Originally published in South Coast Today.

As a strength coach, people often assume that I will be extra critical of those who struggle with their weight and exhibit poor fitness. I’m actually quite sympathetic toward many people who struggle with fitness because it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to be fit in the environment in which we live.

There are so many obstacles that conspire against fitness that it’s a wonder any of us are fit, not a shocker that we have surging childhood obesity rates. Sure, we still see examples of physical laborers and so forth, but the fitness-sapping environment of which I speak is the more common snapshot of present-day America. We live in a technetronic culture that is so rife with conveniences that we barely have to move to get through our daily lives.

The fitness challenge that vexes modern day society is a very complex problem with no easy solutions. The prophets of doom have the bleak outlook that the future of fitness lies in pills and surgeries.

I’m as big a cheerleader for diet and exercise as anyone, but it hasn’t exactly been a rousing success as a remedy for our collective fitness woes. Coercing diet and exercise upon the masses is as about effective as Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” crusade. It seems like an OK idea — it might help, but who’s gonna actually do it?

I periodically brainstorm with doctors and other health practitioners about solving this fitness crisis. The pediatricians always suggest taxing sugar. Hitting people in the wallet does seem to have the power of persuasion, but I say we start by punishing laziness.

At the top of the list, the obvious starting point should be a stiff fine for not returning your shopping cart to the designated drop off areas. Last week I saw an abandoned cart in the parking space that abuts the actual drop-off bin.

I can maybe understand why a person might choose not to walk 50 feet, but what kind of shameless hump doesn’t walk three feet to do the right thing? Bearing in mind that the store signs politely read “please return,” these small radius violators should get hit even harder. The penalty should be proportional to the egregiousness of the laziness.

I’ve always loved the saying, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

I can’t think of a better time to abuse statistics for my own personal agenda, so I called up New Bedford’s own physicist and estimation guru, Dr. Aaron Santos, and had him crunch some numbers for me. Using an average walking speed, an estimated, work-bout duration of 30 seconds and a way-too-generous belief that 90 percent of shoppers return their shopping carts, we found that in one week the unrealized caloric cost of these deadbeat carriage offenders would result in a collective weight gain of seven tons. In our neck of the woods that’s like 39,000 linguica pizzas.

Stockpiling an extra calorie a week as a fugitive of responsibility (which is about the calorie burn of returning a cart) might not seem like a big deal and you’re probably right. But as a glimpse into the bigger picture, maybe it shouldn’t be dismissed as so insignificant. The sum total of all these miniscule calories do add up and can have a considerable effect.

With all of our shortcuts, time-savers and amenities, there are a lot of would-be throwaway calories that become surplus calories. A very popular approach to fitness in this country is to go to the gym for an hour and do a super-duper, intense workout to counterbalance the motionless aspects of our daily lives.

It’s too tall an order to offset 23 hours of damaging behavior with an hour of therapeutic behavior.

Does taking the stairs and going for a walk during your lunch hour offer the calorie burning potential to save our overworked, overscheduled, drive-through society? Not really, but this is precisely the kind of stuff we should be doing on top of our structured exercise time to compete in this eternal game of catch-up between our necessarily active leisure lives and our sedentary work lives.

And do I honestly believe that sanctioning shopping cart delinquents will help the cause? Nah, but if it leverages courteous behavior and reduces the number of car dings, it’s still a great idea.