I agree with this statement, but I'm responding to the article's specific brand of exercise, not exercise in general. Personally, I am on a slow downward trend in weight because I'm making an effort to do things I like and pick and choose my foods more carefully.

I am just tired of people like the poster, who literally play both sides of the fence in one article ("I demand credit for the effort I make to make my body look this way" vs. "I am not a health freak.") I also find it funny how inevitable the course of those posts are. It would have a been a good article if he hadn't made the transition from descriptive to prescriptive, but he did and here we are asking, "Why on earth would I inflict LL Cool J on my ears in 2009?"

I sympathize with the poster. I'm tired of people treating me like a freak just because I care about my weight and have actually accomplished something in that direction. I used to be a mess (5'9" and over 200 lbs, on a relatively small frame) and now I'm much better -- still overweight, but in better shape than some of my friends. That creates some resentment for people around me who are self-conscious about their weight. I'm expected to completely avoid talking about my efforts to get in better shape. It's not a matter of demanding credit; they simply don't want to hear that I have to work at it! When I have a beer with them and they ask me how I'm feeling, they don't want to hear that I had a good run this morning, or that I feel bad because I had a bad run. Okay, fine, I get it, I won't mention it.

But what can you really do? You can't do a Jedi mind trick when you wheel your bike into work. "This isn't a bike. This is just something I found in the parking lot, after I parked my car." What do you say when somebody asks what you were doing when they left you a voice mail earlier? "Uh... stuff. Yeah, I was doing stuff." When somebody asks you why you didn't eat all the fries that came with your burger, are you supposed to lie and say you didn't like them? There's no way to completely hide the fact that yes, you are trying to do something a little different.

Plus, the same people who get annoyed when I talk about my struggles with my weight feel free to talk about their own. They want to talk about their efforts at diet and exercise as if it's normal, but we have to pretend that mine are beyond reasonable. Never mind that the only difference between us is that I'm twenty pounds overweight and they're fifty pounds overweight. I'm supposed to remember that if my lifestyle were normal, then that would reflect poorly on them, so we have to pretend that their lifestyle is just one or two small tweaks away from being totally healthy, and my lifestyle is the product of an eccentric, overenthusiastic, probably unhealthy interest in fitness. What? I'm still freakin' twenty pounds overweight!

I'm not trying to be a freak. I'm just trying to be NORMAL, trying to live a lifestyle within the bounds my body is engineered to tolerate. I'm just trying not to eat so much food that it harms me. I'm trying not to live a lifestyle so sedentary that my body doesn't know how to cope with it. That's all.