Putting the Muscle on Flab

It may be a sluggish holiday retail season, but it’s boom time for the folks who sell exercise machines to help us burn up the guilt of holiday calories. And sweat, we are told, has gone high tech.

High tech has brought us “electronically enhanced stationary cycles” in place of ordinary stationary bikes. If you want to find out if you have too much fat, a mere pinch of the upper arm will no longer do; now, a little machine that looks as if it could also give you the temperature of your roasted turkey can tell your percentage of body fat. Will discussion of body fat percentages now join small talk about cholesterol levels as acceptable conversation over dinner? Or, more appropriately, over a couple of glasses of mineral water?

These state-of-the-art machines and devices are the latest weapons in the never ending battle against flab: This time of year television, radio and newspapers are full of ads for speedy weight- loss promotions and programs. Some play on the guilt angle, typically showings pictures of slothful persons breaking springs on bathroom scales. Or there is the fantasy approach, with ads featuring the sinewy bodies of professional models--the implication being that you can look like them if only you pulled yourself out of the easy chair and jumped onto the treadmill. And there are year-end sales for memberships in gyms that offer the use of exercise machines complete with video screens and sound effects that duplicate the exertion of climbing stairs, riding bicycles or rowing boats.

But some experts say that since the body’s cardiovascular system does not know the difference between walking up real stairs and using a machine to duplicate the task, the equipment’s price tags are an expensive affect merely to satisfy a need for digital computer numbers and “bells and whistles.” Instead of using sophisticated machines, one exercise science professor proposes a radical idea: walking daily wherever you can do it (no charge on that yet, unless a personal trainer walks with you). That makes more sense, he suggests, than having people drive and take elevators to go to a club filled with exercise machines.

He may be right. But we hasten to suggest that if someone were to invent a motorized sidewalk cart that offered a sumptuous holiday meal, a cool drink--and maybe a bell and a whistle--that most of us would walk quickly after it. In fact, such a machine would probably sell like, well, hot cakes.