I've exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.

Using her trademark hyperbole, Bombeck jokes about the extremes of diet-and-fitness culture by imagining women so emaciated that scavenger birds mistake them for carrion. The line satirizes social pressure—especially on women—to pursue thinness as a moral or social ideal, even when it becomes unhealthy or absurd. It also positions the speaker as an everywoman observer in a gym or exercise-class setting, contrasting ordinary bodies with the intimidating presence of “too-thin” fitness devotees. The humor works by exaggeration and incongruity, but the underlying critique is serious: a culture that rewards self-erasure and treats the body as a project to be relentlessly minimized.