By Mary Gold

Michelle Segar, PhD, MPH sounds a bit outraged. She’s read an article by John Cloud, who exercises like heck and still has a doughnut habit; in fact, he’s wearing the doughnut around his waist as he types at his computer. And he’s blaming his doughnut on exercise. Imagine.

Segar writes in a More.com Magazine article “Cloud blames researchers and public health officials for our culture’s misconception (or misperception) of the key role that exercise plays in weight loss, and I agree with this to some extent. But, the marketing by fitness companies aiming to sell their products and services as the magic bullet to your dream body are the true culprits of America’s unfortunate belief that exercising is as important as dietary changes in producing weight loss.”
Whew. Those academic types can get awfully huffy.
Whereas Cloud, whose exercise routine sounds as if he’s training for a triathlon,  takes four, count ‘em, four pages to state the obvious. (Drum roll precedes truism.) “In short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight,” he writes in Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin, (Time: August 9, 2009) at the very end of the article. I’d like to mock the man, really have fun with his ability to make us wait four pages before socking it to us.
I can’t, though, because I’ve been there. Well, sort of. Years ago, my only exercise consisted of walking. His routine is quite different.
Read on to feel the man’s pain: “As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I'll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30 minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy — an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week.”
No mocking allowed. Why not?
I was a chunko well into my late forties. Up and down, up and down, svelte one month, chunky the next. I wish I could blame my husband-at-the-time, but he didn’t actually insert my favorite kettle chips into my mouth and he wasn’t the one buying Ben and Jerry chocolate with peanut butter, along with peppermint stick, sliding it into the freezer behind the frozen peas so he wouldn’t find my fatty little secret. (Ah, how I loved that taste of cold mint in the summer on a sugar cone)
I did all the inserting on my own.
I think it was my Carrie Bradshaw-ness that made me question a few little details. I was working in shopping malls. Part of my job was to walk the mall every day, talk to store managers and owners, and it was during these jaunts that I staked out my next purchases. Bolstered by my healthy discount, of course. I knew the look I wanted. It’s just that I never quite looked the look I wanted. Why? I didn’t quite have the body. I was er, chunky. No, let me be honest. I was fat.
Nope, no light bulb went on, no buzzers rang, signaling me that diet and exercise go together. It took years and major surgery, nine days in the hospital and almost twenty pounds later for me to realize—thin at last—that to maintain that lighter weight I needed to eat healthy. And, to build the muscle I’d lost, I had to exercise, heft a few weights.
So, even if I don’t mock, I’ve got to smirk. Both Time and More magazines use photographs of doughnuts to enhance their articles. I’m not a doughnut person. Doughnuts don’t give me pause, don’t make me salivate.
Perhaps if they’d used chocolate ice cream laced with ribbons of fudge and nuts instead of a silly doughnut, well, then maybe that bad habit of eating a lot of goodies post-exercise would have rung true.
What I’ve found, though, is that exercising makes me want to eat well to feed my body, nourish it. I now understand what it means to eat for fuel. And mostly I do it.
Speaking of fuel, I’m going to call my friend Snake. There’s a solid chance he’ll want to go for ice cream tonight.