Weight-Loss Goals: No More Pie in the Sky

With any luck, the last of the sweet potato pie will be gone by tonight. We will have devoured all of Allie’s waffle cookies and emptied the tin of Christmas fudge. Nothing but crumbs will be left of the pound cake my mother-in-law sent from Ohio.

Only then can I begin in earnest abiding by my New Year’s resolution to, once again, (drum roll, please) lose a little weight this year.

I’m not asking to be a size 2 again. I’d be happy to lose the 10 pounds that federal health officials have called on each of us to drop as a measure of our patriotism. That might not make me look like Halle Berry, but it would avail me of an entire wardrobe of dresses and pants that I’ve had to shove to the back of my closet because I can’t breathe when I fasten them.

It’s not that I’m a glutton, but that I eat more than I exercise. Count me among the two out of three Americans who don’t get the surgeon general-prescribed 30 minutes of daily exercise--enough to trim 10 pounds a year.

Surgeon General David Satcher says our national tilt toward obesity is threatening our country’s well-being. Six of every 10 Americans are overweight, he says, and most of us are far too sedentary. But it’s hard to muster the energy to exercise when you’re recovering from the stultifying effects of a weeklong holiday food orgy. And it’s harder still to resist the notion that you really can--as the advertisements claim--lose weight while you sit, watch TV or sleep.

This is the time of year when we’re bombarded with pitches for gym memberships, diet pills and exercise gear. It’s easy to be seduced by the “new you” they promise, but harder to make that reality. The problem is you have to make time for the gym, diet pills are apt to lighten little more than your wallet, and exercise machines can, if you’re not careful, do more harm than good to out-of-shape physiques.

“Look at the people they show demonstrating the equipment on TV,” says Ro DiBrezzo, a professor of exercise science at the University of Arkansas. “You very seldom see an older adult or someone who’s overweight using the product. That should be red flag No. 1.”

In other words, they don’t use aerobics teachers and muscle-bound guys with washboard abs on their commercials because that’s how you’ll look when you’re done working out, but because those are the only folks with the strength and coordination to make these weight-loss contraptions work.

Some of us have to learn that the hard way. There’s an entire cabinet in my garage devoted to exercise gadgets, purchased with the best of intentions, then cast aside before they whittled away even an inch from my waist or subtracted a pound from my thighs. Like the rubber-band gizmo that promised washboard abs in just three minutes a day. It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to loop Rubber Band A through Notch C, and the assembly process left me so exhausted I had no energy left for the exercise routine.

DiBrezzo says we ought to steer clear of those trendy body shapers and invest instead in tried-and-true exercise machines--stationary bikes or treadmills. But an unused treadmill is a lot harder than “Ab Magic” to stash unseen in the back of a cabinet.

And I suspect that the mocking reminder of a stationary bike just gathering dust would make me feel like such a failure, I’d wind up eating more to assuage my guilt.

Ultimately, DiBrezzo says, most of us would be better off joining a gym and stoking our motivation by exercising with a friend. The last time I tried that, I wound up putting on five pounds. It was not the gym that did it, but those post-workout stops at Starbucks, where we rewarded ourselves for our industry with a couple of venti lattes

In our family, the dawn of a new year has always been associated with food. As a kid, I spent the holiday at a family buffet at the home of Aunt Ida and Uncle Butch. He was the head cook at a Catholic boys’ school. She supplied local bakeries with homemade pastries.

Together, they ran a catering business. You can imagine what New Year’s Day dinner was like.

We’d eat ourselves into a stupor, sleep it off on the sofa, then eat some more. Football, card games, the Rose Parade ... those were all secondary to main attractions like fried chicken, mashed potatoes, seven-layer cake and honey-glazed ham.

When we finished, we kids would waddle around, mimicking adults who, stuffed to the gills, would rub their bellies and dutifully announce, “Whoo, that was some dinner! Tomorrow, I’m going to have to start my diet.”

Well, tomorrow is here. And I’m keeping this New Year’s resolution simple: Eat less. Walk more. And if all else fails, buy bigger clothes.

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@ latimes.com.