When I was in sixth or seventh grade, the most popular girl in school, T____ who got all the boys’ attention, started to have to share the limelight when a new, equally pretty girl named N____ came to school mid-year. Feeling the lapse in attention didn’t make T feel good, and in an effort to bring the focus back on herself, she started resorting to extreme, attention-grabbing measures. She’d wear flashy clothes and when that didn’t steal N’s thunder, she’d break out the dramatic makeup look - you know the one- the blue shadow and Tammy Faye mascara.

Before too long, the school’s attention turned to a canned food drive, and with everyone engrossed in their own struggles to get ahead in the contest to win an ice cream party, less attention was payed to the girls. Soon, both girls were desperate to recoup their audience.

It was like a bad episode of The Facts Of Life with dueling popular girls competing for the number one spot on their peers’ radar with Mrs. Garrett playing referee. N would show up Monday with a crazy hair do, and by Friday, T would counter with a half-shaved head. N sported a fake tattoo of a butterfly, T responded with double-pierced ears and big hoop earrings. 

Now, imagine the girls as magazines named Time and Newsweek. The playground is the news stand. The boys’ roving eyes are the diverted attention from magazines onto electronic media. The other peers in the school are all of us, called potential readers. The canned food drive distraction is today’s poor economy (causing attention and expendable income to be drawn away from the dueling mags). Instead of Mrs. Garrett as referee, it is the rest of the media. (Today Show mentions Time magazine article- 2 points! Larry King mentions Newsweek article - 3 points!). And of course, the flashy glitz and glam getups of the dueling girls are equivalent to overblown or sensationalized controversial stories about two of the most popular “kids” (topics) in “school” (America), pushed out by skilled marketing and PR teams. 

Call me a skeptic, but I kind of feel like that’s what is going on with the new Time story with the headline, The Myth About Exercise. Could it be an answer to Newsweek’s attention grabbing story about Ms. Oprah Winfrey a month or so ago, in which they claimed that her show’s health advice was dangerous?

I’m usually not a conspiracy theorist, but what better way for Time to steal some attention (and readers) back from Newsweek, after its hugely popular aforementioned article stole the show a few weeks back, and potentially made an enemy out of Ms. O, the biggest media powerhouse in the world (-100 points). Think about it. Time write’s a story about another health topic close to America’s heart: obesity and weight, a topic that surely Oprah would want to give attention to anyway, (in light of Ms. Winfrey’s professed hatred of exercise, and struggle with weight), and with any luck, she may just want to stick it to Newsweek by helping to bolster sales of its competitor. (Indeed, Gayle King, on Oprah’s radio show, was already touting the story this past week.) (Time….+1000 points… SCORE!) 

I really wasn’t this cynical until I read Time’s exercise vs. diet article, which left me feeling, ironically, a little hungry. No, not for food, but for new information. For good information. I felt like it was nothing more than a series of referenced studies, most, which stated the obvious, about things we’ve all known for quite some time. In fact, I’d venture to say, the majority of average moms and career women have already known all of this stuff for quite some time, from their own trial and error processes with diet and exercise in an effort to stay in shape, get in shape, reduce stress, or gain more energy.

Maybe it’s not Time I am annoyed with. Maybe I’m just frustrated with the fact that there is so much good money being thrown into studies which cause debate over what we already know - weight loss requires consuming fewer calories than you expend. The recap of the article will show you what I mean.

I’m warning you. The main takeaway is anti-climactic. Are you ready? Losing weight requires both the combined efforts of exercising and eating right. Yup, that’s right. Exercising like Madonna only gets you arms like hers if you also eat like….a famine victim. Okay, bad example. None of us want to be as buff as her anyway. But the point is, Madonna’s not topping off her hot yoga session and six mile runs with a burger and fries.

Food matters, people! Tell us something we don’t know, right? Basically, the article reiterates what European women have been doing forever, and what American women used to do: eat healthy, and be moderately active. It’s not all that necessary to train like an Olympic gymnast to keep weight off, and sometimes those that do, eat more.

Other “stunning” discoveries:

*Women often over-estimate how many calories their cardio workouts burn, thus, allowing themselves to splurge and eat more than they might otherwise eat. (All of us girls who have ever stopped at Baskin Robbins for a double scoop (insert me raising my hand) on the way home from the gym are really shocked at this one). 

*Most everyone, including kids in two studies in the U.K., compensate for extra energy expended by conserving energy at other times in the day. In other words, when you work hard, it makes your body tired and you tend to rest it later. Also, people who have short bursts of energy multiple times throughout the day usually end up burning as much energy as those who perform a straight hour of more intense exercise once per day. (All busy moms who stay lean by chasing kids all day know this!)

*The longer you use your willpower the more you’re likely to “cave” in a big way. In other words, other than Posh Spice, no one is very good at eating like a bird for very long, without going on a binge-fest consisting of donuts and Ding Dongs.

More “enlightening” facts from the article:

*Exercise is, indeed, good for your heart and mind, and decreases risk of disease. (Don’t fall over. I know this is riveting news.)

*Burning calories makes the body hungry for more. (If it didn’t, we’d all die of starvation, right?)

*Heavy people expend more energy than skinny people overall, due to lugging around the extra weight. (Shocker, right?)

And the absolute best tid bit out of the whole article? A respected Harvard scholar’s belief that McDonald’s built the play equipment in their restaurants to make kids hungrier thus causing them to eat more. Hmmmm……How ’bout they built it as a way to just keep them in the venue longer, period? How ’bout compete for the children’s birthday party business? How ’bout create a more alluring reason for kids to come there in the first place, once Happy Meals were no longer doing the trick.

I’m no Harvard Scholar, but last time I took kids to McDonald’s, they had little interest in eating more food once they were set free in Playland. Which brings me full circle - back to recess in grade school, with the dainty dueling divas. Once the boys left the cafeteria, and were set free on the playground at lunchtime, they had little interest in the girl rivals, T___ and N____. T and N were pretty girls and all, but they just lacked substance.