I used to work with a man, let’s call him Jerry. Every year, when he went to his doctor for a physical and was asked what his height was he would add an inch to the previous year’s number. The reason he said was BMI, body mass index, the ratio of a person’s height to their weight that many physicians use as a gauge of whether you are overweight.

Jerry said he wanted his height to increase to compensate for his expanding waist and increasing height. That way his BMI would remain pretty much the same from year to year and his doctor wouldn’t ask him to go on a diet.

“I’m not overweight, I’m just under height” was his explanation.

A well-rounded figure

Apparently Jerry is not the only one doing this. A new study out says that when people are asked to provide their own weight in research surveys they underestimate their weight and overestimate their height. Women are worse than men at doing this. And white women are the worst of all for fudging the numbers.

Now, the researchers, in the journal Ethnicity and Disease say this is not a big deal and people don’t over or underestimate by a lot, just enough to throw the BMI measurement off by a point or two. Which is good news for the researchers because it means their findings are still close enough to the truth to be valid.

But it’s not such good news for ordinary people. I know none of us like to admit we might be a little overweight and so it doesn’t hurt to lie to someone asking us about our weight. Particularly if we’re only off by a small amount.  But who are we really fooling?

The researchers are not going to judge you about your height or weight. All they care about is their data and the odds of them ever seeing you again are slim. So it’s not as if they’re likely to come up to you in the supermarket one day and say “hey, didn’t you say you were 5′ 7″? You only look 5′ 6″ to me.”

But if we are lying to complete strangers about the fact that we are overweight, then we’re probably also lying to ourselves.

It’s like watching those men at the gym who stand in front of the mirror sucking their gut in as hard as they can. They glance at themselves and think “yeah, I look pretty good for my age”. But as soon as they walk away from the mirror they relax their muscles, their belly drops and they look like a naked version of porky pig. It’s not pretty believe me.

Ultimately it all boils down to this: you can’t fix a problem if you don’t acknowledge that you have a problem. Pretending you are taller than you are, or smaller than you are, or thinner than you are, or lighter than you are just means you are hiding from yourself.

Jerry got away with his little game for a few years until one of the office staff, who was taking down the information, asked if he really was 6′ 7′? Jerry looked surprised, then said “oh, I must have shrunk a little”. The tech looked at his belly and it was clear that at least one part of Jerry wasn’t shrinking.

That was the moment Jerry decided he probably should do something about his weight. Because lord knows he couldn’t do anything about his height.

I have never made any secret of the fact that I hate yoga. Mostly because I have spent a lifetime doing sports that compact all my muscles and here comes this ancient exercise or meditation or whatever you want to call it that pulls everything out and forces me to stretch parts of me that don’t want to stretch and twist things that shouldn’t twist and have me assume positions that are just not natural. So when I recently saw an article in the New York Times saying that yoga might be bad for people my initial thought was “yeah, I was right all along.” The article said all that twisting and bending can be bad for you, it can strain muscles, rip tendons, pull your back out of shape.

But then I thought

Why am I doing this?

Wait a minute, any exercise can do that to you. If you haven’t played soccer in years then you can hurt yourself doing that. If you used to love ping pong as a kid and took it up again as an adult you can hurt yourself. And maybe yoga is a slightly exaggerated form of any exercise because it really works every single part of your body, but the basic premise is the same. If you do it properly and carefully and with good guidance it can be safe and really beneficial.

That’s not to mean I like it any more, but it does mean that it isn’t dangerous just because you do it wrong or have a crappy teacher who teaches you bad form or you try to get into a full lotus when you have spent the previous ten hours sitting in front of a computer screen and wonder why your tendons just don’t want to go there.

The point is, exercise in any form can be bad for you if you haven’t done it before – or for a long time – and you do it badly. You need to know what you are doing or work with someone who knows what they are doing and knows how to show you how to do it.

