Hello, World.

With The Biggest Loser's Bob Harper putting Jillian Michaels through a CrossFit WOD beatdown on "The Doctors" AND Reebok taking out a full-page ad featuring Rich Froning in People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" issue, is this the week when our little cult suddenly enters America's mainstream consciousness?

(I kind of wish Rich Froning was wearing the new Reebok CrossFit Nano shoes instead of the nubby RealFlex, though.)

Want to bet on whether Bob Harper'll incorporate CrossFit training into The Biggest Loser next season?

A Buffet (of Articles) for Fitness Buffs

With the exception of the inane and largely information-free P90X/CrossFit article, Slate's Fitness Issue is jam-packed with entertaining reads about all sorts of health-related stuff. If you have time to kill on this lazy Sunday, check out the articles on:

• Whether exercise is as addictive as drugs;
• Those perfectly-toned fitness models in magazines and ads, and what they do on the job;
• The "Müller technique": The P90X of the early 20th century that's still practiced today;
• A behind-the-scenes look at the Soloflex home gym -- the first fitness product hawked on late-night infomercials (and did you know you can brew beer with it?);
• Exercises for your face;
• The search for the perfect fitness DVD by a self-described "fat girl";
• All you ever wanted to know about all those stupid fitness magazines;
• Popular fitness programs in other countries;
• Jack LaLanne versus Jane Fonda versus Jillian Michaels (what -- no Richard Simmons?).

Grab your coffee and dig in.

Exercise and Weight Gain Go Together Like Daris and Orange Afros

On Tuesday night's episode of "The Biggest Loser," the final four contestants -- Michael, Ashley, Daris and Koli -- were sent home and given a month to train for a marathon.

After shedding 150 pounds (and trimming back his Chia curls), Daris appears to be in the best shape of the bunch. He's under 200 pounds, and can exercise like a maniac. During his training runs, he must have pushed himself harder than anyone expected -- Jillian Michaels circled in a helicopter for what seemed like an eternity before spotting Daris running around the open fields of rural Oklahoma in his orange t-shirt.

But as NBC's eerie-green night camera footage shows, intense training for a 26.2-mile footrace makes Daris hungry. He raids his kitchen late at night (but remembers to turn on the videocamera and aim it at the refrigerator first), and confesses that he can't help himself.

His hardcore training paid off, though: Daris broke the "Biggest Loser Marathon" record by finishing the race in just 4 hours and 2 minutes -- more than 2 hours ahead of second-place finisher Koli, who looked like he was going to seriously fucking die of cardiac arrest when he crossed the finish line. Michael and Ashley strolled in sometime after everyone stopped caring.

At the weigh-in, however, our man Daris was the only contestant to have gained weight, going from 195 to 197 (even after the removal of 65% of his hair)! Cue the flabbergasted stares and accusatory WTFs from Jillian and Bob, whose eyes looked like they were going to shoot across the stage and riddle Daris' naked torso with holes. Daris, you sabotaged yourself! You have no self-control! Stop eating like you're stoned! AAAAAAGH!

But let's take a deep breath and consider: Was Daris' weight gain all that unexpected?
The guy trained for a marathon by busting his ass. You don't go from looking like a life-sized Cabbage Patch Kid to running an almost sub-4:00 marathon by kicking back. And guess what exercise does to your appetite?

As I've mentioned before, intense physical activity makes people hungrier. I know: This isn't rocket science. But for some reason, the "Biggest Loser" trainers appear to pin the blame on Daris' lack of willpower rather than on the physical demands he put on himself in order to kick everyone else's ass in the race. The harder you train, the greater the likelihood you're going to eat more. As Time Magazine put it:

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, Chair in Diabetes and Metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like "The Biggest Loser" -- or for that matter, from magazines like this one. The basic problem is that while it is true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

There are plenty of reasons to squeeze in some vigorous physical activity. But on a show like "The Biggest Loser," where the name of the game is pure weight loss (and not setting marathon records or even achieving optimal health, for that matter), simply cranking up the intensity level of exercise isn't going to do the trick.

Round 3 / Day 67: Jillian Michaels' Yoga Meltdown - Level 2 Workout

It's my Recovery Week, and I wanted to do some yoga this morning, but wasn't exactly champing (chomping?) at the bit to do yet another session of Fountain of Youth or Yoga X. M suggested that I try her Jillian Michaels' Yoga Meltdown video, so I gamely popped it into the DVD player and selected the "Level 2" workout, guessing (based on nothing at all) that it was the more advanced of the two 30-minute sessions on the disc.

