The Heavy (14 page)

Our opposing roles in this effort—Mom as the heavy, Dad as the fun guy—were characteristic of our general parenting personas. We were usually on the same page overall, but we went about getting there very differently. As two stubbornly opinionated people, we had arguments that were always, as my husband put it, “only about things that were never going to change.” I wasn’t about to loosen up. He wasn’t going to stress himself out. I thought an extra
frozen yogurt was a big setback. He thought it was a useful break from the stringency of Bea’s diet.

It was easy for me to get annoyed with what I often saw as his hindrance of our progress. But if I think about it in a calm moment, I suppose that sort of balance is helpful for our kids, and even for the dieting process. In the same way that I see value in letting Bea have some nutritionally deficient but fun treat every day to stay motivated, Jeff’s more permissive approach to eating, as long as it wasn’t frequent or excessive, was probably a good thing for her, too. He let me oversee the kids’ eating my way when they were on my watch, even when he felt I was sometimes too strict. So I returned the favor when it was his turn to feed them. It wasn’t that often, in any case.

But one area in which my husband and I do not at all see eye to eye is with regard to the utility of exercise. He wakes up an hour early four times a week and works out at the gym, while I sleep. He has exercise clothes and gadgets, whereas I honestly don’t even own a pair of sneakers. The fact that it has taken me this long to talk at any length about exercise is reflective of my general attitude toward it—which is that it is hugely overrated as a tool in weight loss.

I know that this attitude often makes jaws drop in shock at my ignorance, but hear me out. There are three reasons I can think of why people work out: for their health (improving their cardiovascular functioning, reducing risk of heart disease, prolonging life span), for fitness (being able to lift a suitcase into a car trunk, carry around a small child, take the stairs, run to catch a bus, ride a bike for fun), and for weight loss (burning calories and fat in the expectation that it will lower one’s body mass).

Let’s start with the first one. I’m in favor of exercising for health. If someone has health problems such as heart disease, I can
see that exercise would be a good thing. I do think it is possible to be healthy without exercise if you’re genetically lucky. My grandmother Beatrice lived until she was 106, and you know she wasn’t jogging or playing soccer during the entirety of the 1900s and early 2000s.

I am not a great role model in that department. I have a sedentary career, am terrible at sports, and find gyms deathly boring. Other than brisk daily walking—to the extent that it is convenient as I go about the execution of my errands and parental obligations—I do no formal exercise. Perhaps wrongly, I believe that my fortunate genetics and clean bill of health exempt me from the requirement of exercising for the sake of overall wellness or optimizing my life span.

Then there’s physical fitness. In that department, too, I believe genetics has a hand. I believe that, with an inordinate amount of effort and time, I could train to, say, run several miles—slowly. Or do many repetitions of sit-ups. But that it would be more difficult for me than for someone more naturally inclined toward that kind of activity.

I do wish I were more physically fit—able to, say run the three blocks to meet Bea’s school bus without stopping or more easily take the stairs in the event of an electrical outage. But the effort-benefit ratio does not make for a compelling argument to exercise for this purpose, given how much I hate it. So I don’t. I’m strong enough to climb up the subway steps, to haul a suitcase, and to carry my children to bed when they fall asleep on the couch. Other than that, I make sure I’m on time for Bea’s bus, and I hope for the best for the power grid.

I truly believe it is important for my children to exercise for their overall health and to do so in order to be physically fit—to be able to lift things, and run, and climb. So in my most do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do
bit of parenting hypocrisy, I seek out physical activity for them, in order to instill the habit and give them the advantages that exercise can bring.

But as for exercise as an important tool in weight loss—I just cannot get on board.

