From Fitness Fan to Sure Sloth : Many ex-hard bodies are no longer hoisting the barbells, which are gathering dust along with gym shorts and diet books. They’re plumb tired of the workout and menu-control routine.
Two years ago, Dr. Mark Aranbasich was the poster guy for healthy living. He worked out four or five times a week, took aerobics classes, lifted weights and didn’t let too much fat creep into his diet.
Then “It” happened. He stopped working out.
“I wish I could say that it was because I was injured or I attained my fitness goal,” says the Los Angeles dentist, “but it was just a matter of laziness. Once you’ve fallen out, it’s hard to get back into the swing of things.”
Recent lifestyle surveys suggest that Americans have been slowly backsliding on their health regimens--eating more junk food, smoking more, exercising less--despite an almost daily assault of information about the benefits of good nutrition and moderate exercise.
A poll of 1,250 adults for Prevention magazine found a 5% rise in the number of smokers from 1991 to 1992. And in an American Dietetic Assn. survey of 1,000 adults last year, 39% of respondents said they were “doing everything they could” to eat a healthy diet. The year before, 44% said they were.
Even in body-fat-obsessed Los Angeles, where most gyms are packed during the 6 p.m. crunch, we’ve been slipping.
Rich mashed potatoes and artery-clogging goose liver pate are what diners hunger for, says chef Joachim Splichal of Patina and Pinot Bistro restaurants. Although his lower-fat spa dishes satisfy the lunch crowd, dinner is another story.
“People are ordering more mashed potatoes, double orders of mashed potatoes, and it seems as if we’re selling a little more foie gras than the year before,” he says. “A few years ago, a five-course menu was impossible to sell. Now, people are really indulging themselves in that.”
Splichal hesitates to suggest that this binge has reached trend status: “It’s too early for me to say that--we’ve just started the new year.”
Ah yes, the New Year, when resolutions are made and broken. But resolutions are remade all year long and re-broken in a predictable pattern of being good/being bad. We wake up at 5 a.m. to exercise and eat steamed vegetables until we’ve had enough personal sacrifice, thank you, and then it’s back to sleeping in and inhaling chocolate chunk cookies.
Personal trainer Adrienne Williams knows the mind set behind the healthy-unhealthy roller coaster. First come the excuses, then the missed appointments.
“I sense it when their enthusiasm starts waning and work starts to take precedence,” she says. “Or they’ll say they’re not feeling too well, and before they’d go even if they weren’t feeling well. They don’t pull out for good reasons--it’s never because great things are happening, but because money’s too tight or something bad’s happened. One client said she’d been eating and drinking so much that she wasn’t fit enough to get back into the gym, which is kind of ironic.”
But Williams won’t shake a finger at anyone, because she’s been through slack-off stages, too.
“I think it’s all interconnected with the ebbs and flows of energy, and mental strain that produces these types of effects,” she says. “At different times in our lives we need more or less exercise.”
She also believes that society endorses inactivity via media messages: “Read this, watch this, come to the movies--it’s easy to let yourself slip into that.”
*
When burnout--or just plain inertia--hits, it can produce intense guilt feelings, coupled with rationalizations: My job is so tough I’m too exhausted to go to the gym; I’ve been working out a lot lately, I deserve a break. And so on. The mental gymnastics can be as exhausting as an hour of aerobics.
“It’s hard to say exactly what made me stop going,” says Aranbasich, the dentist. “Burnout . . . there were some things going on in my personal life that were taking my up attention. Between those two, that was enough to do it.”
He was an exercise die-hard for six years before getting off the treadmill two years ago, easing up on a fairly strict low-fat diet and gaining 15 pounds. (“But I haven’t ballooned out or anything,” Aranbasich says.) Forays to the gym have been sporadic.
“I think having that routine made it easier to follow through on other routines,” he says. “My life used to be more regimented--every Friday I’d bring my clothes into the cleaners. I still get things done, but thinking back on it, my life was really together.”