This workout's perfectly fine -- it features Jillian Michaels (the tougher/meaner of the two "Biggest Loser" trainers) front and center, doing an interesting hybrid of Ashtanga yoga moves (done faster than typical) and mild cardio. Most of the moves involve holding a yoga pose (Chair Lunge with a Twist, for example, or Half Moon) for a moment or two, and then quickly moving in and out of the pose to give your blood a little pump.

Michaels doesn't establish much of a flow between exercises or poses, nor does she bother with setting any sort of serene or zen-like atmosphere. Instead, the focus is clearly on power and movement rather than flexibility and balance (though she does spend some time trying -- and sometimes failing -- to stay balanced on one foot). I, for one, didn't mind it. It's definitely not "yoga" in the traditional sense, and I don't think I "burn[ed] mega calories" as indicated on the cover of the DVD box, but it was a good change of pace. Plus, while the session required more than a modicum of effort, it was low-key enough to qualify as a recovery workout.

One other thing I liked about this workout: We did Crane.

I kind of wish Michaels didn't keep referring to the audience as "girls," though. I already felt girly enough without the reminder that this DVD is targeted at women, thankyouverymuch.

Check It Out: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ''Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution'' and ''Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.

So begins Gary Taubes' thought-provoking and spectacularly polarizing July 2002 cover article for the New York Times Magazine entitled "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" Taubes, an award-winning science journalist, points out that well into the 1970s, the scientific consensus was that diets high in "sugars and starches" -- in other words, carbs -- caused obesity. Up until that point, "the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that carbohydrates made you fat." Thirty years ago,

you could still find articles in the journals describing high rates of obesity in Africa and the Caribbean where diets contained almost exclusively carbohydrates. The common thinking, wrote a former director of the Nutrition Division of the United Nations, was that the ideal diet, one that prevented obesity, snacking and excessive sugar consumption, was a diet ''with plenty of eggs, beef, mutton, chicken, butter and well-cooked vegetables.'' This was the identical prescription Brillat-Savarin put forth in 1825.

But over the past three decades, "we've been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer."

What explains the shift in conventional wisdom? In 1977, "a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its 'Dietary Goals for the United States,' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of 'killer diseases' supposedly sweeping the country," and "peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat." But according to Taubes, the reported increase in heart diseases that triggered these conclusions was wrong, and there was (is) no evidence to support the hypothesis that consumption of meat and dairy products had led to a dramatic uptick in heart disease. In the 1980s, the N.I.H. spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying -- and failing -- to link fatty diets with heart disease, but on a "leap of faith," posited nonetheless that the link existed. And "once the N.I.H. signed off on the low-fat doctrine, societal forces took over":

The food industry quickly began producing thousands of reduced-fat food products to meet the new recommendations. Fat was removed from foods like cookies, chips and yogurt. The problem was, it had to be replaced with something as tasty and pleasurable to the palate, which meant some form of sugar, often high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, an entire industry emerged to create fat substitutes, of which Procter & Gamble's olestra was first. And because these reduced-fat meats, cheeses, snacks and cookies had to compete with a few hundred thousand other food products marketed in America, the industry dedicated considerable advertising effort to reinforcing the less-fat-is-good-health message. Helping the cause was what Walter Willett calls the ''huge forces'' of dietitians, health organizations, consumer groups, health reporters and even cookbook writers, all well-intended missionaries of healthful eating.

The message was loud and clear: Go low-fat. Eat carbs instead. For decades, this mantra was pounded into our heads by academics, health professionals, agribusiness and marketers alike. But these days, it's become widely accepted that carbs spike insulin production, which in turns triggers weight gain. And "[f]ew experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified."

If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it...

But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it's true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.

I'm not saying you should immediately run screaming from carbs and start stocking up on lard. But it's worth checking out Taubes' claims for yourself.

I've just begun reading Taube's 2007 book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, and will post a review when I'm done. So far, I'm finding it an engaging read. If nothing else, it encourages intellectual curiosity: Taubes challenges readers to look askance at conventional wisdom and to question whether there's evidence to support what many of us have been taught about diet and nutrition. A healthy dose of skepticism is always a good thing. (It certainly helped color my reading of the New York Times' recent article on the "obesity-hunger paradox.")

Just like his controversial New York Times Magazine article, the talking heads are split on Taube's book. (Michael Pollan and Andrew Weil are fans; Jillian Michaels and Mehmet Oz are not.) And not all reviewers agree with Taube's conclusions. But regardless of where you land on this issue, there's certainly a lot of food for thought here.

After the jump: Video of Taube's 2007 lecture at U.C. Berkeley (in case you don't feel like reading his 468-page book, but want to get the gist of what he's saying).