They scroll on the top of your wide screen high definition set while you watch your match, alone or with friends, at home or in restaurants, with your beer mugs and your highly salted cheddar cheese, chips and roasted peanuts snacks within reach.

They are scrolling tickers which tell you that sedentary life style and unhealthy diets will lead you to obesity, diabetes, hypertension and all kind of health mishaps. They bring to your mind those sudden and untimely deaths just when the match reaches a heated and emotionally charged stage! “Connoisseurs” who live between their couch, their comfortable office armchairs and their car’s back seat often feel the blow and the pinch of these awkward newsfeed. But most people will not give a damn about it.

So, with their protruding beer belly, a minority of overweight or obese men and women will go sweating every day to check if these adverts of the ministry of Health carry any truth at all. They do so mainly for the good of their nerves and they walk, jog or run for their life. In fear of that heart attack foretold.

They are seen early morning, sometimes late afternoon, on the beaches, downhill paths, on stadium tracks, along fitness trails. The most daring find themselves in gyms and the rich on golf courses. Their ostensible reason is to lose weight. The secret idea is to attain that model leanness even though they are in their forties of fifties.

Alas, most of them will just drop out after some months. Discouraged and frustrated, just because hours of effort and sweating have not melted a single kilo of their fat away!

Watching them gasping and choking for a very minimal weight loss brings me to the gone by days when I was studying for the French sports instructor’s certificate where the basics of training are taught, but most importantly the principles of interval training which was researched and introduced in Europe by expert coaches in the fifties.

Those who sweat for hours without losing a single kilo would be much surprised to learn that only twenty minutes of interval training, with brisk walking for example, will rapidly burn their excess fat. Well conducted interval training is known to burn calories and shed toxins forty hours after the training session. One will not achieve this result with hours of running or jogging at a regular pace.

Some of our trainers, coaches and yoga instructors are aware of it. For yoga has evolved to yoga dance, Bikram yoga and Jeevan Tatwa whose seven postures done in five minutes are tantamount of half an hour of brisk walking.

http://www.bikramyogamtl.com/home_eng.html

But most of our pseudo sport and fitness instructors are unaware of the properties of interval training.

Dr. Al Sears and many high level training coaches have been repeating time and again that most of our fitness instructors have a 100 % wrong knowledge of cardio.

http://jonnybowdenblog.com/interval-training-weight-loss/

Can it be otherwise for these trainers and coaches when the simple fact of calculating the body mass index is next to impossible for them.

It is no wonder that the number of people exercising is fading to nothing. The TV tickers of minister Lormus Bundhoo is no longer grabbing, for people do not have time, infrastructure and qualified trainers to lead them on the path of healthy physical activities.

No incentive neither from government or corporates which are very busy making the most of workers before stress and non-communicable diseases get the better of these poor chaps.

Funds are not scarce, funds are used for example to build recreation centers for the elderly for they are vote pulling projects.

Let us hope that minister Bundhoo will one day come to the conclusion that he has placed the cart before the horse and he will realize that his ministry needs infrastructure and trained coaches as well as nutritionists to handle the overweight, obese and non-communicable epidemics hitting Mauritius.

But hope is what makes idiots live. The more so when one realizes that those who might turn these hopes into realities are highly incompetent people who go under the names of “advisor”, “special advisor” or “super CEO”.