Good form is essential

The other day, the other month actually, I pulled the heck out of my calf muscle playing squash. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done a thousand times before. I wasn’t moving in a way I hadn’t done a thousand times before. And yet this time, for whatever reason, my calf went kablooey. Maybe I was just pushing it too hard, or my form was bad. All I know is that as soon as I hit a great cross court shot and was moving back into position in case my opponent – damn you Austin – got it back, my calf went bang and that was that. I’ve been slowly getting back in shape since then. But it takes time. And patience.

And that’s why when I read that article about yoga being bad for you, much as I wanted to jump on the blog and say “see, the NY Times agrees with me” my own experience taught me otherwise. Yes, of course yoga can be bad for you. Playing tiddlywinks can be bad for you if one of them jumps up and hits you in the eye. Anything, done badly, can be bad for you. But that’s no reason to dismiss the enormous potential health benefits of yoga.

Downward facing “you dawg you”

Don't try this at home folks

I once met an 83 year old man who had become a devotee of Bikram yoga. That’s the kind where they heat the room to 110 degrees so you sweat like crazy. It’s meant to warm up the muscles and tendons in your body so that they are more flexible. It’s also meant to replicate the conditions in India where yoga first was practiced. This gentleman had only taken up yoga when he was 80 and swore by Bikram, saying it gave him more energy, made him feel healthier and happier.

Frankly I think he just liked watching lots of young, cute women bend into positions that in his youth would have been unthinkable.

I still don’t like yoga. But I would never tell other people not to do it. For my 83 year old friend it’s the highlight of his day. And that’s reason enough to do any exercise isn’t it.

If you thought TV was bad for your brain a new study says it’s doing just as much damage to your heart! In fact this study says that if you watch TV for six hours a day you may be shortening your life by five years. Five years! That’s amazing. Those Kardashian girls are killing you in ways you hadn’t even imagined.

Death Watch

Now this is not some anti-TV nutcase just trying to get you to do something crazy like read books or go for a walk, these are well regarded Australian scientists who have their paper in a respected medical publication – the British Journal of Sports Medicine - and the researchers say that just sitting there watching TV for hours at a time is as dangerous for you as smoking or not doing any exercise (which come to think of it would fall under the sitting watching TV banner as well, but I digress…….)

Now, there’s lots of things I could write about the methodology they used to come up with their findings but that’s rather dry and you can read it if you go to the study itself. What is interesting is that they calculated that in 2008 Australian adults (25 years and older) watched 9.8 billion hours of TV a year.

Now, while allowing for the fact that Aussies are sports mad and that a single cricket game can last five days that’s still a heck of a lot of TV. It makes me wonder how many bad sitcoms did people watch, how many dreadful reality shows, how many episodes of Australian Idol etc.

One hour more = less

Here’s an even scarier statistic from the researchers: each hour of TV watched after the age of 25 reduced the life expectancy of the viewer by just under 22 minutes. In TV terms, that means each episode of ‘Glee’ means your life is reduced by an episode of ‘Two and a half Men’.

Really, fun as ‘Glee’ is, is it worth missing 22 minutes of Charlie Sheen.

Or, to put it another way. Is it worth watching that re-run of Law and Order (for the 12th time) if it means missing out on playing with your kids, your grandkids, your neighbors kids, your wife/husband/partner/lover/cousin/uncle/goldfish? Or just reading a book. Or just going for a walk. Or just hanging out with people you like who have interesting things to say?

Comparable to smoking

Previous studies show that smoking one cigarette can, on average, reduce your life expectancy by 11 minutes. That’s the same as watching half an hour of TV. So, if you are smoking while you watch TV you might as well gather the family around now, coz you ain’t got long to go and you’ll be lucky to make it to the end of this season’s ‘Dancing With The Stars’

We all can make choices about how we live our lives. And with hundreds of TV channels and On Demand and Apple TV we clearly have a dizzying array of choices of what to watch. I guess the only question now is would we rather watch life on TV or live it ourselves.

