Physical Activity Blog

Fitness vs. Fatness Redux — The Competitive Edge

2007-07-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

I know I’ve discussed fitness and fatness in the past. How one can be perfectly healthy and not fit the stereotypical thin athlete look.

Well, in this morning’s New York Times[1] (on-line edition) there is an article about how skinny athletic cyclists do not hold the competitive (or health) edge over their more robust[2] counterparts (I’m talking about recreational athletes, not the professional guys who all look like they’re about 130 pounds and six feet tall).

The article also mentions that any one of the professionals can bike twice as fast as any of the recreational competitors. I don’t think that’s because of body size though.

Although the article discusses how thin runners might have a similar competitive advantage, I beg to differ.

I learned this lesson early on in my university running career. My body type does fit the thin stereotype as did many of my teammates. I remember standing on the start line of a university cross-country race, sizing up the competition (so to speak …) and dismissing one girl with a stocky, muscular frame.

I’m sure you can guess that I was suitably humbled when she won the race by a long margin. I straggled in about 20th. The only pride I can take out of that story is I never made the same mistake again.

The bottom line is whether you’re interested in health or competition, don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to look a certain way. In fact, as illustrated by my story, there might be a competitive psychological edge to not fitting the stereotype!

1. The Bicycling Paradox: Fit Doesn’t Have to Mean Thin (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/health/nutrition/
17essa.html?em&amp;ex=1184904000&en=445dd068a9
c39626&ei=5087%0A).

2. I just looked up robust in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). One definition is sturdy, which is how I meant it, but it also has strong and healthy as a definition. There you go! Unintentional confirmation of my point by the OED.

Inspiring the Masses

2007-07-11T10:27:00.001-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

I am in sports glory these days. With the U20 soccer and Tour de France on (truly hoping for a scandal-free tour this year), I am one happy spectator.

I was in the stands on Sunday when Canada took on Congo at Commonwealth Stadium here in Edmonton. I watched the Mexico-New Zealand match that preceded it and had a great taste of live soccer action. So, when the rain came pouring down, it wasn’t too hard to bail out and bike home to watch the rest of the match on TV.

If only the Olympics were on right now too, and I could happily park my butt on the couch for the rest of the summer.

But aren’t these events supposed to inspire me to get off the couch?
That is often the justification for why public funds should be poured into these events. I’ve wondered about this question for a while now. If high-level sports, be they amateur or professional, inspire people to take up sport, then wouldn’t the U.S.A. be the fittest country in the world? (In case you’re wondering, they’re not.)

A few years ago I tried to find out if any research had been done on this topic and came up dry, but anecdotal evidence abounds. Watch any Olympic games, and you’re bound to see at least one interviewee talk about how as a kid they watched some sporting event and went out and tried it and that’s why they are at the Olympics today.

The following from the Tour de France website, which explains why the mayor of London wanted to host this year’s first stage, sums up both arguments, quite nicely …

“We believe the Tour de France will inspire more Londoners to use their bicycles to get around. Indeed, for triple Olympic cyclist Bradley Wiggins, watching the 1994 UK stage of the Tour motivated him to take up professional cycling, and the rest is history!”
(http://www.letour.fr/2007/TDF/LIVE/us/
0/etape_par_etape.html)

I hate to throw cold water on all the mayor’s plans, but finally, at a conference I recently attended in Norway, I saw a presentation on this topic. The authors also had difficulties finding any existing research, so they did their own. They looked at various levels of sporting events, from the Sydney Olympics through to local 10-kilometer runs and came up with no discernible impact of these events on population levels of physical activity.

Of course, this is only one study and much more research is warranted, but that doesn’t stop those trying to promote these events from using public health as a justification. The authors were privy to the documents behind the London 2012 bid. These were ripe with rhetoric about how the Olympics will increase population levels of physical activity.

If you’re an athlete, sports fan or a business person, you might have very real, very good reasons for wanting a large sporting event to come to your city. But, don’t believe the people who say that it’s a way of increasing health across society. Their claims are premature.

Now I have to go find the remote because I think the round of 16 has started.

Walking in Europe

2007-07-04T10:44:00.000-07:00

By Tanya Berry, PhD, Alberta Centre for Active Living

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from blog-writing due to a trip to Norway and Germany.

I love Europe — pretty much every city I’ve been to has a pedestrian-only downtown core. In Oslo, you can watch a cross-section of Norwegian society walking amid shops, restaurants and art galleries at Karl Johans Gate. At one end is the train station and at the other the palace, two ubiquitous European buildings.
But what is really interesting is the countryside. In North America, you are likely to see signs like this one.

