Obsessed: America's Food Addiction

by Mika Brzezinski

  “I said, ‘I’m going to go out on a limb. None of those three are good.’”

  His biggest mistake was continuing to eat during retirement as he had during his playing days. “I played in the NBA for sixteen years and I never worried about my weight. You’re training for a few hours every day and you’re playing games, so you can eat whatever you want.” Weight Watchers came calling, asking Charles to be the spokesperson for its “Lose Like a Man” campaign. Charles agreed, but quickly came to his first hurdle: learning to eat fruits and vegetables. He had never eaten much of either one, unless he was ordering potatoes or corn.

  Learning to eat pears or apples instead of potato chips was a major lifestyle change. But it’s something he decided to do, not only for his own health but to serve as a role model for his home state of Alabama, which has the nation’s fourth-highest obesity rate, and for the African American community. “We’ve got too many fat black people out there, plain and simple. We’re trying to reach that demographic,” says Charles. “Black people eat way too much fried food, first and foremost. I don’t think we do enough exercise, to be honest with you. But the fried stuff is really the biggest problem.”

  The Charles Barkley Foundation hosts an annual gala in Alabama every year to raise money for health facilities for minority patients. “We started six or seven years ago, and we raised about twenty million dollars,” he says. “We just opened up our first free clinic last year, actually, and my goal is to open up twenty of them around the state.” The event organizer called him about the menu for the dinner they were planning for a thousand guests. “She complained, ‘Even the vegetables are deep fried down here,’ and I told her, ‘Welcome to my world.’”

  The dinner menu is starting to change, part of Charles’ effort to approach overweight and obesity not just as an individual issue, but as a community issue. I really applaud his efforts, and I expect that he’ll look great in the smaller tuxedo he’ll be wearing at his foundation’s next black tie fund-raiser.

  Whether it is protein or Paleo, vegan or vegetarian, the emphasis on minimally processed whole foods seems to be a core component of maintaining a healthy weight. Structure and accountability are important, too, but you’ll have to design a strategy that suits you: there is no single approach for everyone. Weight Watchers is “diet agnostic,” says David Kirchhoff. “What we really provide is support to help people change their habits and their outlook,” rather than advocating for one particular food or system over another.

  What we really provide is support to help people change their habits and their outlook.

  —David Kirchhoff

  As usual, Nora Ephron offered the wisest bottom line:

  It’s one of the great passages to adulthood when you understand that if food means something to you, you have to watch what you eat every single day.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT’S HOW YOU MOVE

  MY STORY, WITH JOSHUA HOLLAND, CHRISTIE HEFNER,

  MAGGIE MURPHY, DAVID KIRCHHOFF

  Changing how you move is every bit as important as changing how you eat. In fact, the two habits work closely together. According to the American Council on Exercise, if you diet without exercise, 25 percent of every pound you lose is lean body mass. When you lose lean muscle, your metabolism slows down, making weight loss even more difficult. On the other hand, the higher your percentage of lean body mass, the faster your metabolism—and the faster your metabolism, the more calories you can burn.1

  I used to think of this as my antidote to bingeing. I would stuff myself with junk food and then exercise so compulsively that some people called me “an exercise bulimic.” I’m not sure that’s an official diagnosis, but it did seem like a good description of my manic ability to calculate exactly how far and how fast I would need to run to burn off a pizza or a pint of ice cream. I spent so much time obsessing over this in college that I barely managed to study, or even attend class. The same thing happened when I got into the work world. Early in my career, if I wasn’t at the TV station working, it was a pretty safe bet that I was out running someplace.

  I am no longer doing those internal calculations, and no longer spending all of my free time running. My attitude toward exercise is a lot less compulsive now, and a lot healthier. It’s still a big part of my life, but in a very positive way. Honestly, exercising is how I keep my sanity and reduce my stress.

