Party’s Over for Those Who Overindulged

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OK, now that I have your attention, perhaps we can get real for a few minutes.

Before I go any further, though, I’d like you to sit down. That’s right. Now lean back, relax, and look down.

No, not at the floor. At your belt. Or more accurately, at the roll of flesh that is prohibiting you from seeing your belt.

Very good. Now we can continue.

It’s now been a week since our excuses for overindulging disappeared.

No more turkeys with buttery stuffing, eaten under the guise of being together with our families.

No more huge quantities of gooey, sugary, delicious things, popped into our mouths with the pronouncement that “What the hay, it’s the holiday season.”

No more sweet liqueurs--each containing about 3,000 calories per sip--downed as we toasted to our friends’ good fortune in the coming year. As if we cared.

And no more kidding ourselves, either. There is no denying it: This recent spate of cold weather clearly did not--as we convinced ourselves that it would--force our body to burn three times more calories to stay warm.

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So what now?

Get ready for a different kind of holiday crowd.

“There’s been a big jump in membership this week,” said Stacey Long, who works at the front desk of Body Venture, a health club in Simi Valley. “A lot of people are joining up now. It’s gotten pretty busy.”

Long, who described a surge in attendance taking place at numerous other health clubs around the county, said she doesn’t have a weight problem. She is one of those people who “can eat anything I want and not gain weight.”

You know, the kind of person you feel like tying to a chair and force-feeding Ding Dongs to.

But she said she understands what it must be like.

Right. The same way I understand what it must be like to be Raquel Welch.

Personally, I find it difficult to imagine how anyone who has not experienced it firsthand could know what it’s like to take one bite of pecan pie at dinner--and wake up the next morning two sizes larger.

Or to step onto the new computerized scales that your thoughtful family member got you for Christmas, and hear, “Danger! You are exceeding the maximum weight load for this unit!”

Or to have your Significant Other sit on the sofa impatiently, tapping his toes, while you rip through your closet--piling pants upon dresses upon skirts--looking for just one thing that will fit.

No, this is something that is reserved for those of us who have been there. For those of us who secretly tear out those no-pain diet ads from the Enquirer while we’re waiting in the market checkout line. Who pray for a bad case of the flu.

Who want, with all our might, to believe that the European herbal body wrap, which one local beauty salon touts as being able to “flush out all the toxins in the body and help in the process of losing weight,” really will do the job.

But trust realists like Scott Meyer, owner of Harold and Jean’s Health Club in Oxnard, to shoot us down.

“Sometimes someone will get one of those body wraps to fit into a dress for a party,” he said. But since the weight loss is mainly water, he added, “Hopefully you’ll get out of there by 12 or you’ll turn back into a pumpkin.”

Meyer, whose parents started the health club 30 years ago, isn’t surprised at the lengths some people will go to, come January. “You get a lot of people this time of year who have put on weight over the holidays and then they think they’re going to come in on Monday and lose it by Friday,” he said.

“That’s real typical. I think the reason is that, over the years, there’s been so much media hype on the different products. You know, the ‘I-lost 45-pounds-in-10-days’ things that come up.”

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Meyer said he tells it to members straight--which, of course, most of us don’t really want to hear.

No. 1: No, there is no pill that will speed up a person’s metabolism. To do that, Meyer said, you’ve got to work on increasing muscle tone.

No. 2: To increase your metabolism, you’ve got to do more than just join a health club. (I know this to be true. I joined one last January for its low, low membership rates, and based on my biannual visits it ended up costing me $150 per workout.)

No. 3: It won’t happen overnight. “You’ve got to set small goals and keep at it,” he said. “You didn’t put it on in a day and you’re not going to lose it in a day.”

Thanks, Scott, for sharing. I’m sure we all feel much better now.