In Norway, you get signs such as this close-up of one in three languages.

Thankfully for me, one of them was English! This sign was in the middle of a forest on a walking trail. We got a map from our hotel and set out — too early for berries, but we did wander through a few herds of sheep.

Here is a similar picture from a trip to the Netherlands several years ago (no translation required!).

On the other side of this gate was a cornfield. We walked along the edge of it by a farmhouse and on through to the next town. No problem.

In Norway, we walked right through somebody’s yard. The homeowner (an older woman) was gardening at the time. We hesitated and asked if we were going the right way. She pointed up her driveway. We kept going and ended up in a fantastic valley with a rushing little river and cool geographic features. It was actually an old and historic route to another village.

It would be so nice if North Americans would adopt similar sensibilities. It’s so much more civilized.

No Pain, No Gain

2007-06-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

Interesting! For years I had attributed this saying to a certain running shoe company that shall remain nameless. So, before I started, I Googled “No Pain No Gain,” because I was worried about copyright infringement.

One of the first among the 1,040,000 hits (and I used the specific phrase!) was a description of the saying from Wikipedia — the source of all important facts (just kidding — I get cranky when students in my classes cite Wikipedia, but, hey, a little bit of hypocrisy never hurt anyone).

At any rate, according to this trusted source, the saying came out of bodybuilding circles — apparently you won’t gain big muscles without a little bit of hurt. I wouldn’t know.

But I can be pretty sure that the saying did not come from an advertising campaign as I thought, although the nameless shoe company does allude to the theme in a commercial you can watch on YouTube — another amazing source of well-vetted information. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwjRtTKviSY.

Make sure you read the comments. Those are the interesting bits … I can guarantee I didn’t “almost cry” when I watched this. But I digress.

I got thinking about this saying because I was told about a new reality show starring Shaquille O’Neal called “Shaq’s Boot Camp.” The point of the show, which is due to start in a few weeks, is to get overweight kids fit. My source (who is a respected professional, and no, I did not find her on the Internet, we had a real live conversation) saw some previews. As she told me:

What I recall is that at first Shaq was running with overweight boys on a track. They were huffing and puffing (the boys, not Shaq!!). At some point during the story they went to a shot of a young girl (I'd say early teens or younger) lying on a bed in a room like an emergency room or treatment room, with people around her concerned about her heart rate I think I recall seeing a stethescope at some point She was lying with her eyes closed... It was a scary scene.

You know I don't recall if they were doctors or medics or ordinary people or parents or what ... but I recall thinking that my goodness, this scene of a young girl obviously in trouble from overexertion possibly or who knows what does not create a positive happy note of “OH, let's go exercise and lose weight and be healthy.”

… the impression I was left with was that exercise is work, exercise is not fun, exercise can be dangerous. Shaq's program seemed to me to be one to get young people active and healthy, which is good, but I recall thinking that any kid watching might think it looks like “torture.”

So, once again the message will come across loud and clear: “no pain, no gain” or worse — exercise is dangerous. But using a celebrity will mean this show will be watched by many people, and the wrong message will be remembered yet again.

Unfortunately, “moderate physical activity leads to substantial health benefits” isn’t quite as snappy a saying as “no pain no gain.” Here’s the message I got back from Google:

Your search — “moderate physical activity leads to substantial health benefits” —- did not match any documents.

So I modified my search to “moderate physical activity can lead to health benefits” and got back one hit, from the U.S. department of Health and Human services, Division of Diabetes Treatment and Prevention.

On a more positive note, “Active Living” got 966,000 hits but scrolling through the first couple hundred did not result in any links to celebrity shows or YouTube videos.

The long and short of it is that we need to up our media presence. Any celebrities out there looking for a cause?

(As an aside, I’m well aware that although I didn’t name the running shoe company, I still managed to name at least four other commercial enterprises in a 677-word blog and linked you to a commercial advertisement. I’m not helping my own cause, am I?)

Mixed Messages

2007-05-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

By Tanya Berry, PhD, Alberta Centre for Active Living

Have you seen the new Special K TV ad? It starts off showing a number of magazine covers of women in bikinis and goes on to say that there is no need to be stressed about summer — you’ll look great in a bikini, supposedly if you eat Special K. Then it ends with a tagline that refers to health.

There are all kinds of things going on here.

