Uh... Duh!

Everywhere you turn these days there is another article about overweight and obesity rates in the United States and in fact now globally as it seems the world has taken on our not so great eating habits.

This is fast becoming a global epidemic. There is no question that cardiovascular diseases kill more people each year in the US than all other diseases combined and while overweight and obesity are not the only causes, they are major contributing factors.

So... when do we finally get it?

When do we stop analyzing the data and start taking action?

I love digg.com. Its a great place to find info on just about anything. Type in "obesity" and three of the top four stories are as follows:

#1 - "Parents Blamed for Childhood Obesity"

#2 - "Desk jobs making more people obese,study finds."

#4 - "Kids Who Lack Self-Control Prone To Obesity Later"

Uh... Duh!!!

I'm not attacking the authors. The articles are all very good and they report valid current issues which are analyzed by studies. But just look at the titles alone without reading any further.

"Parents blamed for childhood obesity." Ya think? Who else is responsible? Aren't they the adults? Aren't they the role models?

"Desk jobs making more people obese, study finds." Really? Who would have ever thought that? Would you have ever guessed that sitting on your butt all day long might have something to do with why its getting so big?

And the last article, just kind of goes without saying.

If you're a parent, let me ask you a question: Where do your young children learn their beliefs, values, habits etc.?

Do we really need another study to tell us that what you do affects what your children do? If you eat junk... your kids eat junk. If you sit on the couch and watch countless hours of mind-numbing television... so do your kids.

If you think a good workout is running to the fridge during the commercial break...

I hope you get the point.

I would love to believe that the day will come when we will all appreciate the value of an active and healthy lifestyle and yet I'm not holding my breath. So, if you won't do it for yourself, how about doing it for your kids?

Everybody says they don't have enough time and still they manage to get in 4 or 5 hours of TV time after work.

I'm not asking you to give up all of your television entertainment but how about a little?

Why not:

Spend a half hour preparing a healthy meal instead of fast food? Healthy doesn't have to be expensive. In fact, I can make a great healthy meal for as little as $2 or $3 per person. You can't eat at the golden arches for that!

After your healthy dinner and before you sit down to veg in front of the tube, take the family out for a 30 minute walk. Did you know that 30 minutes 5 days a week can result in a weight loss of 13 pounds over the course of a year without changing your diet?

Like it or not, good or bad, your kids are learning the habits they'll carry into adulthood from you right now. What do you want them to learn?

Isn't it time once and for all that we finally start to do something instead of just talking about it or writing about it?

We have a choice. Five years from now we can be reading headlines that say: "New study shows more families making healthy choices in the kitchen." or "Obesity rates finally decline as more parents take active role in modeling good habits"

Or

We can have more headlines like the ones I mentioned earlier that just kind of make us all go;

Uh... Duh!!!

A New "Sub-blog"

We run, bike, swim, walk, lift weights and all other forms of exercise and yet...

We treat our bodies like they're a $200 beater car ready for the junk-yard!

What did you eat today? Do you even know? How many carbs, fats and protein? How often did you eat today? Once? Twice? Three times? Four? Five?

Why do we have more excuses for not eating right than for just about anything else in our lives?


Get the info you need to get it right on my new page

How Long Is Five Years?

(This was originally posted on my other now defunct blog back in September, it just kind of fits with a lot of the conversations I've been hearing lately.)

If you're at all like me you probably have served up more excuses to yourself for not exercising than you can count.

Let's be honest. We all have days when we just shouldn't workout. Days when we're genuinely sick or hurt and training is not going to fix anything or may even do more harm than good.

I'm not talking about those days. I'm talking about the other 360 days of the year when the only thing between a good workout and you, is a great big excuse!

Now I understand, I know how hard it can be to tie a pair of running shoes after a long day of work. And then there's the dilemma of not having the right outfit to wear. And there are at least a half dozen things you should be doing each day before you even think about going for a run. Life is busy!

But... let me ask you a question: Where were you in your life five years ago?

How many of the goals and dreams you said you were going to accomplish actually came to be? And based on the response I assume most of us gave; where will you be five years from now?

I'm not a pessimist, quite the contrary, I'm a huge optimist. I mean as one of my all time favorite speakers, Zig Ziglar say; "I'm so positive, I'd go after Moby Dick in a row boat and bring a five gallon bucket of tartar sauce!" or "I'm so positive, I'd spend my last two dollars on a money belt!"

The honest to goodness truth is that most of us have fitness goals we're not meeting and the biggest reasons are nothing more than excuses.

Maybe you don't have grandiose aspirations in the world of health and fitness like I do. And that's OK. I will suggest, as I learned the hard way, that while it's alright not to want to be an athlete, it's not OK to not have a plan for your general overall health. Every year in this country a greater percentage of our population slides into the "Obese" category and we go on like nothing's changed and everything's just fine.

