Fitness is Personal -- You're Unique

It also ruins people's health.

A relatively small percentage of people find a sensible diet and exercise plan that fits their real habits and body type, succeeding at changing their habits for the better. They lose weight, exercise more and get fit. Everyone else just gets jealous and spends more money on products intended for those purposes when the real things you need to do for it are very simple: eat less, move around more.

Calorie counting isn't a bad thing in itself. It's one of the better ways to measure what you're doing and that can help with staying on the lean side of your body type. Don't expect dieting to do the impossible. It will not straighten crooked legs or remove the weird bulges of overdeveloped muscles that compensate for crooked legs, something I found out in high school when I drove myself into underweight trying to look like other teens.

It's also not going to turn a stocky endomorph into a tall thin ectomorph. Period. It'll slim you down to being a more muscular stocky person. Muscle weighs more than fat. They caution on the BMI index sites that results may be off for athletic, muscular people -- their BMI may look too heavy for their height because all the muscle weighs more than fat.

But hey, maybe you're a guy like me and think "Muscles wouldn't be a bad thing! I'll work out and build up some mass."

Watch out for overdoing it. Musclebound is a bad thing. It's possible to get serious sports injuries from going too intensely into a workout routine and it's possible to distort your body and make yourself very sick by doing so much calisthenics that your body muscles literally damage themselves to bulk up. Certain types of exercises rip muscle fibers and the scar tissues then form more bulk.

Learn about what you're doing if fitness is going to be your hobby. That and make sure that's actually something you enjoy. Some people love it. The repetitive motion, striving for a goal, charting it daily and seeing slow steady positive results are the main enjoyments, also there's endorphin highs from sustained physical activity.

So exercise can be self rewarding if you keep it up day after day. It can also be addictive and that's where people take it to extremes, so pay attention to whether it's distorting your life.

Now here's for the rest of the geeks, couch potatoes and bookworms. If you have tried a dozen different workout programs and dropped all of them after a few weeks of determined effort, even gotten a little bit of results and drifted away -- stop trying to do it as calisthenics. You aren't going to wind up doing it right on the magic thirteenth plan. You're not going to change who you are.

Try something different.

Look at all the things you enjoy doing and which ones take the most physical activity. Cooking can actually be a good form of exercise. Exchange quality for quantity in food, prepare things yourself and learn to do them really well. Get into the chemistry of food, nutrition and the processes of preparing good foods. The more physical work is involved making a treat, the more calories you'll burn up.

Take up dancing and find a social group that dances in a form you actually enjoy. Did you like folk dancing in college? Go back to that, find a club that does it. Do you like just dancing in night clubs? There still are some. Dance is a fantastic physical activity much better than calisthenics because it's often lower impact and the motions are not as repetitive. I think there are fewer dance injuries overall, though I could be wrong for some vigorous types of dancing.

In any case, dancing is creative personal expression. If you're a creative intellectual, dancing becomes one more cool thing you can do and you get the benefit of meeting interested and sexy others by socializing more. If you have a girlfriend, this may actually improve the relationship. More women like to dance than guys, so guys willing to dance with their lady have a certain staying power. She's going to have a hard time finding another partner willing to get up and do it.

Or try painting outdoors. If you're bored with just walking on a treadmill, pack some art supplies and a portable easel. Head out for someplace beautiful and paint it from life in oils or pastels. Even studio painting at an easel is vigorous physical activity. Artists learn to do a stroke or two, then stand back and look at the painting from a distance, come in and paint some more.

Haven't you noticed how artists as a group seem to include more thin, fit-looking, healthy people than a random group of office folks? That's why. Work large, that really gives you a workout with stretching and bending included.

Get into fishing. Fishing takes walking, it takes going outdoors, it takes patience, it takes practice and a lot of exercise. Especially fly fishing takes practicing the casts in your yard or garage for a long time to get good at it.

Sports are an obvious choice, but they are not the only activities that are physically vigorous. Just start looking at all the different things you can do for fun and think about what you are doing with your body while doing them. Joining a Civil War recreation group may mean marching every weekend with your Civil War buds in costume -- and this could be a whole lot more fun than just walking on a treadmill.

The opportunities are there to add healthier levels of activity to your life without punishing yourself with a boring calisthenics routine. Many people hate regimented exercise and treat it as a self punishment for being sedentary. Little do they know that taking up something active that's fun to do is a better long-term solution. So if you've never managed to get off your duff for the workout routines... maybe what you need is to blow it off and go fishing or take up dancing.

Have fun. The more you enjoy it, the more you'll stick with it. Healthy new habits last when they're self rewarding.