I blogged in the past about appearance versus health, and this ad wraps it all together. It seems to me that the advertisers are hedging their bets — we don’t know if women want to look good or be healthy, so let’s hit both in one commercial.

Another entanglement that Special K gets into is diet and activity.

The standard equation in terms of weight is energy in = energy out. Hold the comments — I’m well aware that there are all kinds of other variables in there ... but the bare bones equation remains the same. You need to eat to move, and if you don’t have the right balance, you will gain or lose weight. People can interpret weight how they like — lose weight to look good, lose weight to be healthy, or more likely, a bit of both. But it is very hard to disentangle diet from exercise.

So, it’s not surprising that food manufacturers mention activity and that health promoters often have both diet and physical activity as their target behaviours (check out http://www.healthyalberta.ca/). In the past Special K had pedometers as a give-away in their cereal boxes. This was a public-private deal with Canada on the Move and the evaluation results showed evidence of an effect from this campaign on walking behaviour. This is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

But the partnerships created don’t end there. If you go to the Special K website, there are videos from Shape magazine, including workouts on how to “sculpt those abs.” Right beside that is a featured recipe with a “nutrition score.” There is a whole program on how to lose six pounds in two weeks.

It all gets a bit messy after a while. And the consumer is left with trying to figure out the bottom line, which if you look beyond Kellogg’s trying to flog their cereal, isn’t an easy task.

This is why I find ads like this one so interesting.

How Much Physical Activity Should I Do?

2007-05-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

Tough question.

An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)* this week discussed this "dose-response relationship" and concluded that the message should be “even a little is good, but more is better.”

It’s a challenging message to convey, and there still seems to be much confusion around how much people actually need to do. There’s also debate that maybe the active living message has watered things down too much, so that people now consider a walk to the fridge as part of their daily physical activity.

Even my mother chastised me over my “four-minute workout” blog. She argued that four-minutes are better than nothing. She is, of course, correct on one level. However, I was arguing that people who thought that they would achieve high levels of fitness from four minutes of exercise were mistaken and that the four-minute workout marketers were misleading the consumer.

The JAMA article discusses how women who did 72 minutes of moderate activity a week (walking on a treadmill or biking) showed increases in fitness, but no changes in blood pressure, blood lipid profiles or weight. Hence the article’s suggestion of a little is good, but more is better. Probably the best message so far.

*Dose-response relation between physical activity and fitness: Even a little is good; more is better. (2007). Journal of the American Medical Association, 297 (19), 2137-2139.

Time

2007-05-16T13:20:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

I’m stressed this week. Lots going on at work. Home life is dominated by renovations. Busy, busy. I barely have the time to write my blog. I’m tempted to not go for a run and to skip my soccer practice. I’ve got data to collect and presentations to prepare. My research assistants are neglected, and the cat hasn’t been scratched behind the ears for a few days.

It’s at times like this that the average North American finds that their physical activity falls to the bottom of the priority list.

But what would help is a bit more exercise.

Really. “Lack of time” is often cited as the number one reason why people don’t exercise, so it’s not too surprising that if you try to tell people that some exercise will reduce their stress, the response isn’t great. “You don’t seriously think that adding something else into my schedule is going to reduce my stress?”

Well, yes, I do, and here’s the argument why: across multiple research studies, physical activity is associated with positive mental health, including higher self-esteem, well-being and health-related quality of life.

There’s also strong evidence that being active can improve mood and help with the symptoms of depression and anxiety. In fact, exercise is effective in treating clinical depression across different ages, from young adults through middle-aged and older adults. There’s even evidence that exercise can benefit those who suffer from severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

I know all this. This is not news to me, and probably not to many of you either. Yet I’m still considering skipping soccer tonight, so that I can put another coat of Varathane on the kitchen cupboards. Knowing something doesn’t mean that you’re actually going to do it, as so many people in the health promotion business know.

But having written this, I’m pretty sure I’ll go to soccer practice tonight. It will be a struggle at the outset, but I have to remind myself that I generally come back after such an excursion with a much clearer head. Maybe I’ll be refreshed and less stressed, so that I’ll be able to figure out how to work that experience into an effective health promotion message.

Maybe.

Kananaskis Dispatch

2007-05-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

With a title like that you’re probably expecting a blog about majestic mountains and the motivational power of wilderness for physical activity. You’re looking forward to hearing about people striding about in hiking boots exhilarated by the fresh air and close encounters with a bear. You hope such tales will inspire you to leap into the great outdoors.

Nope.