As I look honestly at the pictures of myself just 3 1/2 months ago before I had my heart attack, I am embarrassed to say that I had slipped into that group of Americans who take health for granted and do little to improve it. I was kidding myself into thinking because I ran once in awhile and had done four marathons in the last two years that I was healthy. I even lied about my weight when they were checking me into the emergency room. I say lied, but the truth is I had paid so little attention to it lately that I wasn't aware of how big I had gotten.

Despite what I thought, I was a stout 250-pounder and all you have to do is look at the picture to see it. Amazingly, I ran a 5K race just three weeks prior. Had I gotten the race pictures back sooner, instead of the day after I got back from the hospital, I might have realized just how bad my condition was.

Fact of the matter is, most of us do this on a pretty regular basis.

Oh sure, we all know we aren't in perfect shape, but we'll get around to fixing it sooner or later, right? And five or ten years later we're still sitting around thinking about getting around to doing something about our health.

PLEASE, START NOW!

I can't say enough about how important it is. I can't impose, impress, stress or anything else, that you have to do something now, if you don't admit to yourself it's time to change now. The saddest part is that most of us know we need to eat better, exercise more, drink less, stop smoking, whatever and still we do little or nothing at all. Incidentally, if you know you are overweight, smoke, drink too much, have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes or anything else of that nature, please don't go out once a month, over train and call yourself fit. I for one would rather have you around than have you dead.

You don't get in shape overnight. It takes time. If you are overweight, there are two issues to be addressed; the weight and your cardiovascular fitness. Sometimes, it's important to work on the weight first just to get to the point where you can improve your heart. This all takes time. But again, let me ask you the question; If you don't start to make a change now, when will it happen? Where will you be five years from now?

Do you remember five years ago? In some cases it went by so fast it seems like only yesterday doesn't it? Trust me, the older you get the faster it goes! You blink at forty and suddenly, you're forty-five. What happened? And more important, what's changed for the positive?

So what do you do?

As I said earlier, there are a million excuses for not exercising and you've got to get rid of them all.

If you're overweight, start simple. Take a walk in the morning or at night... or both. This is arguably the best fat burning exercise around because it keeps you in the zone where you are burning fat the whole time you are exercising. Start with twenty minutes, ten minutes out and ten minutes back. If you handle that well, increase your time. If you are seriously overweight don't automatically try to graduate to jogging. We want to drop some of those pounds before we work too much on the cardiovascular system. I will promise you this; if you will commit to walking everyday for at least forty-five minutes a day, you will notice a difference in your weight and your shape within two weeks and instead of water weight, which is usually the first thing to go when you diet alone or try jogging, it will be fat loss.

Just do this! If you can afford it, get a personal trainer and join a gym. If you can't afford it, contact me and I'll help you with a training program and a plan to get you healthy free of charge (it's that important to me).

Incidentally, walking is also great because it doesn't require lots of fancy equipment or shoes. If you're embarrassed to have people see you, wait until dark, but at all costs get out and go! Besides, most of us see someone out of shape exercising and think: "Go for it!"

For those of you who have fitness goals involving competitions or races, let me just say... no more excuses! Today is the day where you get serious! If you really plan to run a 5K, 10K, half-marathon, marathon, ultra marathon or compete in a triathlon or some other fitness event, it's time to put your training first.

I know we all have the time constraints involved with work, family and such... so be it. If you're going to compete, it's the other stuff that has to be evaluated. Stop reading this blog and go run! Which will be more important to you five years from now, the fact that you took on a physical challenge and succeeded or the fact that you watched a particular episode of your favorite TV show?

Nothing in life worth having is easy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something! It's just that simple! Do you really think there is such a thing as "Five minute abs"? I don't know anyone who exercises five minutes a day, period. And likewise, if you want to complete some form of athletic endeavor, it's not going to happen in five minutes a day. You will find the time when your goal is important enough to you. When you finally decide that this is something you truly want for your life and you will be proud of five years from now when you look back after completing your twentieth marathon or whatever and say; "I did it!"

Tomorrow almost didn't come for me. That may one of the greatest blessings I will ever receive however, I don't wish that on anyone. The key is to get the "don't waste another day" feeling without having to go through what I went through. When you get that feeling, you stop accepting excuses from yourself.

I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day and I said to him, "I spent the last five years of my life, "Actively Disengaged". What that meant was, I was going through the motions. I had a good job, making decent money and I worked hard at it, but only as hard as I wanted to because it was in a business I had been in for twenty years and I could literally do it blindfolded with one hand tied behind my back. I mean it just didn't require me to be actively involved mentally. Accordingly, I unplugged in other areas of my life as well. I'm all for being laid back and relaxed, but I took "going with the flow" to all new levels. That's why it took me ten years to run my first marathon. I'd get to the end of a long day and even though I had promised myself I would go for a run after work, someone would say let's go have a beer and I was done for the night.

