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JANUARY 12, 2001

CLICKS & MISSES
By Peter Coy

Logging On to Slim Down
Plenty of sites say they can help you firm your flab with diet suggestions, inspirational stories, and interactive quizzes. Here are a few of them


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Modern technology has made us obese. It created such enemies of fitness as the automobile, the elevator, and the low-priced deep-dish pizza with extra cheese. Can technology -- specifically, the World Wide Web -- also save us from our rotundity? This being January, I browsed through a bunch of Web sites devoted to fitness to see if they could help people keep their New Year's resolutions to get in shape. My conclusion? Yes, they can, if you find Web sites to be righteously inspirational, or if what's been holding you back is a lack of information about how to go about tuning up your body. When it comes to fitness, the Web is overflowing with both inspiration and information.

It's impossible to do justice to the hundreds of fitness-related sites on the Web in a single column. You may find your own favorites by looking through a directory such as Google's directory.google.com/Top/Health/Fitness/, which pinpoints sites on topics ranging from exercise equipment to martial-arts conditioning, or Yahoo!'s dir.yahoo.com/Health/Fitness/. Just about all of the print publications that deal with health and fitness also have sites, with obvious names like runnersworld.com, a favorite of mine.

Some of the most ambitious fitness sites have membership fees and create personalized diet and training programs for you. These are good for people who can't afford a personal trainer but need someone to lay down the law for them -- and keep track of their progress, which you're supposed to enter every day on the site. To be sure, using these services -- as well as some that don't involve subscriptions -- involves a leap of faith that they will abide by their promises not to misuse personal information such as your drinking habits and your catalog of diseases. Wisely or not, I laid my life bare for purposes of researching this column.

DISMAL PROSPECT.  To get a feel for what it's like to join a cyber health club, I clicked on GymAmerica.com and signed up for a three-month subscription for both diet and training programs for $47.94. (Why the odd number?) Although I didn't give GymAmerica a long trial period, my first encounter was somewhat disappointing. When I clicked on the "superstars" section to find out a long-distance runner whose training I could emulate, the only person I found was Jami Goldman, a double-amputee sprinter. It also spit out a weight-lifting program I wasn't interested in. (I'd rather do push-ups and sit-ups, if I must.) And even though I said I was happy with my current weight, it gave me a starvation diet: 1,668 calories a day. Lunch was fat-free plain yogurt and chicken garden salad, while my "snack" was two cups of grapefruit juice.

Faced with that dismal prospect, I could see why subscribers looking for an easy out might click over to GymAmerica.com's "gymshop," which features such questionable nostrums as the testosterone-boosting hormone androstenedione (the supplement baseball slugger Mark McGwire was criticized for using during his record-breaking home-run season of 1998) and Liddell Laboratories' Brain Energy Mind & Memory Restorative ("Spray twice under the tongue 3 times per day").

Another site in the same category as GymAmerica is aworkout.com. While I didn't sign up for it, I was impressed by its free stuff, which includes advice on proper form for exercising and a food database licensed from Phoenix-based CyberSoft Inc. Sample entry: a serving of Stouffer's frozen creamed spinach has 336 calories, 236 of them from fat. Wasn't spinach supposed to be a diet food? I found myself drawn to sites that provide information rather than telling me what to do, like drink grapefruit juice. DREAM ADVICE.  Getting fit isn't nearly as complicated as managing your investment portfolio. To get your finances in shape, it actually helps to know about such arcana as the equity-risk premium. To get your body in shape, all you really need to do is: a) eat less and b) exercise more. Nonetheless, the tidbits of advice that are all over the Web just might make your fitness program less stressful and more interesting. On ballyfitness.com, for example, you can learn how to choose a sports bra or what Astanga yoga is (a form of yoga that makes you sweat a lot). As for inspiration, menshealth.com features the workout routines of Men's Health magazine cover models, so you can look exactly like them. (Yeah, right.) And the well-named imchubby.com has the story of Art Olsen, a man who lost 375 pounds.

Quizzes and calculators are big on fitness Web sites, much as they are on personal-finance sites. They can be goofy but fun -- and sometimes actually educational. At healthyideas.com, which is run by Prevention magazine and women.com, I learned that I could lose seven pounds in a year simply by leaving a tablespoon of mayo off a sandwich once a day, and that a dark green tablecloth suppresses your appetite. Lots of sites include calculators for how many calories you take in by eating and how many you expend by exercising -- reinforcing the tragic message that, in this area at least, the Lord giveth much more readily than the Lord taketh away. However, the best calculator I found was at realage.com. Starting with your chronological age, it comes up with your "real" age by adding or subtracting for such things as exercise, diet, family history of illness, whether you ride a motorcycle, and how many close friends you have (more friends make you younger). Then it suggests a plan. I got everyone's dream advice: Gain a little weight and drink a little more alcohol.

People who are determined to get in shape probably aren't reading this column. They're off somewhere doing stomach crunches or eating celery. As for the rest of us, it's time to put down the chips, get off the couch, and go -- go surf the Web, that is, if only for starters.


Coy, Business Week's associate economics editor, runs marathons in his time off
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