Today I’m going to write about how easy it is to make rats fat.
I am writing this from Kananaskis, Alberta (hence the title), and I’m here for the Western Obesity Summit, which is a multidisciplinary forum for obesity researchers. I wasn’t here to present, just to learn, and what I’ve learned is that if you restrict calories, you can slow down aging in rats. I’ve also found out that there is some sort of link between obesity and immune function in rats.

Further, did you know that if you feed rats high-fat, high-sugar diets, their bones break more easily? And I can now also tell you that some kinds of gut hormones in rats are related to how much they eat. I think.

I think that’s what I’ve learned, because, in all honesty, this has been a hard slog for a psychologist. Not the fault of the researchers, but to quote Dr. Seuss, I puzzled until my puzzler was sore trying to make out some of those slides. But, try as I might I couldn’t get further than what I’ve already told you, and don’t quote me because I’m not entirely sure that I got that right.

I was inspired to write about this, because such research sometimes get filtered through to the general public. As a result, some people change their whole lives, believing, for example, that if you don’t eat very much you’ll live longer. In fact, there’s a whole society dedicated to this (http://www.calorierestriction.org./).

The problem of course is that these are rat studies, not human studies, and that these are very specific rats. The rats used for these studies have a genotype that makes them very easy to make fat and are therefore very specifically chosen by obesity researchers for their studies. (Thanks to my colleague who explained that one to me.)

Indeed, when I went to the calorie restriction website, they had the results of a restricted-calorie mouse model study featured on their homepage as evidence for why you too should skip the chocolate and everything else.

It’s a very dangerous leap from mice to humans. I strategically sat beside a physiologist colleague, so that I could pester him with questions. He told me that there is a classic case of a substance that you inject in a rat and they lose weight. If you inject a human with the same substance, nothing happens. It might come as a surprise to some, but humans are different than rats.

This, I would like to repeat, is not because researchers are making the leap. I think the problem is that as a society we are hungry for solutions. The search for the fountain of youth is not over. So, we see a possibility, and we lunge at it.

It may very well be that humans will live longer if they eat less, but how much less? And for how long? Is there a critical age during which it’s best to restrict your calories? Too many unanswered questions for me. And so I applaud my colleagues for their work and hope they continue. But for everybody else who doesn’t do this kind of research: beware of basic experimental research that is interpreted as applied.

Now I’m off for a hike in the mountains.

Joy

2007-05-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry,
Alberta Centre for Active Living

On Monday night I witnessed my four-year old nephew’s first ever foray into soccer. The experience was pure joy.

Rarely did anybody run in the right direction.

Some of them fell over when they tried to kick the ball. I really should say “a” ball, because there was no game ball. Any ball spotted was put into play.

Although some kids had blue shirts and some red, none of them cared who got the ball when they kicked it. The exciting part was the kicking.

One little guy got a break away, but it was off the field and all the other kids streamed after him. In truth, the little guy had no concept that it was a break away. He was just running after a ball and was thrilled to have a bunch of new friends join him. Lines on a field are arbitrary.

Every once in a while, our nephew would turn to us and hold his arms up in the air and yell “I’m playing soccer!!!” and then run off.

At the end of the hour, there were a bunch of red-cheeked little kids who looked deliriously happy. There were no winners or losers. There was no consideration that it was a “good workout.” It was pure unadulterated* fun.

So, if only we could keep that going and leave the rules and the “shoulds” and the “musts” out of the equation. If only we could keep the adult sensibilities out of it. Then we could all experience such joy.

*From the Oxford English Dictionary, Unadulterated: not mixed or diluted with any different or extra elements; complete and absolute: pure

All I Really Want Is a Smaller Butt

2007-04-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry
Alberta Centre for Active Living

I received the following e-mail from a good friend this week:

I've been meaning to write you about your blog … the one you wrote on "fat vs fit" has had me thinking (isn't that what blogs are supposed to do?). Anyway, I just headed back to the gym (I'm trying to get there four days/week) and trying to figure out my real motivation for working out. No matter how much my head tells me that it's good to be fit and healthy, the real reason I'm working out is to have a smaller butt. It's awful to say but honest. Perhaps I have been spending too much time reading People and Us on my vacation, but the desire to look good in a bikini is far stronger than the difficult to measure health benefits…

In any event, a few comments from perhaps an average North American woman heading into 40. In our current culture of "body beautiful," it's very difficult to make tangible the intangible benefits of being healthy. I hope you don't find that discouraging but will help to find a way to make those benefits more easily measured and understood by average people.