  It’s also how I maintain my health. Research tells us that regular exercise lowers the risk of early death, coronary heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and even some types of cancer. Unfortunately, not enough people are paying attention to that message: the federal government’s Healthy People 2020 report estimates that nearly 80 percent of adults aren’t doing enough aerobic or muscle-strengthening exercise.2

  My strategy for fitting physical activity into my life is to make sure to keep moving, no matter where I am. Washington, DC, is the center of the political universe, so I’m there a lot for Morning Joe, and no matter how busy my day is I find a way to squeeze in some exercise. Every time I head to Georgetown for lunch, I go first to the “Exorcist steps,” made famous by Father Karras’ headfirst fall in the movie, and run them up and down. So far, at least, my head hasn’t started spinning, and it hasn’t caused projectile vomiting, but I have burned some extra calories.

  I prefer to run outside whenever I can, rather than limit myself to the gym, and that allows me to exercise almost anywhere. My friends, colleagues, and business associates know that I often return phone calls while I’m out running. I can get a lot done on that four-mile daily run, although I sometimes use it just as a “time out”—a chance to clear my head.

  At home, I often add ten minutes of arm work with ten-pound weights to my routine, and three times a week I jump on the elliptical trainer for twenty-five minutes more. The whole regimen is pretty simple, and it’s one that I can work into my hectic schedule, which is the key to doing it regularly.

  My penchant for grabbing a little piece of my workout at every opportunity draws some chuckles among my crowd, but they have gotten used to it. They know that if we pass a steep hill when we take the show across the country, I might just whip off my heels and run up and down it a few times. It turns out that even celebrity trainer Joshua Holland, whose clients include Madonna, agrees that’s a sound approach to staying fit. Although he is the director of training at the exclusive CORE club in New York City, Josh doesn’t think exercise should begin and end at the gym. “Fitness includes everything from walking to work to taking the stairs instead of the elevator,” he says. His advice: “Move well and move often, and do as much of it as you can.”

  Fitness includes everything from walking to work to taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Move well and move often, and do as much of it as you can.

  —Joshua Holland

  In a society where so many people work in sedentary jobs and power tools do most of our heavy work for us, we have to incorporate activity into our daily lives very consciously. I remember as a kid, we used to rake leaves for hours on fall weekends. It was just a routine, and we never thought of it as exercise. Now a leaf blower does the job in fifteen minutes with nearly no effort at all, and we don’t get any health benefits. Maybe we should go back to raking leaves again. Or consider the trick that worked for Dr. Nancy Snyderman’s daughter: she traded in her power lawnmower for a push mower and lost weight as a result.

  Nearly every weight-loss plan includes exercise, but just how much do we need? Federal guidelines recommend two and a half hours a week of moderate aerobic activity, combined with muscle-strengthening activities at least twice a week.3 Healthy adults who follow those guidelines cut their risk of dying prematurely by nearly one-third. People who suffer from chronic diseases benefit even more, cutting their risk of premature death nearly in half. And the benefits aren’t just for the body. Studies have shown that even moderate exercise is an effective antidote to depression, and a report by the Mayo Clinic indicates that it helps
elderly adults ward off dementia.4 But more isn’t always better. My guiding principles used to be “the more I exercise, the more weight I will lose,” but that’s not necessarily so. A study from the University of Copenhagen compared three groups of men in their twenties and thirties. One group was sedentary, another worked out moderately for thirty minutes a day, and a third group exercised strenuously. At the end of thirteen weeks, the sedentary men weighed the same and the strenuous exercisers had peeled off about five pounds. But the “biggest losers” were the men on the moderate exercise plan, who shed an average of about seven pounds apiece.5

  Food diaries showed that the men who exercised the most seemed to have gotten hungrier and ate more as a result. They also moved less over the course of the rest of the day. Those who were putting in thirty minutes of moderate exercise daily, by contrast, continued to consume the same number of calories. Just as important, the formal exercise seemed to motivate them to make changes in their daily activities, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, and they had enough leftover energy to actually do it.