Actively disengaged is that point where you go on auto-pilot in life. It may be where you're at right now. You may have dreams or goals in your life, but their attainment is something of a haphazard approach of whatever, whenever or even, if ever. It's not a really cool place to be. Most of us have something more we want for our life and when you are actively disengaged you get a lot of feelings of frustration because you're not really moving in any particular direction, let alone towards your desired outcomes. It's kind of like being in neutral.

For me, having been through a heart attack, I know that allowing myself to be actively disengaged no longer means "neutral", it means "park" and "park = dead"! I am at greater risk now that I've had one to have another and even more likely not to survive if I do have another one. How's that for a stimulating ultimatum? I no longer have the choice to be disengaged. I have got to do everything I can to get in the best shape of my life. As odd as this may sound to some, it really is a blessing! I'm not really interested in being dead right now, so my alternative is to get in great shape.

Are you actively disengaged in your life? Do you get home from work and instead of throwing on the workout clothes, you sit down in front of the idiot box... (most homes now have two different kinds of them; the TV and the computer) and chill out. It's easy to come home and tell yourself you just want to unwind for a little bit by doing something mindless. Stop kidding yourself. That TV show you're watching is not going to make you feel any better and it certainly is going to be of no use at mile 18 of your next marathon or halfway through the swim in a triathlon. And there is no scientific data to back up the theory that two hours of mindless TV can improve your 5K time by 20%. There is however, a lot of data to support doing some good solid running or weight training or cycling.

Being "Actively Engaged" in your life is not easy. Oh boy, here we go again with the whole; it's not easy thing again! It is however, very rewarding. When you take the time to know what's really important and then follow up with the right decisions to ensure that you take the right actions, you will experience abundance like you've never known. Look at all the truly great athletes in life and you will see a group of people who knew and made the right decisions more often than not.

I'm not saying you can't be spontaneous once in a while when everyone in the office is going out for a celebration, it just can't be every single night and in lieu of training. If you're serious about your training, people around you will know that and act accordingly. If they'd rather have you out with them every night, even though they know how important your training is to you, you might want to re-evaluate who you hang out with. "If you ain't for me, you're agin me!"

If you're actively engaged in life you make plans and you do what you can to stick to them. It takes (I know people don't like this word)... discipline, but it's worth it!

So, how long is five years?

Not very long and yet it can be a lifetime! It can represent the best or the worst part of your life. And more importantly, you can decide today what you will feel when you reach five years from now. You can commit to what's really important and go for it or you can let life take you like a leaf in the wind. The choice is absolutely yours!

Make it a great five years!

And We Wonder Why We're Obese!

I will never ever suggest to you that being healthy is something you can do in just a few short minutes a week!

Why?

Because it's just not true!

Unfortunately, there are loads of people who in an effort to get you to read their material, will tell you pretty much anything you want to hear! They will manipulate and twist the truth to make it suit their intended outcome whether it be just to get you to read their article or maybe to get you to buy their products and services.

Take a recent headline for an article on Reuters.com:

"Want to get healthy? Exercise 7 minutes a week"

Come on!

Now I'm sure the author will say if you read the whole article you will have enough information to make an educated decision about what was presented to you. And if you read the whole thing you will, as long as you fully understand that they are specifically talking about improving your bodies ability to utilize insulin.

Again unfortunately, most of us don't read complete and boring articles about studies... we read headlines!

No, it is not the authors' fault if you see their headline and don't read the article, but any writer worth their salt knows that we have so much information (about 2 billion bits per second) thrown at us that we make lots of quick assumption about what we read.

And maybe I am wrong about the writers' intentions. Perhaps they really felt that telling people about a study which monitored 16, early twenties, young men for an astonishing 2 weeks, while they worked out vigorously for 30 seconds twice a day, thereby improving their body's ability to utilize insulin, was vital information and therefore merited utilizing whatever method is possible; including a deceptive headline, to get people to read.

I say that is, pardon me: crap!

Nearly two thirds of Americans are overweight! This is not bad... its horrifying! We are a nation of quick-fixers. We want everything now and we don't want to work for it. That is sad. We wonder why we have wide-spread health issues. We are daily bombarded with misinformation and half-truths, all designed to grab our attention without any regard to the damage that they do to our health.

We used to be a caring nation. And an active nation. And a responsible nation. What happened?

Believe me when I say that I would not ever want anyone to be censored on what they can say or write. Its part of what makes this nation great. I just wonder; what ever happened to responsible journalism?

Is it really so important to get people to read your article that you have to present a headline that is so far from the truth that it really doesn't match the article?

If you read the article, it does not make the claim that this is a cure for all your health issues, it's just the headline, which is honestly, all most readers will ever see and read!

That's all I've got to say for now!