Where is the part about the ice cream???

Disheartening news. That whole thing about moderate exercise for 30 minutes a day being sufficient for health and all of that...Turns out it's wrong. No, not wrong in the way I would have hoped. Wrong as in, get off your big, fat ass and stress your pathetic flabby excuse for a body for at least an hour a day or until you puke. OK, even if you puke, you still have to torture yourself for an hour a day; anything less doesn't count.

Really? My sincere yet meager attempts don't count? Then what the hell am I still trying for? If 30 minutes of moderate exercise is meaningless, I would prefer to achieve meaninglessness by doing absolutely nothing. It's much easier to fit into my day and it doesn't make me break out in a rash.

May, May, May...what are you babbling on about?

Why, that would be the report released this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine stating that for the obese of the world, diet is a thoroughly insufficient means to weight loss. Diet and moderate exercise are nothing more than a token attempt at reducing body size. Alas, it requires about 68 minutes of vigorous, rigorous exercise every day for the exercise to have any meaningful effect at all. Even then, it might all be for naught:

Still, the underlying question remains: are diet and exercise a reliable cure for obesity? Modern-day obesity researchers are skeptical — achieving thinness, they say, is not simply a matter of willpower. Research suggests that weight may largely be regulated by biology, which helps determine the body's "set point," a weight range of about 10 lbs. to 20 lbs. that the body tries hard to defend. The further you push your weight beyond your set point — either up or down the scale — some researchers say, the more your body struggles to return to it. That might help to explain why none of the women in Jakicic's study managed to lose much more than 10% of their body weight. After two years on a calorie-restricted diet, keeping up more than an hour of physical activity five days a week on average, most were still clinically overweight (though much less so than before). For the obese, the end goal should not be thinness, but health and self-acceptance, which are more realistic and beneficial objectives.

To which I emphatically say, bullshit. I see no value in this kind of tedious, painful self-induced suffering if thinness is not the ultimate goal or result. Who are these people? They did all this research, didn't they bother to ask the study participants what motivates them to diet and exercise? Duh. People like me don't do it for our health. We do it because we don't like the way we look. It's about looks, looks, looks, body image, and the size on that little cloth tag inside of our clothes. Duuuuh. Those researchers know what phsyical benefit weight loss and exercise can bring, but those of us involved really only care about what's on the other side of the skin. The outside part.

I know about set point. I know that four years ago, I was many years into spending 15 hours a week at the gym (sometimes more). I never lost more than a few pounds. Very few. The trainers at the Y were stumped. So much wasted time. So much wasted money. Once I started taking all of these brain meds, there was nothing working to my advantage. The weight came over me almost overnight, despite all of that clean living.

Here is what I know. I eat a small dish of ice cream every day. It hasn't made any difference in my weight either way, but it makes me a much happier person at the end of the day.