Oh happy day!

I don’t know why it has taken so long for this to come to my attention, but the August 9 edition of TIME.com contains an article by the evidently brilliant and insightful John Cloud called “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin.” (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-1,00.html)

Take a moment, as I did, to savor the concept. Let the mix of delight and relief wash over you as it washed over me.

Notice the delicious absence of doubt. This is no namby-pamby “can exercise make you thin?” The underlying premise that it won’t is here a given.

Oh that we had known this truth for the past 50ish years! The abuse I took from Coach Earhart and Coach Jasper! (You think I could forget their names?) The hours I jogged. The gyms I joined. The Jane Fonda Workout Tapes (no, really). The goddamn Marine Corps Marathon!

And for what?

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher.

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," say it loud and there’s music playing,
"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," say it soft and it’s almost like praying,

My man John … May I call you “my man,” John? … Later in his canonical article observes:

Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

I would do a little happy dance, but I don’t want that much exercise to ruin my diet.

Lest Dr. Ravussin’s LSU credentials seem a little second tier, I give you Harvard:

"The most powerful determinant of your dietary intake is your energy expenditure," says Steven Gortmaker, who heads Harvard's Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity. "If you're more physically active, you're going to get hungry and eat more."

I’ll be right here on the sofa, watching HGTV while watching my weight.

Integral to the whole wrongheaded premise that exercise benefits weight loss (No it doesn’t. No it doesn’t! Ha, ha, no it doesn’t!!), is the assertion that “muscle weighs more than fat.” As I never tire of explaining, gently, to my loved ones, that’s idiotic. A pound of muscle weighs sixteen ounces, while a pound of fat weighs … ah … um … sixteen ounces. I will let Obesity Research shoot down the point this crew may be trying to make:

…, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle — a major achievement — you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight.

I was with them right up until “a teaspoon of butter.” Who would eat a teaspoon of butter? I just went to the kitchen to measure. It would take four or five teaspoons of butter to cover half a baked potato. Just like doctors and auto mechanics and colorists, these science people would be a lot better off if they spoke in ways that reflected real people’s lives.

And I know exercise isn’t the only problem. I’ve been down the “I need more butter on this cheese, I’m on a diet” route. It was the only time I had a doctor call me an idiot to my face.

Exercise does have demonstrated benefits in alleviating and preventing any number of health problems. So? Does anyone exercise for health? No, really. I’m sure people say they do, but what’s the real skinny?  Are the grim and drawn faces atop the Stairmaster there for their health? Do the red-faced and grunting power lifters grunt for their health? The brightly-colored wide-hipped step aerobecizers? The huffing spinners competing with the air?

Health, my ass. 

But like this post, John’s article isn’t just about exercise or weight, it speaks to universal themes:

In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it.

Self control weakens after you use it. This is a principle that has long guided my life. I am on a perpetual quest to conserve my self-control. I practice this conservation at the mall, as well as at the buffet table. I apply it to all my appetites with equal rigor. I think you will find great benefit in being as sparing with your self-control as I am with mine.