But on the flip side, too much structure began to wear him out.
“I’d go to the gym, be there for two hours, get home at 8:30, eat dinner and go to bed. I thought, ‘I’m spending so much time doing this, what other things could I be doing rather than devoting so much time to this?’ ”
*
Job pressures, money worries and relationship problems cause enormous stress, which can trigger episodes of self-indulgence.
“A lot of people have to fight traffic for two hours a day, (and) they may have pressures at work, people telling them what to do,” says Dr. Gail Frank, spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Assn., epidemiologist and professor of nutrition at California State University, Long Beach. “And when it comes to food, they say, ‘Listen, I’m going to do what I want to do. I’m at lunch, this is my break time, and I’m going to do what makes me feel good.’ I believe it’s sort of a sign of the times. This is one way of having control when so many things are under the control of someone else.”
It was just plain burnout that finally got to “Jerry” (whose name has been changed to protect the guilt-ridden) when he stopped his intense workouts cold turkey four years ago. But the 39-year-old, who works in TV production, still has to deal with his friends’ shock.
“I still run into people who say, ‘I can’t believe you’re not going to the gym!’ And this was a good one: ‘You were our inspiration!’ Yeah, thanks. And now I’m going to be a slug like the rest of you.”
Jerry’s workouts were strenuous: Three hours a day, six days a week of stomach work, stretching and weightlifting. That routine went on for seven years. The last year he tacked on 1 1/2-hour ballet classes four times a week.
“I don’t know where that energy came from,” he says.
Wherever it came from, one day it just went.
“I went to the gym and I had really just had it,” he recalled of the fateful day. “It had been building up, but basically everybody was annoying, and it was becoming more and more a chore to go, and it was getting more crowded. And then this steroid freak screamed at me, accusing me of leaving my sweat on the bench, and I thought, ‘Do I really need this in my life?’ ”
But it didn’t take long for the dreaded guilt monster to strike--it still does, Jerry admits.
“I’ve got a little midriff bulge and my butt’s starting to sag,” he says, betraying a hint of sadness. “It was always an effort to do it. But now I don’t have the sense of accomplishment that I had.”
Will there come a day when he ventures back among the few, the proud, the buffed?
“I know I won’t,” he says without hesitation. “I just can’t see myself doing it. . . . There would be mornings when I’d do a couple of sit-ups and keep that going for a week or two, but then I’d forget about it. I don’t know, maybe I’ll get a Nordic Track. I don’t know.”
*
Trainer Williams has seen gung-ho clients metamorphose into sprouting couch potatoes. “They get into a workout, they see results, and then pressures come on. But once they stop, they think it’s really going to be hard to get back into it. So they get depressed, they may eat more, take up smoking, drinking more often, and they get into a bad cycle.”
But others do manage to work their way out of slothdom.
Georgia (who requested that her last name not be used) recently started back on a three-day-a-week program after knocking off for six months, during which she battled remorse and a 40-pound weight gain.
Her downfall started when she opened an advertising company, which propelled her from manageable 11-hour work days into killer 15- and 16-hour days. Then she began daily psychotherapy sessions, cutting out her workouts altogether.
“I was sort of feeling almost self-destructive,” she admits. “I knew I wasn’t doing anything for me, and this was the one healthy thing I did. When I was working out I had dropped 20 pounds, and when I stopped I put on 40. I made food my little comfort zone.”
But Georgia’s trainer didn’t want to forever lose a client to the black hole of workaholism and Haagen-Dazs Triple Brownie Overload.
“She kept calling me. She was cool about it--we’re friends,” Georgia, in her early 40s, explains. “She’d say, ‘How’s it going? Finally we went out for breakfast, and I said, ‘If you think I’m going to be back working out with you, you’re wrong. I don’t see how I’m going to be able to do it.’ She didn’t press it at all. But then I started thinking, ‘Well, how can I fit it in?’ ”
Georgia finally managed to squeeze in the appointments. “If I can work it into my life, anybody can.”