Lack of exercise is one of the lifestyle deficiencies experts invoke to explain why we are getting fatter. Our bodies, the argument goes, evolved with the expectation that our survival would depend on a much higher level of activity in our daily lives than our current existence affords. But that explanation may be a red herring. In 2012, Herman Pontzer, an assistant professor of anthropology at Hunter College, reported some findings in
The New York Times
about the extent to which our sedentary lifestyles are to blame for the obesity epidemic. He studied the modern-day Hadza people of Tanzania, who still maintain a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. He found they burn the same number of calories per day as modern Americans do.

How can that be? Pontzer posits that our bodies adapt to account for our energy demands. “
If we push our bodies hard enough, we can increase our energy expenditure, at least in the short term,” Pontzer wrote. “But … our bodies adapt to our daily routines and find ways to keep overall energy expenditure in check.” Our bodies evolved to compensate for increased levels of exertion.

The upshot: “
We’re getting fat because we eat too much, not because we’re sedentary,” Pontzer believes. And he agrees with me that while “physical activity is very important for maintaining physical and mental health … we aren’t going to Jazzercise our way out of the obesity epidemic.”

Let me acknowledge that I know there are people with more active lifestyles than mine, who burn more calories every day than I do, and who therefore can eat more. A waitress, a nurse, a kids’
gymnastics coach—sure. There are also people who are super active in their leisure time, and they’re in that same category. I have a friend who lives in the country, and when we go visit her for a weekend, I see that she is moving all day: tennis in the morning, a bike ride into town before lunch, a hike with her kids in the afternoon, et cetera. In the short term, that is going to affect what she can eat. These are people whose normal lives are different from mine because they engage in sustained activity for many hours per day. I’m never going to be like them, professionally or personally.

But let’s talk about working out—the kind of forced, regular, discrete periods of exercise that people do in order to burn more calories, like jogging, riding a stationary bike, or going to a gym. I have periodically tried to integrate exercise into my weight-loss efforts. In high school when I joined Jack LaLanne, and fifteen years later at the New York City gym I tried out with my husband, I truly committed to going. I showed up several times a week to do circuit training, take aerobics or yoga classes, and hit the treadmill or rowing machine. Each time I gave it a real commitment for a full year.

My time at the gym may have made a difference—maybe I was slightly less out of breath upon rushing to the subway for work, or I could carry my handbag around with marginally less arm fatigue—but if so, the benefit was minuscule. And with all the effort I was expending, I was maybe burning 300 or 400 calories at each visit. Do you realize how quickly I can eat 400 calories? Exactly the number of seconds it takes to dip a soupspoon into a jar of peanut butter a few times. Do you know how willing I am to keep the lid on the peanut butter jar if it means saving the cost and effort of going to the gym, not to mention avoiding my deep dislike of every minute I spend there?

Then there’s the fact that with increased exertion comes the
need for increased caloric intake. So you’re basically forced to compensate for your burned calories by eating more food than you otherwise would. I tried to challenge this theory by combining calorie cutting with increased exercise—the activities would seem to go hand in hand for a dieter—and the results were not good. It turns out that it’s not ideal to go to the gym and hit the treadmill strenuously after work if you ate only a salad for lunch. I found that out the hard way, when I needed to be assisted out of my gym by a staff member after getting dizzy on the treadmill. But if you’re going to have to bulk up on calories in order to have the energy to work out, what’s the point, from a weight loss perspective?

I did not renew those gym memberships once they expired. And I stand by my belief that while I’d be in better shape in terms of muscle tone and cardiovascular fitness were I engaged in regular physical exercise, I wouldn’t be substantially thinner.

Now, certainly, I have become skilled at finding evidence—anecdotal and otherwise—to support whatever theories about diet and exercise promote my personal worldview. But I’ve also tested these theories for decades, and I stick to what works. If exercise reliably made me drop weight, I’d make myself do it even though I hate it. If junk food in small quantities made me fatter, I’d avoid it. I am practical. I will do something faithfully, even if it makes me deeply unpopular with my own family, if it produces results. I focus my willpower where it will make a difference.

