Exercising a Point of View : Health: At cholesterol central, couch potatoes say it’s a workout just to lift all those cheeseburgers with extra chili. Fitness buffs say report on risks to the sedentary confirms what they already knew.
The experts had spoken, and the lunch crowd outside Tommy’s Original World Famous Hamburgers on Thursday easily divided into three camps: the smug, the sheepish and the unrepentant.
The subject on the counter--where the faithful line up, belly to belly, to chow down on chili cheeseburgers-- was the latest medical finding that couch potatoes who suddenly undertake vigorous exercise significantly increase their risk of heart attacks.
An avowed couch potato with a tubular waist to prove it, Steve Wiggins didn’t need the studies to stay comfortable with his sedentary status.
“Listen, have you tried holding down a couch for a long time? It ain’t easy,” bellowed Wiggins, financial services director for Saturn, the car manufacturer, who had escaped the politically correct lunch bunch back at work. (“They’re all back eating salads and drinking chamomile tea,” he said.)
“Every once in a while I blow the dust off the exercise bike,” said Wiggins, 43, who indulged in a double chili cheeseburger and a chili dog at the Beverly Boulevard mecca. “I have a strong heart muscle. It’s pumping all this cholesterol.”
“You could actually call this exercise,” said his companion, Dave Saunders, 26, hoisting a burger. “You have to stand to eat. You have to use two hands.”
But others seemed chastened.
“I’m a frustrated weekend jock and a couch potato during the week,” confessed Alonzo Clark, 45, director of personnel for the library department of the city of Los Angeles. He and a co-worker, Ann Kerman, from the Department of Recreation and Parks, were doing their once-a-month Tommy’s sojourn. (“Earlier in the week we had baked potatoes for lunch--honest to God.”)
He said the studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave him pause. “It just means I should be more consistent,” Clark said thoughtfully, as the chili cheeseburger in his left hand began to ooze oily orange sauce down the side of its paper wrapper. “Oops,” he said, catching it in time and focusing back on the task at hand.
But some Tommy’s customers smugly insisted they could have their burgers and clean consciences too.
Don Sprague, 55, a salesman who feasts at Tommy’s once or twice a week and takes daily three-mile walks, said: “If I felt guilty, would I be here?”
Across town at Sports Club L.A., the Westside’s most palatial exercise haunt, the news came as zero surprise to the clientele that pumps and rides and sweats daily. (These people, the studies assert, are still in good shape.)
“I think it’s ridiculous for someone who hasn’t exercised to take two flights of stairs,” said Cindy Margol, an administrative assistant at the club, as she gingerly spooned frozen yogurt (“It’s nonfat”) at her desk. “You should take it very slowly--maybe start with a treadmill.”
If anything, this group feels quietly vindicated. “No question about it. I’ve been doing the right thing,” said writer-producer Larry Spiegel, who is in his early 50s. Spiegel says he exercises 10 times a week at pursuits, including workouts at the club, five-mile runs and thrice-weekly tennis games. But even he worries about those heart attacks. “It’s always in the back of your mind. I knew a guy who dropped dead on a tennis court years ago.”
But there was little condescension from the converted. Mostly, they had encouraging words of advice for those just rising from the couch.
“If you’re sedentary and you start running, you’ll be up on your max rate right away,” said chiropractor Susanne Bennett, meaning heart rate, of course. Out on the club’s expansive deck, the 31-year-old Bennett was sunning herself (“I have seasonal affective disorder . . . I need at least 30 minutes of sun a day.”), her impossibly perfect, bronzed body encased in a leopard print bikini.
“I have a patient who just came in with lower back problems from being overweight,” Bennett said. Her exercise prescription, which the New England Journal of Medicine would assuredly endorse: Take it slow. “I told him, ’10 minutes a day’ and we’ll build from there.’ ”
