The Conspiracy Against Exercise

New York Times blogger Tara Parker-Pope had an interesting post last week, When Fitness Means Life or Death. It's about a new Discovery Health reality TV show where contestants compete to see if they are fit enough to escape from a disaster like a sinking car or a fire in a high-rise building.

Parker-Pope points out that the show's central question goes beyond mere entertainment: On 9/11 she found herself needing to flee down 9 flights of stairs only to find herself stuck behind a slow-moving, obese woman.

This all got me thinking about the conspiracy against exercise that has been evolving in this country, especially since 9/11: the conspiracy against the public staircase.

In recent years I have found that with the exception of universities, almost all public buildings (including Seattle's brand new Central Library) have sealed-off their staircases, making them "staff only"--although the staff insist, when questioned, that the public will be allowed to use them in case of an emergency.

Even more egregious are the buildings where you can't even find the staircase. Being the persistent type that I am, I always search for the mythic staircase and will pester any available staff until I uncover its secret location.

What I usually find is that many medical buildings and office towers have actually removed the signage both to and above their staircases, even in those rare instances where the public is allowed to enter the hallowed stairwell. How many non-employees would know that the unmarked brown door hiding over in the darkly lit corner actually leads to the building's one precious staircase?

I consider this to be a public health crisis on two levels. First, we're a nation that's growing ever more obese--and our health is suffering as a consequence. Why on earth do want to discourage people from walking up or down a few flights of stairs?

Second--and more frightening--is the question of what would happen in a bona fide emergency. Especially if the staircases are unmarked and don't have signage, how will anyone find them?

Even if the staircases aren't totally obscured, ask yourself an honest question: if you were stuck in a blazing, smoky fire on the 7th floor of a large urban library, would you prefer to be in a building where only the staff were familiar with the location of the staircases? Or would you prefer to be in a building where maybe 20% of the patrons had also been taking the stairs regularly?

Busting Weight Loss Myths # 1

One of the biggest weight-loss myths out there is that a low-fat, nearly vegetarian diet is one of the keys to weight-loss and health. However, I'm one of the biggest (though now shrinking!) poster children for busting this myth.

I switched to a low-fat diet around 15 years ago. I had never had any trouble maintaining a healthy weight and I certainly didn't need to lose weight. But my 52-year-old father had just had a heart attack, and while I was visiting him in cardiac ICU, a cardiologist dropped by to visit and promptly began haranguing me about my diet.

My father's heart disease was clearly hereditary: my paternal grandfather had died during bypass surgery when he was in his 50s, and my father's brother had a fatal heart attack while mowing his parents' back yard when he was only 22. I needed to follow the same diet too--unless I wanted to end up like my father.

For 9 years, I was devout believer in the low-fat diet. Unlike my father, I didn't take the low-fat diet as a license to gorge myself on fat-free sweets and other junk food. Instead, I ate a healthy, low-fat, whole-foods vegetarian diet. Despite the fact that I'm decidedly not a binge eater, and despite exercising regularly (mainly walking, hiking, and biking), I ballooned from 118 pounds to almost 150 pounds--and I'm only 5' 2" tall.

Not only was I fat, I also felt like crap. I was tired all the time and got extremely cranky after 2 hours without food. And if I should go more than 2 to 3 hours without something to eat (which I usually did, because I was also a victim of the "snacking makes you fat" myth), I would get these terrible tremors that were getting harder and harder to hide.

Finally, I found a doctor who grasped the real problem--my low-fat diet was actually hurting me. Because, of course, a low-fat diet is essentially a super-high-carb diet, since most sources of protein also contain the dreaded fat. And a super-high-carb diet will not only make many of us fat, it also screws with the body's insulin levels, a bad thing if diabetes happens to run in your family (it does it mine).

It took me two years to actually make changes in my diet, in part because I'd been so brainwashed by the low-fat myth. But when I did finally change to a more Mediterranean-style diet--boosting my fat intake to roughly 30% of my diet and protein to roughly 20%--the results were astounding.

Not only did I immediately feel better, but slowly, over time, the pounds began to melt away. Without dieting or any conscious attempt to eat less or exercise more, I lost almost 13 pounds, bringing my weight to 137 pounds, to a BMI of roughly 25.

I've continued to lose weight since then. Stay tuned to future postings about how busting other myths helped me shed more pounds.