A man goes to see his doctor and says ‘Doc, it hurts when I do this” and the doctor says “Then don’t do that” Turns out that advice is more than just the punchline for a very old joke, it’s also based on sound scientific research. At least now it is.

The researchers say that how you hold yourself, your posture, can have a big influence on your sensitivity to pain.They say the more dominant a pose you adopt, the less sensitive to pain you are; and the reverse is true, the more submissive a pose you adopt the more likely you are to experience increased sensitivity to pain.

Posing the question

Scott Wiltermuth and Vanessa Bohns published their wonderfully titled study, It Hurts When I Do This (or You Do That), in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They found that by having people adopt a more dominant pose the individuals felt more powerful, more in control of circumstances, and better able to handle stress or distress. They also found that those who were assigned to adopt the most dominant poses were better able to handle pain than people asked to adopt a more neutral or submissive pose.

Powerful poses

Sneaky science

Now, being a researcher means being kind of sneaky. They told the participants in the study that they were taking part in research into the health benefits of exercise at work and got them to get into a variety of yoga poses – some were powerful, dynamic poses, others were much more submissive with everything curled inwards. But how did they measure their sense of pain? Simple, they put a blood pressure cuff on their arm and kept pumping it up way beyond a normal level and told the study participants to tell them when to stop, when it hurt.

Those who were given the powerful yoga poses had a higher threshold of pain than those given the submissive poses. Cool eh!

Fake it

What’s really interesting is that the researchers say that we can use this kind of information in every day life. For instance, if you are in pain your natural reaction may be to be very nurturing and protective of yourself, to curl up into the proverbial ball to protect yourself. Wiltermuth and Bohns say that may have precisely the opposite effect. By making yourself adopt such a submissive pose you may be increasing your sensitivity to pain, because you are essentially saying you have no control over what’s happening to you or how you react to it.

Wiltermuth and Bohns say instead of curling up you should sit or stand up straight, and push your chest out. This can create a sense of power and a sense of control over what’s happening, or at least reduce your sense that things are out of control.

So, turns out your mother was right after all – isn’t she always – posture does matter. Not just in how others view you. But also in how you view yourself.

The human body is an amazing thing. Think of all the abuse it takes over the years and yet it still manages to perform into, in most cases, a ripe old age.

Think of how much junk we pump into it that it doesn’t need – how much fat and salt and sugar and chemicals of various kinds disguised as food.

The tale of the tape

Think of how many calories we consume that we don’t need – almost 600 in a Big Mac alone, and that’s without the fries and soda – that just sit on our hips adding pound after pound to our weight and inch after inch to our girth

Too much

Think of all the physical activity we don’t get because our jobs are sedentary and are so far from our homes that we have to travel either in a car or by public transportation.

So, it’s no wonder that over the years we get larger. What is a wonder is that our bodies somehow manage to endure all this and still keep functioning at a pretty high rate, still keep moving, even if we start to move a little slower and with a tad less grace and elegance than in the past.

Your loss is your gain

And then one day we lose weight, or we start to workout and we tone up our muscles and people come up to us and say “hey, you’re looking really good these days, what are you doing?”

And we notice that we feel better. Our clothes aren’t so tight or they’re even loose! We sleep better. We have more energy. We look better. Our eyes are brighter, our skin clearer.

Yet despite all that we all too often slip back into old habits. You’ve probably heard the statistic, that around 95% of people who lose weight on a diet put it back on – and in many cases add a few extra pounds just for good luck. Why is that? Well, one obvious reason is that we are surrounded by temptation every where we go. You can’t walk down the street without seeing a store or restaurant selling you calorie-laden, junk-filled foods. You can’t go to the office without some well-meaning soul (maybe it’s you) bringing in cakes or muffins or cookies (how come no one ever brings in broccoli florets). The things that proved our undoing in the first place are all around us. And you can’t open up a magazine or newspaper, watch a TV show or go online without being bombarded by yet more ads for yet more tempting foods.

