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Monday, January 15, 2007

The Fidgeting Weight-Loss Plan

By Frank Cerabino | Monday, January 15, 2007, 10:15 PM

The Invisible Spiders Diet

We here at The Blogaroni had a radio channel-flipping accident the other day, finding ourselves listening to diet doctors who, much to our surprise, made a sensible and extremely doable suggestion.

Weight loss through fidgeting.

Getting the jumpy on your health

It turns out there has been lots of research on this topic, and some diet doctors say that the difference between slim and plump people may be in their differing abilities to sit still. Story here.

To do this sort of research, scientists rigged up study subjects with special motion-detection underwear, shown here. They learned that hours of conscientious fidgeting can add up to hundreds of calories a day, which over time, could end up as pounds lost.

We here at The Blogaroni are not sure how to fully activate motion detecting underwear, but we are adept at fidgeting, with a secondary natural talent for nail biting.

So, without further ado, we present …

The South Florida Fidgeters Guide to Weight Loss.

1. Stay sweaty

Avoid air-conditioned comfort. Instead, sit in stuffy, humid rooms, or better yet, out in the sun until your skin gets clammy and moist. This will make you itchy, which will lead to scratching, a form of fidgeting. It’s hard to sit still when you are itchy.

2. Drive across Palm Beach County

If you think the traffic’s bad going north and south on Interstate 95 or Florida’s Turnpike, try a midday journey across the great waist of Boca Raton, or from West Palm Beach to Wellington and back.

This will activate the inner-fidgeter in anybody.

You’ll do enough toe-tapping, finger-drumming and seat squirming to burn a boatload of calories. The trick is not to pull off into a Taco Bell and order something big and gooey just to give your clenched jaws something to gnaw on.

3. Venti? No, not big enough

Sure, that Starbucks coffee is strong and tasty, and the venti size is quite a jolt of fidget-inducing caffeine.

But there’s nothing that’ll get your motor running (possibly right off its moorings) more than a 64-ounce tub of hours-old convenience store java.

Your heart will be palpitating the drum solo to Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.

4. Ignore the sea pest warnings at the ocean beaches

Getting stung by a Portuguese Man-o-War jellyfish is no fun, but it will get you fidgeting — almost as much as the yearly arrival of those microscopic sea lice (usually between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day).

The sea lice cause something known as Sea Bather’s Eruption, which is a fancy way of saying that they get under your bathing suit and bite the smithereens out of your tender loins.

The pain is a small price to pay for the dozens of calories you will be burning as you claw at your inflamed skin in a futile attempt at relief.

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