Well said, my friend, and not necessarily discouraging, but challenging for sure!

In my perfect world, everyone in society would be active because it enhanced their mental and physical health. But, (be warned! some might find the following heretical), if the only way that someone is going to get moving is with the hope of a smaller butt, I’m not convinced that is a bad thing. Of course, I’m leaving the eating disordered out of the equation.

I should say that health and appearance aren’t the only two reasons people have for exercising. Many people exercise for social reasons, and some love to be challenged (either by competing against others or against oneself). And if you Google “exercise motivation,” you get a remarkable number of hypnosis websites. I won’t even start to speculate on that one.

However, I would argue that health and appearance rank among the most important motivators, and the trick is to find out how the two compete or coexist. I also think it’s high time that health promoters stop pretending that appearance isn’t important. In fact, some authors* argue that few health promotion campaigns take into account the environment in which they compete. And this is probably a big oversight.

So, rather than pretend the elephant isn’t in the room, maybe we should try to get to know the elephant. Share a few peanuts. Then, and this may sound underhanded, we can use what we’ve learned to achieve our own goal of population health.

*Randolph, W., & Viswanth, K. (2004). Lessons learned from public health mass media campaigns: Marketing health in a crowded media world. Annual Review of Public Health, 25, 419–437.

I Know This Guy...

2007-04-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

Anecdotal evidence is popular, and that’s why the human interest angle sells newspapers. People also love to tell stories that go something like, “I know this guy, and he was out running, and this guy that I know, he had a heart attack! While running!!! That’s way too dangerous, man. No running for this guy. Not me.”

For some people, examples such as these are preferable over the evidence of the thousands of other people who run regularly and do not suffer from heart disease.

Figuring out the contributing factors to disease at a population level is the work of epidemiologists. Behavioural epidemiologists, for example, are the ones who figured out that if you’re physically active, you’re more likely to have a healthy heart. Where epidemiologists run into trouble convincing some people of the links between behaviour and disease is that there are, of course, always exceptions to the rule.

Take my grandpa for example. He is 102 years old and doing fine. He moved into a home when he was 100. He started smoking at 18, and he loves to pull out a calculator and do the math for people: 102–18 = 84. Holy smoke! 84 years! He thinks tobacco is a preservative.

This comes to mind because of the distressing comments recently posted on the Globe and Mail’s website* in response to an article titled “Waistline watching should be taken literally”. Barring the vicious comments made about overweight people, there were many, many postings along the line of “pull up your bootstraps people! I lost weight and you can too!”

Although a few comments posted that tried to point out that self-control may be just part of the equation, most of the comments were distressing. I’ve already blogged about perceived laziness, took a stab at social determinants, and talked about the built environment, all attempts to point out that maybe there’s more to the problem of increasing physical activity than pure will power. But individual level evidence is most powerful of course, when you’re the individual. Thus, the prevalence of “I did it and so can you!” posts on the Globe and Mail’s site.

So, the question remains of how to sell the idea that changing behaviour is complex and that putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of the individual is flawed logic. If I hear of a way to make the sale, I’ll let you know.

* Read it all here: Globe and Mail website

Splish Splash!

2007-04-11T08:11:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

My husband, a friend and I were walking home from work recently when a truck rumbled by and threw up a spray of slush, salt, and sand that soaked our friend.

Of course this soaking was due in part to the great spring melt that is currently underway in this prairie town. But my friend’s misfortune is symptomatic of other ills. We were walking on a sidewalk beside a busy street. Between the sidewalk and the buildings is about 20 feet of green space. Had the sidewalk been buffered from the street by some of that green space, our friend in turn would have been buffered from the spray.

So maybe you feel bad for my friend. You know exactly what I’m talking about because you’ve been there yourself, but maybe you’re also wondering what this has to do with physical activity, which really, is what this blog should be about.

Well, how that sidewalk is constructed is part of our built environment, a topic that has been under increasing scrutiny as a contributor to physical activity. In particular, the great urban sprawl that is taking over North America has been linked to our deteriorating health. In general, people who live in neighbourhoods with multiple uses (homes and shops all mixed together) and where the streets are well-connected (think a grid) are more likely to be physically active than those who live out in the ‘burbs in what have been termed “lollipop neighbourhoods.” These lollipops have lots of little cul-de-sacs that aren’t very well connected and there’s no way you can walk to the corner store to buy some milk because there is no corner store for miles. Off in the distance, on the other side of a busy four-lane road, past the acres of parking lot, loom big-box stores stuffed full of everything you could ever want. But, really, who’s going to walk there? It’s madness.