But it’s more than just temptation. It’s habit. We use food to console us when we’re down. We use it to reward us when we feel we’ve done something good. We use it as an occasion to hang out with friends. We use it as a courtship ritual when we go out on a date with someone.

It’s with us every single day of our lives but when was the last time you seriously thought about what you are eating, not just at that meal, but at every meal, with every product you buy?

Without being aware of what we are doing, of what we are putting into our mouth, it’s all to easy to slip back into old habits, to see the numbers on the bathroom scale slowly rise.

Bouncing back

But remember, if you lost it once, you can lose it again. And this time, knowing where you went wrong last time,  you can avoid those same pitfalls. Maybe you’ll find new pitfalls, but then you learn from those and bounce back again.

You know how good you felt, how good you looked when you were doing the right thing. That’s an awfully powerful incentive to stop doing the wrong thing and recapture that feeling isn’t it.

Kevin and I have an exercise routine!  That is the first step in getting motivated to exercise on a weekly basis, have some kind of routine.  Sometimes we play squash, sometimes we take hikes and sometimes we just go to the gym and workout.  Lately, due to little nagging injuries, we’ve been working out at the gym 3 to 5 times a week and not playing squash.

Our workouts are 3o minutes of aerobics followed by 3o minutes of free weights or core muscle exercises.  It’s not really exciting, and I’d rather be playing squash because my idea of exercise is doing something fun and physical.   Working out at the gym for an hour just doesn’t keep me motivated so in order to keep me motivated I like to play some psychological mind games to me going.

Most of the time I’ll tell myself that I really won’t do anything for the full 30 minute time allotment.  I’ll set the stairmaster to 30 minutes but I’ll tell myself I’ll really stop at 25.  Right?  Wrong…everytime I get to the 25 minute mark I always rationalize….”Well, it’s only 5 minutes more why not continue, but if I want to stop I can.

I don’t know why I do that, but for some reason it gives me permission to continue to exercise for the full 30 minutes.  I guess it’s because I have an out.  It’s silly, I know, so I thought I’d take a quiz on what motivates people to exercise.  What works and what doesn’t?  It’s pretty revealing what motivates folks to exercise.  It turns out my method is unique. (no one else seems to use my tried and true mind game)

An article published in the Idea Fitness  Journal in 2006, authored by Jim Gavin, Madeleine McBrearty and Daniel Sequin reviewed more than 250 studies about exercise psychology to try to find out what motivates us, why and how we participate in exercise.  They came up with a quiz that is pretty revealing about why we are motivated to exercise.

For instance,

Q: According to the studies reviewed, what is the most important motive for exercise for all age groups and genders?

I chose: To lose weight  and tone up – Wrong!

According to the studies reviewed, what is the most important motive for exercise for all age groups and genders?

is:

To improve health

Q: What is one of the most important motivators for exercise?

I chose: Seeing significant results.  Wrong!

The correct answer to:

What is one of the most important motivators for exercise?

is:

Having support from family and friends

Q: According to the studies reviewed, which of the following activities offers the most body satisfaction in women?

I chose aerobics:  Wrong!

The correct answer to:

According to the studies reviewed, which of the following activities offers the most body satisfaction in women?

is:

Hatha yoga

Q: In a study of middle-aged women, which group of exercisers showed more concern about body image and weight?

I chose:  Women who exercise regularly.  Wrong!

The correct answer to:

In a study of middle-aged women, which group of exercisers showed more concern about body image and weight?

is:

Women who don’t exercise regularly

It went on like that and so it turns out, I don’t know “Jack” about what motivates people to exercise!

All I know is that I exercise because I don’t really like it, unless I ‘m playing squash and I exercise because I don’t have to!  I can stop whenever I want.  (That’s my mind game, and my motivation and I’m sticking to it! What’s yours?)

