See if this sounds familiar: A wife and husband are getting ready for a party. He is dressed, she’s still deciding what to wear.
The problem for the wife is remembering what she wore the last time they gathered as friends; she doesn’t want to show up in the same outfit again.
“Who will remember?” asks the husband.
“The women there,” says the wife.
Nicki Anderson says this scenario is common enough for her and countless clients at her Reality Fitness workout studio in Naperville.
“As women, we’re not as supportive of each other as we should be,” says Anderson, 38, a mother of four children between 8 and 14. “Too many times you might hear someone say, `I can’t believe she wore that dress’ or `Look what she’s done to her hair.”‘
Anderson sees such concerns as part of a larger, more disturbing pattern. Women think they are fat. They feel unattractive, no matter that their husbands, lovers, friends, family, co-workers, workout partners, even construction workers on lunch break feel otherwise.
In a new book, “Reality Fitness” (New World Library, $12.95), Anderson puts 140 thoughtful pages to this epidemic of self-criticism.
“Fat as an idea is tenacious,” she writes. “My definition of fat is this: one little word so powerful that, when paired with its partner in crime, diet, it can completely control our lives.”
Anderson speaks from personal experience. At 16, she got her driver’s license and discovered fast-food drive-through windows. She gained 48 pounds in about a year.
As a result, Anderson went on her first diet. It was moderately successful, but she tried more radical approaches and listened more closely when her mother’s friends gossiped about each other’s diets.
By Anderson’s early 20s, she was taking diet pills and not sleeping more than three straight hours because she was “wired” and “in the bathroom the rest of time dealing with the diuretic effects.
“But I was thin, and that seemed to be all that mattered,” she recalled.
But Anderson couldn’t keep up the diet pill regimen. Gradually, she realized no diet was working. She always felt fat. It was just a matter of how fat.
Then two events helped change her focus from the scale to her overall health. One was dating her future husband, Bill. He never once commented on her size. The other “wakeup call” was how good she felt about taking precise care of her body during her first pregnancy.
“I realized that I valued my baby’s health more than my own,” Anderson writes.
These days as an owner of a personal training business she started in 1994, she is championing a fitness formula of small steps.
“About 75 percent of my clients are women between 35 and 55,” she says. “It’s almost always the same issue. The woman has followed many diets and can’t understand why she is still fat. She has tried everything. My response is how about trying nothing, or at least a lot less at once.”
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An example: A busy stay-at-home mom who is quite involved in her kids’ activities, shows up at Anderson’s studio wanting to lose 20 to 30 pounds. She says she is ready to “change the entire way I eat and exercise.”
Anderson starts by suggesting the woman work out for 10 minutes two times in the next week, plus drink an extra two glasses of water daily.
If the mom does find time for the workouts and water, Anderson will suggest going to three 10-minute workouts in the second week and substituting a third glass of water for what would normally be a soft drink.
Setting realistic goals is the critical step.
“Meeting your goals makes you want to continue,” says Anderson.
Anderson says too many people make the vow to work out for 30-45 minutes three days a week and vow to cut out all sugars or saturated fats.
“About three weeks later,” she says, “the same people are stressed out because they can’t meet their goals.”
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To contact Bob Condor or find an archive of his columns, visit chicagotribune.com/go/health
His e-mail is [email protected]