Within the neighbourhoods themselves, often little thought is given to infrastructure like sidewalks. Sometimes sidewalks are on only one side of the street or they end suddenly, so that you’re forced to walk along the shoulder, or they’re not maintained and are full of cracks and holes, or you’re so close to a busy road that you get splashed when traffic goes by. Not a very pleasant walking environment, so people jump into their cars to get their groceries and the groceries end up costing them more than just dollars, they end up costing them their health.

A lot of this evidence comes from the work of Larry Frank, a researcher in the area of transportation, urban design and health, who will speaking about this issue at the Alberta Centre for Active Living’s Physical Activity Forum on May 17. In a video co-produced by the CBC and the NFB called The Weight of the World, Dr. Frank states that there might be cause to sue land developers and urban planners over our health.

If developers see proof that how they design neighbourhoods is an essential contributor to our health, yet persist in creating spaces that are not conducive to physical activity, they may very well be setting themselves up for a lawsuit. Provocative thought. But I like it!!

For more information about the May 17 Physical Activity Forum, visit http://www.centre4activeliving.ca. A videotape of the Forum will be posted on the Alberta Centre for Active Living’s website after the event.

Stereotypes

2007-04-04T12:04:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

If television were a perfect mirror of society, you would know from watching it that women are interested in health and men just want to watch sports on the tube. You would also know that wives have to trick their husbands into eating healthy foods and gyms are only for the young and beautiful.

I have been working on a new experiment. This experiment requires pictures of people who fit certain stereotypes like “couch potatoes.” I have discovered that while pictures of men on couches clutching remotes and bags of junk food abound, it’s pretty near impossible to find a similar picture of a woman.

As I told my husband, I spend as much time as he does in front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn in my lap, yet this is not a picture that someone wants to put in their advertising. The advertisers want a picture of the guy in front of the TV with the wife standing over him, hands on hips, hectoring him to him to eat a salad and go for a walk.

Unfortunately, while such stereotypes are pervasive, they are also very much under-researched. One study that tried to identify physical activity stereotypes yielded some scary results. Researchers at McMaster University* asked participants to read descriptions of people and then rate them on a number of characteristics. The only difference in a full paragraph description was that one person was described as doing sedentary things during leisure time, whereas the other person was active during leisure time.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that the exerciser was consistently rated stronger and healthier. What was more surprising, and very sad, was that the exerciser was also considered to be kinder, happier, neater, braver, more friendly, more attractive and to have greater self-control.

Quite the list. But what’s the problem? You’re all too smart and even-keeled to succumb to such stereotypes.

Or are you? The problem is that stereotypes can result in behaviour change that you’re not even aware of. Another study** showed that if you expose study participants to stereotypes of elderly people, these participants will walk more slowly and do worse on cognitive tasks, behaviours that fit the elderly stereotype.

So, it’s possible that if you’re exposed to the lazy, slobby overweight couch potato stereotypes, you’re more likely to mimic their behaviours. That is, sit on the couch with a big bowl of popcorn on your lap. Not to mention that the more such images we see, the stronger we hold on to our prejudiced beliefs about other people. Why should somebody who exercises be in any way kinder than somebody who does not? Yet these beliefs are coming from somewhere.

It’s been my experience that people don’t want to hear this. They want to believe that they are in complete control of their thoughts and emotions. It’s scary to think otherwise. But the reality is that we don’t have complete conscious control. The good news though, is that the more we are aware of these things, the more able we are to counter them. So start paying attention to the images you see on TV. Is it possible that you believe that those people that you’re watching watch TV are more stupid than you are? Are less happy? More cowardly? If so, ask yourself why you think that. Perhaps as a society we can start to shift our ideas about what makes an exerciser.

*Martin, K. A., Sinden, A. R., & Fleming, J. C. (2000). Inactivity may be hazardous to your image: The effects of exercise participation on impression formation. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 22, 283-291.
** Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-244.

Bad, Lazy People!

2007-03-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

I was in my local drug store recently, engaged in the deeply middle-class task of choosing among the many shampoos on offer, when I overheard a conversation going on in the aisle opposite me. A customer was trying to find out some information about a prescription and the clerk told her that the best way to have her question answered was to go to the store website. She kept repeating her question and the clerk kept repeating his answer. This went on until the customer finally burst out with “I don’t got no Internet!” and left.