Have you ever heard about someone who had a heart bypass or a heart attack and the story always goes, “Wow, one of  Jane’s arteries was 90% blocked and the other was 80% blocked.  It’s always so dramatic you wonder how the person could have been walking around with such blocked arteries.  The difference is, “Good” and “Bad” cholesterol!  Which do you have, good or bad?

You want to have a lot of the so-called good cholesterol, HDL  because it seems to protect against heart attack.  Most medical experts believe that it carries cholesterol through the blood stream back to the liver, some experts believe that HDL actually gathers the plaque that the “bad” LDL left in the walls of the arteries and veins and slows the build up.  That’s right, LDL is bad because the cholesterol builds up and slowly constricts the blood flow to the heart and the brain.

Donate Blood and You Get a Free Cholesterol Reading Too!

You can check your cholesterol for free!  When I donate blood the Blood Centers of the Pacific Blood Bank sends me information about the level of my cholesterol.  They don’t break it out into “good” cholesterol, HDL, high density lipoprotein and “bad” LDL, low density lipoprotein but it will tell you your over all cholesterol level which should be under 200.

So I was very surprised  the last time I donated blood  and checked my levels of cholesterol it was really high!  I knew I had to do something about it unless I wanted to be like “Jane”, so I went to the Dr. who promptly wrote me a prescription for Lipitor, the well known cholesterol lowering drug, with a number of possible side effects.  In fact, Lipitor has so many possible side effects that the fast talking voice at the end of the commercial almost takes a full 1/3 of the commercial to read the list, really, really fast.

“Don’t take this if you are overweight, have blue eyes, are pregnant, know anyone who is pregnant, are the son or daughter of anyone who is pregnant or can even spell the word pregnant.”

It’s not just Lipitor, but many prescribed statins have possible side effects.  Side effects like muscle pain, liver damage, digestive problems, constipation, diarrhea,nausea, rash or flushing, some researchers are studying the link of  statins to memory loss and even Lou Gerig’s Disease.    So when the Dr. prescribed Lipitor to take down my cholesterol level, I reminded her of all  the possible side effects, but she said not to worry, she would keep track of my liver health by taking blood tests every few months.  I wasn’t sold on the idea, but I thought I’d give it a try.

It’s Always About The Money!

I don’t like to take pills!  No one does right? However, my cholesterol was extremely high and I thought, “Better get this down quickly” and since I didn’t know any pregnant people I thought maybe I’d try the prescription, because I have tried just about everything else.  I eat meat, but not often, I exercise 5 or 6 days a week 1 hour at least, I walk up and down the hills of San Francisco sometimes 3 times a day!  I am committed to staying healthy through exercise and good eating habits.  Besides my mother in law is 84 and she walks up and down the hills of Sausalito and I am convinced that the exercise and her diet have kept her healthy and physically fit.  However, with all that said, I still had through the roof cholesterol.  So I rationalized the risks and voted for the benefits.

It wasn’t till I went to pick up my new pills that the risks really won!  The bill for a 3 month supply of Lipitor was $646.00 dollars!  Right!  I immediately recalculated the risk factor, the idea that once prescribed, it is hard to wean yourself off of the prescription and finally the cost to my funds.   I just said “No! You can restock these pills!”

Live As If  Your Life Depended On It!

I really went to work to find out all the foods that lower cholesterol and I cut out most of the foods that raise it.  I found Chinese Black Fungus mushrooms which are thought to lower cholesterol, I begain eating more vegetables like kale and beets, I chewed on walnuts and chopped up avacado for lunch and when I was out for dinner I didn’t always choose a meat dish.

In a month my cholesterol was 70 points lower!  Yes!

There are some side effects though,

I finally fit into my skinny jeans! 

