Politics - News Analysis

Trump Says He Gets His Exercise Walking Between Buildings on the White House Grounds

Donald Trump’s annual physical is tomorrow, and CNN has divulged some information about the president’s diet and non-existent fitness routine.

Last year Trump was less than thrilled when his personal physician recommended he get on a diet, start exercising and set a goal of losing 12 pounds.

None of that happened.

Trump is famous for his love of fast food, and was reluctant to change his eating habits or use the White House fitness room that his most recent predecessors had used to stay in shape.

But apparently he really liked the Dover sole prepared by the White House chefs.

“He was like, ‘Sh**, I have to eat healthy?’ And then he had this delicious Dover sole prepared at the White House and he really liked it,” one White House official said.

A little more than a year later, Trump will undergo his second physical exam as President on Friday at the Walter Reed military hospital. As he prepares for the battery of tests to evaluate his physical health, sources close to him say he has stuck with some minor changes to improve his diet. But an exercise regimen? That’s remained elusive for the 72-year-old President.

“The President received a diet and exercise plan last year after his annual physical, but the President admits he has not followed it religiously,” said Hogan Gidley, the principal deputy White House press secretary.

Nearly a dozen White House officials and sources close to Trump said they don’t believe he’s set foot in the fitness room in the White House residence, maintaining his view that exercise would be a waste of the energy he has always touted as one of his best attributes.

That’s despite the insistence last year of his then-physician, Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, that while the President was “more enthusiastic about the diet part than the exercise part…we’re going to do both.”

Asked in a Reuters interview last summer about whether he was getting exercise, Trump pointed to his infrequent walks from the White House to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a stone’s throw away.

“I get exercise. I mean I walk, I this, I that,” Trump said. “I run over to a building next door. I get more exercise than people think.”

Trump has frequently hit the golf links during his presidency, about the only form of exercise he engages in, even though he uses a golf cart between holes. But the recent partial government shutdown cut into his golfing regimen, keeping him off the course for 69 straight days, a record during his two-plus years in office.

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