  For most of us, that’s good news: you don’t have to train as hard as a professional athlete to lose weight and be healthier. What you do have to do is make the commitment to develop what David Kirchhoff of Weight Watchers International calls the “exercise habit.” “Habits can be forces of tremendous good or forces of horrific evil,” David writes in his blog Man Meets Scale. “How many of us drink a glass of wine at a certain time of day because it’s just what we do? How many of us feel the need to have a snack on our lap when we watch TV at night, even when we’re not hungry? These forces are deeply rooted in our neural pathways. However, if habits can get us into trouble, they can also be the force that makes healthier life permanent.”

  Psychologists say it can take as little as two months to develop a new habit. What if only sixty days stand between you and a healthier life? “I finally turned into a six- or seven-day-a-week exercise person, and it is the greatest gift of my life,” David told me. “It’s annoying to hear people talk about how their exercise is a gift to them, but there’s some perverse truth in it, no matter how miserable I might look in a spinning class. It really does take time to make all these little tiny shifts in your life that culminate in a healthier way of living.”

  Jesse Fox, an assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University, is using technology to give people a powerful incentive to exercise. Her avatars, or “virtual humans,” show people what a healthier, more fit version of themselves can look like. When she was a graduate student working at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, Dr. Fox found that these doppelgängers were effective at modifying the behavior of their human counterparts. As participants in her experiments exercised, they watched their avatars lose weight and get in shape. When they cut back on exercise, their virtual “you” gained weight back. The study found that subjects with avatars exercised forty minutes more over the next twenty-four hours, compared to the control group. The avatars also influenced the way people eat, Fox found.

  There is other technology available that is somewhat less futuristic, but also very helpful. All sorts of new devices can track your activity levels and measure just how hard you are working. I visited a friend in her office recently, and I was really taken by how great she looks. I said so, and she reached into her sweater and pulled out something that looked like a thumb drive for a computer. It was actually her Fitbit, which is essentially a pedometer on steroids. A little over two inches tall, and barely more than a half-inch thick, the clip-shaped Fitbit weighs less than half an ounce and costs about $100. You can carry it with you everywhere to measure how far you walk, how many stairs you climb, and how many calories you burn during the course of a day. When you synch the monitor with your other electronic devices, you can also get workout advice and plans from trainers and athletes.

  Tools like this are coming on the market every day. Nike has its own device, called the Nike+ FuelBand, to keep track of your activity. Like the Fitbit, the bracelet tracks every step you take and every calorie you burn. It also lets you set activity goals and shows your progress throughout the day. “Tools like Fitbit and FuelBand make people more aware, and if that’s the goal, then it’s doing its job,” says Josh. “If I look at my Fitbit or my FuelBand and I see that my points or my steps are considerably lower than they should be, I may go for a small run just to get those points up. Once again, that goes back to what? Moving more.”

  Becoming fit helps you come a lot closer to looking and feeling like the person you want to be.

  Just eating less won’t do it. “Everybody talks weight loss, but what you really want is a change in body composition, meaning less fat and preferably more muscle,” says nutritionist Lisa Powell, who believes it is a mistake to focus only on calories. “If you are a large, pear-shaped body and you diet and lose weight, you’re going to be a small pear-shaped body. If you don’t like your shape, you need to exercise if you want it to be fit and lean.”

  If you don’t like your shape, you need to exercise if you want it to be fit and lean.—Lisa Powell

  Canyon Ranch’s Christie Hefner nicely summarizes my goal for both myself and my girls. “Your appearance should reflect you as a healthy person. That means that you’re physically active and that you eat well, which I think are good areas of concern for girls, boys, men, and women, versus insecurities having to do with ‘I don’t look like that model’ or ‘I weigh too much.’”

