This is a copy of a column I wrote for El Pueblo, the official publication of the All City Employees Benefits Service Association of Los Angeles. It contains some good info on health.

By JOE DONATELLI

You eat healthy foods and you exercise regularly. But no matter how hard you try, you can’t lose those last 20 pounds. If you’re like most people, you find this frustrating.

Fortunately, there is something you can do about it.

According to a recently published report in the journal Diabetes, losing more weight means rethinking your entire approach to weight loss. Yes, food and exercise are very important, but there is a third element that most people miss.

Americans are awake for approximately 16 hours a day. Let’s say you spend half an hour a day exercising and another hour a day eating. That leaves 14.5 hours a day in which you’re not thinking about your health. You’re thinking about your job, your children, etc.

A research team at the University of Missouri has discovered that when we sit – and most of us spend most of our days sitting – the enzymes that are responsible for burning fat shut down. When you stand up and move around your enzymes begin burning fat again.

The missing ingredient to increased weight loss is simple. You need to get up and putter around as much as you can during the remaining 14.5 hours of your day.

Marc Hamilton, leader of the University of Missouri research team, said that moving your arms while typing on the computer does not burn fat. The big muscles in the human body that are critical for burning fat are located in the back and legs. These are the muscles you use when you stand up and move around. I call them your puttering core.

“To hold a body that weighs 170 pounds upright takes a fair amount of energy from muscles,” Hamilton said. “You can appreciate that our legs are big and strong because they must be used all the time. There is a large amount of energy associated with standing every day that can’t be easily compensated for by 30 to 60 minutes at the gym.

“Many activities like talking on the phone or watching a child’s ballgame can be done just as enjoyably upright, and you burn double the number of calories while you’re doing it.”

If you sit for long periods of time, you could try:

• Taking walks around the building or block
• Standing while you are talking on the phone
• Walking outside to make cell phone calls
• Drinking plenty of water, which will force you to get up for more water and, ahem, dispose of it
• Organizing that wastebasket basketball league you’ve been dreaming about

I used to work in an office in which the engineering team walked around the outside of the building for 15 to 20 minutes every afternoon. The engineers routinely worked 12-hour days, but they were mentally sharp and relatively healthy. Was it solely because of their afternoon walk? It was probably a number of factors. But the walk was good for their health and had the pleasant side effect of building camaraderie.

The research has spoken. We are a species of born putterers.

Good column, this totally explains why the guys at the Mac store have been getting more and more attractive to me over the years. - Heather T.

I think you’re right. Women will continue to look for new attributes in men as time changes, which is hard on male spouses. Know how I kept my girlfriend for five years? I wear other people’s skin. - Soren

Some words of wisdom are so right they stick with you forever. Fifty years from now when I am sitting in a futuristic retirement hover-home in the clouds of Upper Arizona, these words uttered by my buddy’s older brother my freshman year of college will still flash through my mind.

“Here’s all you need to know. All girls are crazy. And all guys just want to get laid.”

I call this the Lowell Hypothesis, named for its creator. My friends and I probably repeated the Lowell Hypothesis 87,000 times during our four to six years at Ohio University.

It explained everything.

When a girl acted crazy – and in a town with 20 bars within walking distance of campus it happens a lot – we knew that it was in a girl’s nature to act crazy. We had been warned. We accepted it.

When we did stupid things to try to get laid – did I mention that we had 20 bars within walking distance? – we accepted that we were slaves to our hormones. It didn’t excuse our behavior. But it helped us come to grips with things like pretending to like Dave Matthews Band.

I thought of the Lowell Hypothesis this week while reading a Washington Post feature entitled Sex and the Single Bird by French researcher Alexis Chaine. I’ll summarize the article and eventually make a point.

Every summer male songbirds called lark buntings fly north from Mexico and Texas to build nests in a national grassland outside of Denver. The males peacock out with new plumage, glossy feathers, Axe body spray – the works. It was always assumed that females chose the most aggressive birds with the most macho look – kind of like high school … and college … and that 50-year period between college and death. But Chaine’s research shows that these female songbirds actually change their preferences from year to year.

Now, if you’re one of those male lark buntings and you’re reading this in The Washington Post you’ve got to be like “What the fuck!?!” I fly all the way up to Denver – not San Diego or Chicago or some other superior locale – get myself in good shape, bust out a new wardrobe and practice my primal squawk, and for what? So that some hollow-boned avian floozy can decide that bright plumage is out and the ability to gather small twigs is in?

If I’m that male lark bunting I’m thinking, “Hey – all girl birds are crazy. And all guy birds just want to get laid.”

(Above: The female lark bunting. What dude lark bunting wouldn’t want a piece of that?)

Why do these lady birds screw with male birds?

Chaine writes:

For male lark buntings, reproductive success depends on whatever traits are in vogue among females that season. By staying flexible and seeking out partners with the physical qualities most needed at the moment, females ensure that more chicks successfully leave the nest. If the prairie is overrun by ground snakes, for example, mother birds might choose the most protective males – a quality that might be signaled by wing-patch size. If grasshoppers are scarce the next year, maybe they will look for partners with big beaks, which might make them good providers.

This makes me wonder. Nature is incredibly consistent. Most animals, for example, nurture their young without question – humans included. Is it possible that human women do the same thing as female lark buntings? Do human women choose their mates based on what types of advantages males can provide them in that season?

Ask yourself this. Have you ever known a pair of sisters or close friends who married the same type of man? I have. Ladies, have you ever noticed how you and your friends’ husbands or boyfriends are remarkably alike? I know women who have.

You probably laughed it all off as coincidence, but it’s entirely possible that, like the female lark bunting, you and your community of girlfriends/sisters have established, and continually reestablish, what traits are in vogue that season. What’s more, these traits evolve over time, so that the traits you and your girlfriends were looking for when you were 25 are different than those you seek when you’re 30. This would explain, among other things, women who try to change their men, marital affairs and the female drive to move furniture fortnightly.

Think about the female lark bunting next time you look at your man and go, “Who is this guy in my bed?” Maybe he was your 1998 male lark bunting – you were impressed by his ability to navigate the Internets and thought the fact that he owned a Saturn spoke well of his thrift. Now it’s 2008 and you have a whole new set of ground snakes and scarce grasshoppers in your life. You now run your own B2B site, but he still has an AOL e-mail account and drives the same shitty Saturn.

Perhaps it is hardwired into the female brain to change preferences based on present, ever-evolving personal situations. Maybe it is one of the ways – like the lark bunting – that we have ensured the survival of our species.

That doesn’t mean that people can’t have good relationships or that we are simply slaves to our hormones. It means that, when you pick a mate, you’re probably best off looking for someone who can fend off the ground snakes of today and hunt the grasshoppers of tomorrow.

What you want is depth. And if it helps at all, depth never smells like Axe body spray.

I know the guy featured in this MSN campaign. He is a friend of a friend who designed the logo for my improv group Pangea. Great guy. Check out the feature and the three-minute video if you get a chance.

It was a couch on wheels. My God, I loved it.

The one-year anniversary of its death recently passed, and I marked the occasion by pouring a little coolant out on the concrete.

Godspeed, LeSabre.