This sad story underlines the assumption that many people make about health behaviours, including physical activity. We all have the means, we all have the wherewithal. Ultimately, your health is up to you. You know the consequences of not being active, and if you choose to sit on the couch eating chips and dip every night, don’t come crying to me when you have a heart attack!

Yet, how much of sitting on the couch really is a matter of choice? The British epidemiologist, Michael Marmot (I should say Sir Michael Marmot, as he was knighted for his work) has highlighted what he calls the health gradient. Choose any health issue you want, and those lower in the social hierarchy suffer more than those in the upper classes.

Michael Marmot puts forward the idea that the problem is a matter of control. The more money you make or the more education you have, the more control you have over your life. And, the more control you have over your health. An example he uses is the CEO who loses his job and gets a big severance package compared to the person working in the factory for minimum wage who loses his job. The CEO very likely has more time and more options open to him than the minimum wage worker.

The same goes for physical activity. Social factors such as income and education are consistently correlated with activity levels.

Yet, I am regularly told, when I explain what I do for a living, that there’s no problem. People don’t exercise because they’re lazy! This may seem obvious when you have the knowledge and the means to be active (and even then, it’s still difficult for many).

But, we should all look a little bit deeper and ask why people seem lazy. It might be more difficult than it appears for some in our society to be active. Maybe they don’t feel safe in their neighbourhoods or homes and don’t want to go for a walk. Maybe they don’t know how to find out how to be active.

Maybe they don’t got no Internet.

Weight Loss

2007-03-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

This is purely anecdotal evidence (an anathema to researchers), but it seems that every popular media piece on physical activity has the “weight loss” goal attached to it. For example, a television reporter will ask some guy sweating on a treadmill what got him to the gym. The reply will be some gasping variation of “the doctor told me to lose 10 pounds.” Cue the shot of the free weights.

Now, it may very well be that those were his doctor’s orders. What I question is whether weight loss should be a prescription. I also really wish that it wasn’t such a pervasive theme in the media (see my Fitness Fads entry (March 14/07) for why message repetition is a problem). The good health news is that the guy is exercising, not that he is possibly losing weight.

The problem with the weight loss message married to the physical activity message is twofold.

The first problem is that although excess weight can cause health problems, losing weight does not mean that you are gaining health. Stephen Blair, a physical activity epidemiologist, has published some great work that pits fitness against fatness and shows that fatness isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What he found was that a thin guy (most of his data are on men) who doesn’t exercise is worse off health-wise than a guy who may be overweight but who exercises. He’s just fine, thank you very much.

There is also a growing number of critics of the obesity message who make a good point too: the weight loss message can lead to diet fads and pills, rather than physical activity. Not healthy at all.

The second problem again relates to my fitness fads piece: if a person engages in some active living and diet change and doesn’t lose the 10 pounds, he may very well be achieving health gains. But, when the numbers on the scale don’t change, our friend on the treadmill may get discouraged, figure the effort isn’t worth it, and quit.

Time for true confessions: I don’t have a great alternative to the weight loss goal. The difficulty facing my healthcare colleagues is that pounds on a scale are so very easily understandable. You can get up in the morning and step out of the shower and on to the scale and immediately be told whether your weight has changed.

What are the alternatives? Blood pressure goes down, that’s measurable. But blood pressure can vary widely throughout the day and it takes a bit more effort to test than weight. One’s resting heart rate might go down (same problem with variation). One might be less out of breath after running for the bus (not immediately testable at all).

It’s more of a feeling, and ask the psychologists how hard feeling states are to test. Ditto with any other physical activity health benefit you can think of: increased bone density, less stress, reduced cancer risk, the list goes on. All are fantastic benefits of being active, and all are pretty hard for you to measure while standing in your bathroom with a towel around your waist.

So, in the end, all I can say is I really dislike the message behind “the Biggest Loser” (and I really, really hate the play on words) and I wish more people would trumpet the fitness vs fatness idea (hence the theme for this blog entry).

Fitness Fads

2007-03-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

I got thinking about fitness fads because of an article in the New York Times* called “Whatever happened to Jane Fonda in tights?” The accompanying picture shows Jane Fonda wearing sky blue tights and a very “80s” body suit leading a rainbow of women through an aerobics class. The essence of the article is that aerobics classes are passé and that those people now all have bad knees and have moved on to Pilates and yoga.