  Your appearance should reflect you as a healthy person. That means that you’re physically active and that you eat well.—Christie Hefner

  Christie does Pilates regularly, works out at the gym, and loves to play tennis, ride her bike, and ski. “I’ve always paid a lot of attention to wanting to feel and look healthy, so I have been active in sports all my life. I was raised to eat healthy, and it was something I focused on.”

  She believes that magazines and other media need to show more images of vigorous women. When she was head of Playboy, she presided over a gradual change in the look of the women who appeared on the magazine’s pages. “For many of the early years, you would never have seen athletic women in the magazine,” she recalls. “That changed, not just in the appearance of women who were modeling in the magazine but in the appearance of actual athletes like Gabrielle Reece, a volleyball player, or Katarina Witt, the skater. We featured women with strong physiques, and they were both powerful and sexy.”

  Those kinds of images help to shift attitudes about what we consider beautiful and encourage the next generation of girls to value exercise. For some older women who did not grow up playing sports, and never developed the habit of exercising, it’s harder to get started.

  Maggie Murphy of Parade magazine was in high school in 1972 when Congress passed Title IX to ensure that girls have the same opportunities to play sports as boys do. “Team sports were not part of my era. I became an entertainment journalist because I sat home and watched TV and then figured out how to make a living at it,” she laughs. Maggie calls herself a robust, hip-py Irish woman and notes, “There was a real disconnect in the past for women about how to lose weight. Look at Betty Draper on Mad Men, starving herself, then breaking down and eating voraciously. I want to say, ‘Betty go out for a walk. You might be able to eat a little more turkey on Thanksgiving if you went for a walk.’”

  Luckily, Maggie eventually did discover the benefits of exercise, even if Betty has not. She started with an aerobics class in college and eventually graduated to running, where she pushed herself to run a ten-minute mile. When a knee injury undermined that effort, she discovered SoulCycle, an indoor cycling class that combines sweat and inspirational affirmations from the class leader. Well-known devotees include Chelsea Clinton and Lady Gaga. Maggie calls SoulCycle her perfect exercise, and says, “I spend forty-five minutes sweating like crazy and I am set for the day.”

  I spend forty-five minutes sweating like crazy and I am set for the day.—Maggie Murphyr />
  A lot of people perceive barriers to physical activity that aren’t really there. Two reasons some adults say they don’t exercise, according to Healthy People 2020, are the cost and the perception that it takes a lot of effort. Neither turns out to be true. What exercise does require is discipline, and that’s where Olympic athletes have something to teach us. We can’t expect to reach their fitness levels, but we can match a little bit of their determination.

  After training some of these elite athletes at the London Olympics in 2012, Josh Holland became convinced that discipline was the foundation of their success. “What I took away from that experience was how disciplined these people are. To me, that is what it boils down to. They were blessed with certain talents and physical attributes, but I think they have a talent in discipline as well.”

  Beyond making a commitment to exercise, your approach is limited only by your imagination.

  When Josh posted videos on Facebook featuring a unique exercise every day for a year, he proved that neither a gym nor any kind of special equipment is required to work out. One of his favorite pieces of exercise gear is a jump rope; it’s inexpensive and simple to use, and it fits right into your purse or suitcase. Most of his videos were not shot in a gym. “They were either in my apartment, or maybe out in a park,” he said. “We all have a chair in our home, we all have a bed, we all have a sofa. That’s really all you need. I’ve done exercises on chairs, including pushups. You can pick up the chair, you can curl with it, and you can do squats. Or how about just standing up on your own two feet and doing jumping jacks, pushups, or sit-ups?”

  More exercise pros are getting away from workouts that require elaborate machines and focusing on what they call functional movements. Diane’s trainer Andy DeVito used that approach to help her recover from hip replacement surgery and improve her fitness. “The philosophy is based on getting your body to move and work in ways that it was meant to, like climbing, crawling, pushing heavy objects; things that humans were designed to do,” Andy explains. “A lot of the workouts we do simulate those movements and functions of the human body. We’ve stopped doing these activities because we’re sitting at a desk all day.”