As it happens, my crackpot theories sometimes end up being affirmed by the scientific community.
My anecdotal evidence about the pointlessness of working out for the purpose of weight reduction was bolstered in 2009 by a
Time
magazine article that confirmed that while exercise is useful in maintaining weight loss, it does not help people lose weight. It quoted Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and, according
to the article, a prominent exercise researcher. He said, “In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless.” It noted that exercise stimulates hunger, causes us to eat more, and “may even be making it harder” to lose weight. See?

Okay, so maybe the Internet makes it easy for anyone to buttress even the most obscure arguments with “scientific” support. There are certainly studies and articles I could cite whose findings are contrary to these. Maybe I’m only seeing what I’m looking for. But before you discard my theories, take a minute to consider them. Our cultural pattern is that we are all lemmings when it comes to the latest diet dogma, and then five years later that advice gets debunked and there’s a new gospel. So I think it’s fair to develop our own principles based on our personal anecdotal experience and gut feelings.

And while exercise has this squeaky-clean image, it can be a sensitive area for overweight kids. The fat kid being chosen last for team sports is a depressing cultural trope for a reason. Physical activity can be downright embarrassing for those not skilled at it. I recall watching TV with Bea one night when we flipped past an episode of
The Biggest Loser
, a show in which obese people compete to lose weight. As we watched the military-style exertion, humiliation, and deprivation to which the contestants are subjected, we happened upon a scene that I expect occurs in some incarnation each season. In it, an extremely overweight woman was being berated by a trainer at a gym, forced to do push-ups until she literally collapsed into tears.

I have to assume this poor woman on TV knew what she was in for when she signed on to a reality fitness show, but if that were me, I would feel utterly demoralized, as if I were a gross, out-of-shape pig who can’t even do four push-ups without failing. Did the few minutes the trainer spent torturing her into a physical and
mental breakdown really burn a lot of calories or give her a good idea of how to become more active?

Granted, this is not a normal, everyday exercise session. Most real-world workouts are more gentle, and I would hope most physical trainers are more emotionally supportive. But the popularity of drill-sergeant workout DVDs and the bumper crop of training gyms with “boot camp” in their names illustrate that many people think tougher is better when it comes to working out, and that the fatter and weaker you are, the more you would benefit from having someone kick your butt into better shape.

But to my mind, it would have made more sense for the TV trainer to take the woman on a slow stroll around the neighborhood, or maybe window shopping. She would have burned a lot more calories, seen how exercise could be not unpleasantly integrated into her daily routine, and not felt like a disgusting failure. But I realize that doesn’t make good television.

I am pretty permissive when it comes to what appears on the television in my home. Since the age of two, my kids have watched
SpongeBob SquarePants
, which I acknowledge has taught them more synonyms for
idiot
than any other source. And if they crawl into my bed late at night, they’re often treated to an episode of
The Daily Show
, even though I know Bea and David no longer accept my explanation that the bleeping noise covers up Jon Stewart’s fondness for saying the word
stupid
a lot. But that night I disgustedly changed the channel away from
The Biggest Loser
, unable to watch—or to let Bea watch—that overweight woman’s indignity and risk having Bea think that that sort of self-mortification was what fat people have to go through in order to become healthy.

While David was prone to run and jump around a lot, that just wasn’t in Bea’s nature. But we live in New York City. We walk a lot. Bea’s young childhood had been filled with creative movement
classes, multi-sports classes, swimming lessons, and dance. But we aren’t exactly a sporty family, and my husband was the only one who engaged in exercise for exercise’s sake. I wasn’t about to force Bea to go jogging around our building or do jumping jacks in our apartment.

Bea was taking a gymnastics class once a week, and attending physical education classes at school and playing outside during recess. The nutrition doctor explained that wasn’t enough.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend kids get sixty minutes of physical activity every day.
According to a study of third graders conducted by The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, in-school PE classes provide an average of only twenty-five minutes of activity per
week
to each child. We’d have to find a fun physical activity that Bea could do regularly, and enjoy.