Welcome to 2007. Who knows if this is a fad that will take off, but there’s a gym in Toronto offering the “four-minute workout.” This information came to me from a CBC article** about a fitness club that claims that you can get all the “burn” you need on one machine in four minutes. Heck, it’s even located in the underground walkways in the business district. You can pop in between meetings and workout in the same amount of time it would take to get a coffee. Well call me skeptical, but I’m an academic, and I need some solid data before I believe that one.

Now, I’m certainly not faulting people for wanting to get some exercise. I’m old enough to have gone to an aerobics class or two myself (I was also into blue eye shadow and had a purse the size and shape of a cow’s udder, but forgive me, I was in grade 10 in small-town BC. Besides, I thought the aerobics would help when I tried out for the track team, but I digress.) And far be it from me to tell people not to exercise in whatever form they choose.

Yet I worry about the potential impact of these fitness fads, especially when they’re selling the quick fix. People in my field like to say “if you could put exercise into a pill it would be the number one selling drug of all time.” Some people want what exercise can give them, but they tend to want it now, and make it as easy as possible please!

So what happens if someone tries the “four-minute” workout and a month from now hasn’t got anything out from it?*** For those who bought the advertising line, the end result might be “exercise isn’t any good” rather than “maybe I should try going for a little bit longer than four minutes.”

This is particularly worrisome when fast solutions are trumpeted in fitness magazines, television shows, newspaper articles and everywhere else you choose to look. Research shows that if you’re not particularly interested in a topic (like, say, exercise), the more you’re exposed to a message (“10 minutes to tighter abs!”), the more likely that’s going to be the first thing that pops into your mind when you think about exercise.

So, all those articles about fast workouts likely means that those who don’t exercise regularly are thinking about quick fix options when they think about exercise at all. They might even try the advertised workout. Surprisingly, they don’t end up looking like the cover model of Shape magazine, and they quit. Until the next time they think about exercise and they think “Hey! Four minutes! I can do that!” Then they try again, and they still look like the rest of us. The messages that my colleagues and I try to put forward (check out the rest of this website) are then lost in a sea of conflicting misinformation.

* David Sheff; New York Times, Thursday February 8, 2007
** http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/02/13/short-workout.html
*** I started to write “lost 10 pounds” but there’s another of my bugaboos: the focus on weight loss, and the theme of an upcoming blog entry.

Entering the “Blogosphere”: What Messages Are Out There About Physical Activity?

2007-03-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Tanya Berry, Alberta Centre for Active Living

This is the first time I’ve tried writing a blog—so welcome! And bear with me. It might take me a few attempts to hit my stride and get away from an academic style of writing.

I wanted to enter the “blogosphere” (I wonder if that’s made it into the Oxford English Dictionary yet?*), because I was looking for a more open forum where I could write about the issues that I think about all day—physical activity, health, and research. The Alberta Centre for Active Living kindly agreed to be my host.

What Are They Saying About Physical Activity? What I’m really interested in is how physical activity and exercise are represented. When you stop and think about it, there are representations of exercise everywhere. For example, the food marketers love to use pictures of exercisers in their ads. If you want to be healthy like this lovely woman doing yoga, then buying our yogurt is just the thing!

But how do these commercials influence us? (Besides, of course, getting us to run out to buy yogurt?) Do they get us thinking about exercise? And, if so, are these thoughts good or bad? We don’t really know, but it’s a big, scary, commercial marketing world out there. My research explores this issue. I guess I see this blog as my attempt to counter these commercial forces just a little by getting others to think about this issue too. Awareness is a very powerful thing!

I’m also a media junkie—my morning “fix” includes the online editions of the Globe and Mail, the New York Times and the CBC. I also sometimes go to magazines like Salon and Outside. I get all these on-line because I’d go broke if I subscribed to all of them! But most of these online sources have lots of articles available for free.

When I’m on these sites, I go straight to the health sections where I read articles that get me thinking. Sometimes I read stuff that gets my blood boiling! So, to spare my husband a soap-box rant about what I recently read or saw on TV, I figure I’ll get it out of my system in this blog.

(Students in my classes have sometimes been victims as well. The year “The Biggest Loser” show came out, my students were guaranteed a 10-minute rant on Wednesday mornings—the show aired Tuesday nights, and I watched it for “research purposes.”)

So—stay tuned! I’ve got a notepad at my elbow with a list of topics that I need to write about. Coming next: Fitness fads.

* Turns out, you can’t take the researcher out of the blog writer, so I checked—and yes, it is!

1. blogosphere n. (the blogosphere) informal personal websites and weblogs collectively.(From the Concise Oxford English Dictionary , on-line edition.)