The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [115]
has been able to prove that a certain level of exercise provides well-being and health. Jim Fixx, one of the three apostles of jogging, was out jogging when he fell down dead of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-two. The New York cardiologist Henry A. Solomon became famous for arguing that the attempt to attain longevity through exercise was a fad based on marketing: there was no proof that a slower resting heartbeat, for instance, was indicative of well-being. Kenneth Cooper began to argue that his early calls for vigorous exercise were a mistake and that moderate walking a few times a week was enough. Jane Fonda’s autobiography of 2005, My Life So Far, revealed to the world that she had been bulimic through most of her adult life. She says she worked out to extremes, and although exercise may have made Fonda feel good on any given day, the overall experience here was not well-being, was not happiness; it was not the most vibrant one’s body could be. Fonda reports that she still suffers the damage she did to her body all those years. We have read similar attestations from such women as the singer Madonna and the New York Times science reporter Jane E. Brody. Brody has written of herself as having been caught up in what is now called “obligatory exercise.” She explains that “obligatory exercisers often report some of the symptoms seen in athletes who overtrain…. They include anxiety, apathy, chronic fatigue, decreased appetite, depression, hostility, mental exhaustion, mood changes, changes in values and beliefs, diminished self-image, impaired concentration, emotional isolation, sore muscles and disturbed sleep.”11 Exercise is not the panacea we pretend it to be. Still and all, today the fit body is the dominant cultural anxiety: if you want to be happy, productive, and reproductive, you are advised to visit an actual treadmill. To be healthy, not go crazy, and to produce a strong next generation, everyone should exercise, “work out”—whatever that means. When we find that people who exercise more are healthy, by some measure, it might be that their health caused their exercise and not the other way around. And perhaps health causes other vibrant behaviors that we never think to ask about in some of the people who live long but are noticed only as noise in the nonexercising category. Even in what our studies do pick up, it seems that serious gym workouts many times a week are not appreciably good for you and can cause real wear and tear. We find benefit most in going from no exercise to some mild exercise, but those who do much more are not much healthier. In her Ultimate Fitness, the science writer and exercise buff Gina Kolata explained that as she sees things, there are three reasons people exercise: health, weight loss, and exhilaration.12 For health, the biggest effect comes from sedentary to moving—say, from no walking to walking for ten minutes a few times a day, most days of the week. For weight loss, you can almost forget about it unless we are talking about a great deal of activity. Diet is everything; the body doesn’t burn calories fast enough for moderate exercise to mean anything. As for exhilaration, Kolata explains, not everyone gets it, and those people who do get it have to work extremely hard. Moderate exercise isn’t enough to bring it on. And yet, despite the ancient Greek love of the fit male form, no society in history has gone as far as ours in its equation of a good, happy life with a toned, athletic body.
What are we doing when we fill the town center with gyms? We are engaged in a combination of the two American traditions. The first is the pride of the slaveholding gentry, those who no longer do heavy labor and celebrate that fact in sport. You go to the gym to join the middle and upper class in its performance of a life so full of leisure that they have to gather in a large space and exert tremendous energy making nothing. The second is the religious identity that distinguishes virtue through self-limitation—those who see life as a series of disciplines where dedication guarantees success.