Roomy had never been particularly athletic even in his high school and college days. He didn't have much of a base of knowledge to go from when his doctor advised him to lose weight and start getting some exercise. He was in his mid '30s, had a pot belly and mild high blood pressure. As part of a new year's resolution he joined an athletic club not far from work and resolved to start spending his lunch-times exercising, instead of in restaurants.
He didn't know quite what to expect from this unfamiliar environment the first day he walked into the work-out room. The place was filled with 20 or 30 machines specialized for exercising everything from the calf muscles all the way up to the neck. Ten or 15 people were in the room busily using the machines and he decided the best thing to do was simply to watch what others were doing and follow on.
After a few tries at the machines, he realized that he had no idea how much weight he should be using for a given exercise. A couple machines he had tried gave too little resistance, while others had so many plates selected that he could barely get one repetition completed (to his embarrassment). All the other guys and girls in the work-out room seemed like old hands at all this, leaving him feeling all the more obvious in his inadequacy. This got his hackles up and he elected to leave early and come back during the mid afternoon when he knew he would have the place more to himself. Then he could experiment with the machines and note what weights to use on each, away from the gaze of amused eyes.
As he had expected, the place was nearly empty when he returned. The aggravation of his earlier experience spurred him on in his determination to conquer the machines. He went from contraption to contraption experimenting with the number of weight plates for which he mild manage to make the cams and levers move along their prescribed paths.
His enthusiasm for the idea of getting healthy and fit grew as he drove himself to conquer every machine in the weight room. The full spirit of it all impelled him to forcing himself not to give up until he couldn't get out another repetition on each and every apparatus. Finally, he went to the showers feeling that he had really accomplished something. He had used his enthusiasm to confirm his commitment to himself to improve his health!
Unfortunately, while Rory’s enthusiasm gave him over to a spate of beginners' euphoria, his long-neglected muscles were soon to burst the bubble. They didn't appreciate such rough treatment after years of non-use. Roomy felt pain in every bit of his body the next morning. It was to be over a month before he went anywhere near that weight room again and then only after he had read everything and queried everybody he could on the right way to goes about weight training. He recalled that when he had learned to drive a car,
like everyone else he had taken it one careful step at a time. He hadn't just jumped behind the wheel and gone out on the freeway during rush hour.
Fat: Fat, perhaps no other word in our language is despised as much, nor focused on so intensely. Peoples are obsessed about fat—body fat—and how to get rid of it. We have been conditioned to view health and fitness in strictly black (fat) and white (fit) terms: A "fat" body cannot possibly be fit and healthy. This fat-versus-fit dichotomy, made popular in the 1970s with the publication of fitness guru Covert Bailey's "Fit or Fat?", has become the mantra of many a fitness and health professional. You don't have to read any more than the title to grasp the fundamental message of this perennial bestselling fitness bible: A person is either fit, or fat—but not both.
The implications of this myopic fitness philosophy are obvious: The road to a fitter and healthier body is a very narrow one indeed. In order for a fat person to become fit and healthy, that person must lose weight and become lean. This of course implies that "lean" is inherently good and "fat" is inherently bad. Not only is this lipophobic paradigm overly simplistic, it does not stand up against a substantial amount of medical and scientific evidence.
