When I was growing up, I always considered ourselves to be one of the lucky ones, because even though we were close to dirt poor, and could never afford many luxuries in life, we had something the other kids did not, a Summer cottage, a little shack nestled on the corner of a winding lake. Every summer when school was over, our father would pack us all into what ever broken down car we were driving at the time, and for 3 months out of the year, we lived the country life. An idyllic world for any boy, filled with fishing, and catching fireflies at night, searching for bullfrogs, and skinning catfish for dinner.  But most of all it was a time for swimming. I practically lived in my swim trunks, and even before I could walk I was paddling around in the lake.

And so it’s no big leap of the imagination, to find out, that when ever I start an exercise program, it has to unequivocally include time in the pool. I can take or leave running on tread mills, pumping weights, or playing any one of a hundred sports, but put me in water and I will splash and swim and exercise until I’m as wrinkled as an old paper bag and as tired as an old hound dog chasin a coon. It’s a little known fact that fat people float like a cork in water, and is, the one and only, advantage to being obese. And it surprises me that so few places utilizes this great equalizer of men. Perhaps it’s because obese people are so self conscious or because pools and lakes are so dang hard to get in and out of, but if I ruled the world, every diet clinic in the world would include an Olympic sized pool.

I’ve had the great opportunity to work with the mentally handicapped and during my time and adventures with them; we had the occasion to visit a summer facility that included a pool with a wheelchair ramp. This to me is the ideal set up, because even in my disabilitated state I could waddle down a ramp to play and splash and float and for once, forget my immense deformity and enjoy life, and get exercise to boot.

But unfortunately I don’t know of any place like this near by, and even if there was I couldn’t afford it.

And so, to you, would be doctors and entrepreneurs, consider water when you develop your exercise programs. Build a safe haven for fat people to swim. And they will exercise and tone without even knowing it, work with there natural buoyancy, it is the one and only, great advantage that they have. And in so doing you might, even make, getting into shape fun.