Failing the fat test

This past weekend, while sitting at a small dinner party sipping a glass of Malbec wine, the legs on my plastic chair broke and flipped me backwards onto the floor. I careened into the wine bar head-first and shards of plastic chair legs flew into the living room. Perhaps the weight limitations of the plastic seating were not suitable for dinner parties. But…

This morning I dropped the kids off early at school and went to my new gym to conduct a fitness evaluation with their most senior trainer. Too much fat, not enough muscle was the diagnosis. My evaluator was seven months pregnant but looked more fit than I have ever been at any age. “I look more pregnant than you do” I couldn’t help remarking as she was pinching my abdominal fat, “and it’s been 11 years since I had my youngest kid.” My back is crooked which creates waistline chaos, so I encouraged her to measure the pinch of fat on my thin side. The fatty results were the same.

As if it would comfort me, she tried pinching her own waist and said, “I’m all muscle.” She explained that New Yorkers imagine ourselves as thin and fashionable, but physically maybe not so much. Her theory is that we drink wine like Europeans, eat super fatty street food, and mistakenly believe that climbing all those subway stairs keeps us fit. She said that when she asks a New Yorker if they had to choose between the wine and losing ten pounds, they are likely to choose the wine.

It is wildly depressing that my family has used precious Manhattan apartment square footage for an elliptical machine for three years and yet I failed the Equinox fat test.

September is Go Healthy Month, sponsored by the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Their aim is to make living healthy the norm for kids. They are investing in a youth movement around health, but a big part of that movement is getting adults on board with healthy food and exercise. In fact the Equinox evaluator started our evaluation by asking me about my childhood fitness footprint. Meaning, what had my body absorbed about fitness as a child? She was encouraged that I grew up in an athletically-inclined household and seemed genuinely pleased that I was undefeated on my high school tennis team, even if I was only ranked number three.

Kudos to the The Alliance for a Healthier Generation for investing in a nationwide childhood fitness footprint. The Alliance is using online and offline strategies, including computer games that kids can play like exploring the “cave of nutrition.”

My middle school niece, Desiree Leyva, sits on the national youth advisory board of the Alliance. Her and other board members consistently point to the prevalence of junk food as a top challenge for kids who are trying to live healthier. She did her first media interview for a Spanish language paper where I mistakenly read that she was concerned about everyone “eating fast.” I re-read the paragraph with sharper Spanish translation skills and understood that she was concerned about “fast food.” That seems to be the number one response when you ask kids about their personal challenge when it comes to fitness and health – the lure and omnipresence of fast food.

Last year I was at a branding presentation by Nickelodeon where their marketing executives were patting themselves on the back for their new programming which encourages kids to exercise and eat well. A marketing executive from Subway complained that they had been trying, unsuccessfully, to become a Nickelodeon fitness partner because Subway was being very proactive about healthy kids meals, but Nickelodeon was partnering with fast food chains like McDonald’s instead. The frustration had a lot of merit – if you line up a McDonald’s happy meal against a Subway Kids meal, the calorie counts are wildly different. The Nickelodeon rep grimaced and said that their partners had everything to do with ad budgets, not calorie counts.

As for my fat ratio, Equinox is pretty sure that I can make things right again if I do what they suggest for six weeks. And that includes continuing to sip glasses of Malbec. I’ll report back in late October.