Waste now, or waist later

Stop the treadmills. Hop off the elliptical machines.

Step off the stair climber. You say you can't because you've already fallen off (to put it nicely) your diet 15 times (a low guess) since New Year's Day and that is not including weekends, when you ignore the diet?

You've been going to the gym every day, yet the pounds are not dropping and are, in fact, increasing.

Unless you've changed your diet, all that exercising may not be doing you any good and may add to your weight. A 16-month study by the University of Kansas has discovered that its participants did not improve their diet upon adopting a regular exercise regiment and consequently didn't lose weight.

According to the Kansas City Star story, half the women in the study lost weight while the other half gained weight. In order to lose weight, you must exercise AND cut calories.

In other words, eating a Big Mac while walking on the treadmill -- while proving your ability to multi-task -- will not help shed the pounds. To make it worse, men lost an average of 11 pounds even though they exercised the same amount at the same intensity as the women.

If the study holds up, men need only exercise, while women...well that's a different story. Researchers didn't know exactly how to diagnose the problem or offer a solution, but they did develop a theory by the end.

The participants in the study used a food diary, a concept repeated time after time to help track the amount of food eaten. In a perfect diet world, the journal would contain not only your regular meals, but also those pieces of candy you grabbed on the way out the door in the morning, the three trips to the vending machine at work and the chips you sneaked before heading off to bed. The journal keeps you honest about the four donuts you had this week, the three servings of stir-fry you had for dinner last night and the box of cookies you finished off just so they wouldn't go stale.

Evidently, the women in the study were not as truthful in their journals as they should have been, omitting the equivalent of an entire meal. The women were "underreporting" the number of calories they ate to the tune of 700 calories a day, while men were under by 200.

To put it simply, women are lying about how much they are eating and are offsetting the calories they expended while exercising. Ironically, the researchers could measure how many calories the participants expended through state-of-the-art water with isotopes, but had to take the participants at their word on what they ate.

I feel for those women. Who really wants to admit how much they eat? Or who has the time to mark down everything they eat? I'd spend half my day with my head buried in a journal, trying to recount everything I ate that day and feeling sick the other half about how much I ate. Plus, I don't need a journal to tell me where the majority of my calories come from. I'm a mom, after all. I exercised faithfully the first week of my diet, yet gained two pounds. My downfall: Picking up dishes after each meal. Even though my kids are very good eaters, there is usually something left on the plate, whether it's something they didn't like or they had too much food. Rather than let it go to waste (such as in the garbage or to the dog), I let it go to my waist, finishing off the grilled cheese or the remaining chips. Pouring out that juice? Seems wasteful. I'd better drink it. One meatball left on the plate? I went to all that work to make them. I'd better eat it. I only had a salad for lunch, so I can finish off their plates without guilt. that is until I put on my jeans the next morning. The study did point out that although the women didn't lose weight, the exercise did improve their health. So you can be healthy and still have that cheeseburger -- as long as you eat it at the gym.

-- Ronda Graff didn't gain any weight over the holidays, only putting on the pounds later as she tried to rid her house of Christmas candy and cookies.