Only 210 More Minutes to Go for the Week

All these studies coming out that say nope, a low cal diet isn't going to do the trick if you want permanent weight loss. What you really need is to exercise yourself into a frenzy. Oh, and if you want the weight to stay off? Well, then you're going to have to keep increasing the amount of exercise you do each day until eventually you'll have to exercise aerobically 18 hours a day (The last 8 hours your body needs to rest or your brain explodes, or use those hours to do weight work and build those muscles up, fuck mental health). You an also eat starvation level calories while doing all this until you'll eventually won't be able to eat any food at all without gaining weight, as your metabolism will have slowed down to keep up with all the exercise.

The more and more I read and just observe as I go through life, the more I realize the only way to be thin is to be born with the right set of genes.

Sure, there are those rare reports - so rare that these people get magazine articles written about them - who lose a hundred or more pounds and keep the weight off, usually until the article gets published. Those are the people who were born at a normal weight, normal to thin their entire childhood and young adulthood, gained weight after some event in their lives - childbirth, medical problem, certain medications, injuries, etc. - and as soon as they started exercising again or stopped eating 10,000 calories of food each day went back to the size they were before the event. The people who were born fat, were fat as children - even while on very low calorie diets throughout very active childhoods - and their young adulthoods will stay fat into their old age, no matter what food plan they follow, no matter how much exercise they do. It's been proven time and time again. Read any weight loss message board or blog and you'll find thousands of us, some who are still trying to lose weight in their 70's and have been trying since their childhoods.

Anyway, all this leads me to this thread on the McDougall forums. How do people do it? How can they get in a few hundred minutes of exercise every week and still have a life? Or joints? I pull a muscle doing a Richard Simmons stretching tape that others have said put them to sleep and have dislocated my shoulder doing a toning video of his. Leslie Sansone's WalkAerobics videos now aggravate my sciatica, and for a long time I couldn't do them - or even walk too far in "real life" - because of Achille's tendinitis and plantar fasciitis. I once blew my knees out falling off my bike, and I was in my 20's back then, and three times broke my left wrist while on roller skates.

I was very active as a child, always running, climbing, biking, playing ball, and since we had no car, walking every where I wanted to go. Our school had calisthenics in the schoolyard every morning for at least 15 minutes before the bell rang and again before the bell after lunch. Gym class brought more formal exercise, and because I was fat, my parents had me do workouts with Jack LaLanne every morning before school and repeat them again after dinner (Yep, on a full stomach. Well, as full as it gets on 1000 calories a day, which is the diet I was on for just about every year of my childhood, from toddlerhood through adolescence and continued into my adult life with the occasional dip into the 800's when the doc and my mom got frustrated because I wasn't losing). I stayed fat. When I hit high school and no longer had the time to do all that exercise, and PE class consisted not of calisthenics but sports and the President's Physical Fitness Test, I did gain a bit of weight, but not that much, probably 20 pounds, mostly because I was rebounding from yet another stint at less than 1000 calories and going through puberty (which didn't hit until the winter of eighth grade).

I was an active young adult, first working as a nurses aide (now known as health assistants or something) while going through nursing school, then as an LPN working the occasional 16 hour shift in ICU-CCU, while going to school for my RN and degree, then working as an RN, still doing the occasional double shift, but also running a household and caring for my m-i-l who had Alzheimer's and leukemia. And this was when hospitals weren't as automated as they are now. We washed bedpans, we shook down mercury thermometers, we hand-cranked beds and flipped mattresses every day, we delivered all the patient food trays, lifted them in and out of beds without hoists or lifts. Nursing was very demanding physical work! Not like it is now in the two hospitals I recently visited people at. Not only was everything electronic and computerized, but nurses, even the aides, no longer did a lot of anything physical. Lifts and hoists to move patients, bedpan wrappers so when the patient is done you just tie off the plastic bag, specialty people coming in to do things the nurses used to do themselves. In one hospital the nurses didn't even give out meds, there were med technicians who did all that. The nurses mostly stayed in the nursing station working on computers. What happened to nursing care? The gentle reassuring touch that told the patient everything is going to work out all right?

I lost all train of thought. All I remember about it now is that there always were fat people, there always were skinny people, and no matter what one does, there really isn't any way to turn one into the other permanently. Just take what you got and be happy with it.