Simple advice complicated to follow
Two out of three Americans are overweight, and I am pushing Girl Scout cookies. Here’s what the nation’s top health expert Tommy Thompson had to say this week to all us sloths who are feeling especially guilty for having padded our girth over the holidays. “Do you want to look better? Yes. Do you want to feel better? Yes. You lower your calorie intake, you lower your fats, your carbs. You eat more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains and you exercise. That’s as simple as it can be. It is not too hard.”
Yes, but it’s much simpler to talk someone into stocking up on an extra box of Do-si-dos or Tagalongs (they freeze well) than to eat less, exercise more.
Besides who can resist a toothless 6-year-old excited that with the money her Brownie troop raises they can afford to go camping and sleep in a cabinet, even parents can come. (I suppose it will be a tight fit. If we sell enough cookies, perhaps we will be upgraded to a cabin.)
She brought her cookie brochure home last Friday night. Over the weekend, she was eager to sell to the neighbors.
I suggested that she practice her sales pitch. She put on her official Brownie vest and I asked a series of tough questions. Then we talked money.
“How much is a box?”
Three dollars, she replied.
“When do I pay you?”
Every other Wednesday.
“No, not when do I get paid, and give you your allowance. When do cookie customers… Oh never mind, good luck out there.”
She returned with an impressive number of orders, but figured it wasn’t enough and urged me to take her brochure to work.
They are selling like, well, Girl Scout cookies. Which is to say everyone has at least two absolute favorites.
It seems as though every conversation that I’ve had this week has included three components: cookies, diet plans and exercise plans. Everyone has a theory: low carbs, no carbs, cabbage soup, graze all day, eat just one meal.
And then Thompson weighs in with his advice.
While Thompson terms it simple, the simplicity lies in what the government says you should do, certainly not in its execution. That’s complicated.
Not a thing is new. We already know that whole grains, vegetables, fruits, fish and skim milk are better than Twinkies, Doritos and Buffalo chicken wings. And no, Raisenettes aren’t really a fruit, no matter how fervently we’d wish it so. But other than a bit of tweaking in defining portions – which just goes to show that size does matter – we already know this stuff.
We just don’t want to do it.
The government and dieticians can tell us all they want that a serving of pasta is what would fit in a woman’s cupped hand or that a portion of meat is the size of a fist. Dinner isn’t that simple. We pour sauces on our pastas that aren’t found on the food pyramid. How does one count the vegetables found in primavera? No matter how the government slices it (and its working on a revamped pyramid) what we know we should eat and what we do eat are as different as Cheerios and Cheez Whiz.
And who wants to hear that 30 minutes of exercise a day, every day for the rest of forever is necessary to maintain an acceptable weight, and that 60 minutes is better and 90 minutes best of all. Who wants to make time for that?
All this is precisely why two out of three of us weigh more than we ought to. I have 10 pounds, gained after I stopped smoking, to shed. Ten doesn’t seem like much. It’s certainly not obese and my clothes still fit, although a bit snugly.
It’s easy to ignore 10 extra pounds. Then I got to thinking this week a 10-pound sack of potatoes sure is heavy and large. How long do you think you could carry that around without tiring?
So on a much smaller scale I picked up some wrist weights that together weigh just one pound that I thought I’d wear while on my daily walk. As an experiment, I left them on for several hours while I went about my workday, doing nothing more strenuous than pecking away on a keyboard. My arms were exhausted – from weighing just a few ounces more.
Imagine what those 10 pounds are really doing. No wonder I tire sooner than I’d wish.
It is fairly simple to slip off the wristbands and feel the wonderful light sensation that comes with lifting that burden.
It almost lends incentive to do what we’ve known all along: eat less, exercise more. And when those Girl Scout cookies come in, well we’ll see.
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Luanne Traud is the Herald-Standard’s editorial page editor. E-mail: ltraud@heraldstandard.com