Bookstore owners rarely eat out, given our economic circumstances, but these tips will help with your New Year resolutions for weight loss and money retention.

Shelving books burns calories on a sliding scale: the more you eat, the more shelving is worth.

Getting the bright idea to not use a dolly to carry boxes of trade-in books–thereby burning extra calories!–will actually reduce your weekly exercise total. On your second slog up the ramp carrying fifty pounds, your back will go out and you’ll have to sit around for a week while all those little squishy things in your spine return to their proper positions.

Cats are a big aid to calorie loss in a bookstore. The delicate ballet moves of carrying an armload of books and avoiding their game of jingle ball soccer is also good for limbering up. And, of course, the squat-and-recover position picking up the books that fly everywhere is good for the thighs. Go for the burn.

If you need to burn a lot of calories fast, now is an excellent time to rearrange the store’s displays. Haven’t you always intended to put a low shelf in front of that window, move the armchairs into a more cozy position? (Note: Remember, if your back goes out you’re going to lose exercise time; let your partner do the heavy stuff. He won’t mind; he wants to support you.)

Dreaming about exercising uses almost as many calories as planning to do it. After all, as booksellers we know ideas are powerful but need time to germinate.

On those days when you can’t find time to craft a salad, cottage cheese straight from the tub using an iced tea spoon is the busy bookseller’s best friend. Alas, the same cannot be said for the peanut butter jar. Hide it. Desperation makes rules easy to break.

Make your partner shelves cookbooks or food-based novels. Those front cover pictures take FOREVER to get out of your head. Opening a cookbook is twenty calories per browsed page. You don’t need food porn in your life right now.

And let us never forget: reading burns 30 calories per hour. (That’s if you use a real book and turn its pages. If you e-read, it’s only 20. *smirk*)