There was a time — and anyone over forty remembers it — when Sunday morning had a shape to it. The coffee went on. The paper landed on the step, thick and folded over itself. And somewhere in the middle of it was the magazine, the one part of the paper nobody read standing up. You sat down for that one.
That magazine was USA WEEKEND, and beginning in 2005 I was in it. The paper introduced four new columnists that year — Soledad O’Brien on parenting, Walecia Konrad and Sharon Epperson on money, and me on fitness. My column was called FitSmart.
The line in the announcement still gets me: “Each Sunday Jorge’s column reaches 51 million readers in 600 newspapers.” Fifty-one million kitchen tables. I was thirty-eight years old, I had been a heavy kid, and someone had just handed me the Sunday paper.
The promise I made in that first column
“I’ll help you build lean muscle to rev up your metabolism.” That was the pull-quote, and I never really deviated from it. Practical, fast, doable by somebody with a job and kids — that was the entire brief. Time, I said then, is our most precious commodity.
That March, they put me on the cover for The 3-Hour Diet — eat every three hours and you’ll lose weight — with a line inside for the readers who had already dropped a hundred pounds on the plan. Three years later the same magazine would hand me its January 2008 New Year cover.
Print Sundays are gone. The obligation isn’t. Twenty years on I am still writing the same column, just in a different format — and the thinking has sharpened into the two-hour method in MORE TIME.