If the diet gurus and weight loss centers want you to lose weight, why don’t they make products and services chubby people can use? My place of employment is pushing its employees to use its new fitness center. I found it ironic that at the opening festivities the fitness trainer, whose name should have been Buns of Steel Barbie, served cookies and punch. Imagine a fitness center serving cookies! That’s like having an open bar at an AA meeting. Guilt is a great motivator. You eat half the tray of cookies and instantly feel as if you have to do something to purge your body of the peanut butter and macadamia nut poisons. So off I trudge to the first thing that looks easy. The treadmill !!!

Ah, the treadmill. I now have become a high-tech gerbil minus the aluminum cage. The unit I chose has three speeds: slow, medium and I’m late for my plane. Television is a great pastime for the treadmill fanatic. Sometimes depending on what you watch, time really flies. Why just the other day I was amazed that I had been walking for a full 60………seconds. The fitness trainer told me I HAD to reach my target heart rate before I stopped. So I put on a Cindy Crawford exercise video and reached my target heart rate doing nothing.

My second feat was to use the Aerodyne stationary bike. A great concept: The more you pedal, the more the front wheel fan blows air up your shorts. The real stickler to using the bike has to be the uncomfortable seat. If bikes are intended for weight loss, why are the seats so narrow? The feeling is closely akin to straddling a corn cob and is about as uncomfortable. A novel approach to those individuals who desire comfort yet style, why not use a tractor seat? I know if I had one of those seats, I’d stay on longer than three minutes. Better yet, use a toilet seat and bring a Readers Digest; you could pedal for hours.

The last piece of equipment on my quest for slimness I can’t describe. It was kind of a sit-down lawnmower with a bad pull starter. You sit on a seat that moves back and forth, place your hands on a wooden stick and continually pull on it as hard as you can. The only difference between this equipment and a lawnmower is usually after 40 pulls of a lawnmower handle you say a bad word and kick it. No, I take that back; that is the similarity.

By all accounts, as I walked home, I looked normal. Well, except for the fact that the back of my hands were dragging in the dirt. My wife greeted me at the door with a cheery smile and asked, “How did it go?” I decided to wait and answer the question after my sweat glands stopped dilating.

Have I been back? Occasionally. But I find it easier to tell people that my body roundness is caused by a yeast infection.