” calorie-free recipes that use a “miracle,” nutritive-free  ingredient not normally called for in dishes. No, it’s not a coincidence that the ingredient is green (a color that just inherently seems funny to me, especially for food) and that one of the resulting concoctions, the smoothie shown below, looks like green sludge. 

April Fool’s Day Extreme Diet Green Smoothie

At the end of our video, we get serious and wrap up by showing some of the “real” lo-cal, tasty, and doable dishes in The 2 Day a Week Diet Cookbook. If you really want to lose weight while eating well, they are an easy, healthful, satisfying option–one example is the strawberry smoothie recipe offered here below. The new book, which has 75 recipes and 50 photos,  has already garnered 21 great reviews on Amazon; ALL buyers gave it 5 stars and raved about the recipes. We are thrilled!

Please do check our our Extreme Dieters Cooking Club video and let us know what you think. Do we have a future in comedy or should we just stick to writing cookbooks? Seriously, we’re thinking of doing further episodes, so let us know in the comments section on YouTube or at the bottom of this post.

Strawberry Smoothie (or Lassi)

Here’s an easy, tasty smoothie excerpted from The 2 Day a Week Diet Cookbook. BTW, we provide a detailed nutritional analysis for each dish at the end of each recipe.

Tip: You’ll need to add a little sugar substitute or, if you prefer, honey to the recipe–how much depends on the sweetness of the strawberries. For each teaspoon of honey added, add 20 calories to the recipe; check the label on your diet sweetener for the calories in that.

Makes 2 90-calorie servings, 1 cup each.