EAT or DANCE?

For some 40 years I have been concerned with eating. That is not to say my whole life I've been concerned with eating. For the first several years the thought never occurred to me unless I was hungry. Somewhere in my adolescence I decided I was fat. Ever since then I've been consumed with eating.

The media, trends and conversations with everyone from the medical industry to the performing industry have confirmed it. Follow these rules and you'll be thin:

• eat this
  
• don't eat that
  
• eat only so much of this
  
• eat as much of this as you want
  
• don't eat after 8:00 PM
  
• eat only this before noon
  
• don't combine eating this with that
  
• eat within 45 minutes after exercising
  
• don't eat before exercising
  
• eat all your carbs in the morning
  
• eat your carbs at dinner
  
• eat protein combined with carbs to slow down digestion
  
• eat some fat
  
• eat no trans fats
  
• eat no animal fats
  
• eat animal protein
  
• eat these supplements
  
• you don't need to eat supplements if you eat right
  
• don't eat wheat, gluten, sugar, simple carbs, nitrites, processed foods, unwashed fruits and vegetables
  
• don't eat.

Now you can click on all this advice, or see at the big picture. And when you step back and look all this advice you can see a trend. They all have one thing in common, which is the word "eat." So all this well-intended advice says only one thing to the universal human mind. "EAT. EAT. EAT." We did. We are now a society with more obesity and overweight people with health complications in history.

You can't discuss politics, religion or values politely in public, but EATING is always safe. My very best friend in life, Jonny Bowden, gave up his professional career as a Broadway musical director and accompanist and got his PhD in nutrition. Since then he's published umpteen books and is nutrition coach to the stars. He is now known as The Rogue Nutritionist. He also has been a trainer at all the hottest gyms in NYC and LA. But have I ever seen him dance? In all fairness, Jonny is the healthiest of specimens not just because he eats right, takes supplements, but because he moves. He plays tennis. Even his piano playing is a workout.

Years ago Jonny and I studied Creative Visualization in an attempt to be thinner, get better work, see who we wanted to be. I learned to thoroughly envision in my mind's eye while completely relaxed what it was I wanted. Then we were told to start writing the list of all the details and don't stop. The really important lesson in this was to phrase your visualization in the positive. The Universe, we were instructed, can't decipher do and don't, yes and no. It only sees the image you send it without the boolean button. So when you visualize your perfect job, your soul mate or even your ideal body, see it only in the positive because if you say "I don't want a man with no hair" or "I don't want a job that pays less than $200,000 a year" or "I don't want my ass to be wider than my shoulders" that is exactly what you'll get. One day you'll wake up married to a bald man and look down at your gigantic hips as you realize your combined income is $98,000 and say, "This visualization stuff is for the birds."

But the birds may be onto something. I mean, if they can fly hundreds of feet above a field and think, "WORM. WORM. WORM." Then land, find one and eat it and survive, they might be right.

So after all these years of studying nutrition, trying diets and yet finding myself 50 lbs heavier than I was when I started, I wish I had been thinking, "DANCE. DANCE. DANCE."

Think on that. What if we actually got up and danced every time we heard music? Every time we felt the impulse to move? Every time we thought of what we should be eating when in actuality we weren't hungry? What if every grocery store had a dance studio/experience next door so you could dance before grocery shopping? What if people actually danced still? What if we all thought about dancing as much as we thought about eating?

Men often don't like to go dancing. Why is that? We don't even talk about dance any more at parties.

A hundred years ago a dance revolutionized social behavior. And what was it named after? Cake!

• The Cakewalk horrified stuffy parents of young girls yet made those young girls squeal with the delight of movement, touching hands, glowing with perspiration. In retrospect, the original Cakewalk was nothing much more than jogging in perfect posture while holding hands in a formal raised position.
  
• It lead to The Charleston, which grew into
• The Lindy,
  
• Swing Dancing,
  
• The Twist, then dance seemed to die and be reborn as
  
• Aerobics and Jazzercise.
  

But somewhere in there we lost half the audience. We became a society who sits down in front of a TV to watch "Dancing With The Stars" with its Pizza Hut commercials. And eat.

I vow, every time I hear music, no matter where I am or how my kids will cringe, I will dance.