If you pick up a book about torture in the Middle Ages or earlier times, you will discover to your dismay that the running or walking machines in modern gyms are nothing more than avant-garde torture devices.

In the Middle Ages, the persecuted were forced to walk endlessly in continuous circles in a similar way to that still tormenting their descendants hundreds of years later. The persecuted have no choice.

Once they were whipped whenever they stopped, now they get fat if they stop. Yet the situation has deteriorated - we pay for our torture because if we don't, we have no incentive to keep going to the gym.

But if you count solely on these machines to lose weight, you are doomed to disappointment. Because you still insist on catching a lift to the second-floor office; you still desperately want a sofa to sit on, a taxi or motorcycle for short journeys; you still want to minimize the frequency of standing up, from working to going to the toilet. How could your belly not look like a sack of hamburgers if you live like that?

I am ashamed to say that I belong to this group. Whenever my friends ask me to go swimming with them I react with alarm. Perhaps they will say to me at the swimming pool that I do not need a life buoy because I already have one around my belly.

Ever since the invention of the computer, our bodies have lost just about their last motive to leave the chair. Never before in history have human beings so desperately wanted to sit down! One day we will all have to have plastic surgery to lift our buttocks.

One day we will all find we have been sitting for so long that we need to make a special effort to stand up, just like what our creeping forest ancestors did in the formative period of the human species. The only difference is that they were moving in the direction of progress while we are heading exactly the opposite way.

Fortunately, the running machine has come to our rescue now. But can we be rescued?

We are entering into a society of specialization and "pro-fessionalism". So are our lives. The different strands of life are no longer combined together but proceed in their separate ways. We need special exercise periods to burn the fat we have accumulated for months.

We need to take additional vitamins to compensate for the fast junk meals we have eaten for weeks. We need to find extra sleep time to compensate for the sleep we have lost for days.

We need comedy specialists to free us from our sullen faces. And we need to dine out specially to restore family relationships and find stimuli for our tongues dulled by incessant business meals. Any enjoyment, any element of a healthy lifestyle has now to be pursued through special and separate efforts.

Gone are the days when we could take several different types of enjoyment from doing one thing, when we would both take delight and burn fat from walking. We now have to resort to separate "rescuers".

Many will applaud such progress. Yes, how wonderful it is that we are now able to control the style and pace and quality of our life, that we are able to control when we sleep, what we eat, when we take exercise!

We now have more of our fate in our own hands than those unfortunate pre-industrial souls. But while we are seemingly controlling everything, which we human beings seem to enjoy more than anything else, who can safely say that we are not being controlled at the same time?

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