If there’s one word that can be used to describe my athletic abilities it’s ‘almost’. I almost scored a goal. Almost made the basket. Almost won the point. Almost is not a fun word. It’s a reflection of failure. It says “not quite”, “close but no cigar”, “nice try bucko”. In short, as a word, it’s all most distressing.

Songwriters have used it to highlight the pain of lost love as in Jimmy Webb’s song “Didn’t We.”

“This time we almost made the pieces fit, Didn’t we, girl.  This time we almost made some sense of it, Didn’t we girl.”

Over the years I’ve gotten used to it. Well, almost. I would much rather be a great athlete, a skilled soccer star, a talented musician. But I’ve become accustomed to being a decent if uninspired soccer player, an enthusiastic if rather untalented athlete and a lousy musician but a lover of music.

Not alone in my misery

I have come to realize I’m not unique in this. It happens to, well, almost everyone. Even great athletes have their failures. Take baseball. If a player manages to get a hit 3 times out of ten he’s considered a star batsman. In other words failing only 70 percent of the time makes him a star, adored by fans, sought after by the media and probably pretty darn rich too.

And how many times have you seen a star quarterback make a bad throw or a tennis star hit a shot out when she had the court open and her opponent at her mercy. More than either of those players would like I’m guessing. So, whether you are Joe Shmoe, Tom Brady or Venus Williams, for most of us ‘almost’ is a way of life.

Change the framework

I think the key is in how you deal with almost. Do you accept that being almost something is as good as you’ll ever be and become resigned to it, or do you decide that regardless of where you end up, you are going to try for more. You may not be as good as you would like but you may end up being better than you ever thought.

And at the very least you’ll be as good as you can be. And that’s certainly a lot more fun to think about.

I know the chances are not good that I’ll ever be a good squash player, but who the heck cares. I am always trying to improve my game, to get better and though it’s not always evident that those efforts are paying off I love playing the game. So what if I look rather inelegant or ungainly as I hurl myself around the court after the ball. I get a great workout. It’s a wonderful way to ease tension. And along the way I make some good mates – mostly I suspect because I lose a lot and so I’m good for their ego.

But there’s another way of thinking about the word.

When Shirley is on the stairmaster at the gym she has to play mind games with herself to stick with the full program at the level she wants to work out at, and not switch it down to a lower level. She tells herself she’ll only do ten minutes at that level. At the end of ten minutes she says to herself, ‘well, maybe a few more, but no more than five,’ and so she keeps going and keeps going till suddenly it’s all over. She’s drenched in sweat and panting like an asthmatic bulldog, but she did it.

Same in yoga. She does the dreaded “Wheel” once and then tells herself she doesn’t have to do the next one. But she does. Then she tells herself  she doesn’t have to do the third one, she can just go up halfway. But of course she always does it. No matter how hard she finds it, how tempting it is to ease up, she doesn’t.

She almost does, but she doesn’t. She almost takes it easy on the stairmaster, but she doesn’t. She almost eases up in yoga, but she doesn’t.

Suddenly the word is no longer a reflection of failure but a precursor to success. The big difference is how you react to what you are doing, and whether you accept your limits.

Back to that baseball player. If he hits 3 times out of ten, that’s a 300 batting percentage, a very good season. If he does that year after year throughout his career he’ll end up in the Baseball Hall of Fame, almost certainly.

From Shirl:

But Babe, I almost didn’t meet you, but I did!  We did make the pieces fit and we did make sense of it… that’s a Home Run in my book!

Jack LaLanne was an inspiration to many and if you ever met him he filled the air with vitality and excited anticipation about life!  We’re going to miss that wonderful enthusiasm!  He had a wonderful life and a great family.  They all paid him beautiful tributes on how he touched their lives!

So I’d like to say so long to Jack LaLanne and thank him for being so right!  He had the secret!  Just check this out!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEboAJf9UVc

I was just a little girl when I started to workout with Jack LaLanne! My mom would turn on the TV around 12 o’clock everyday and work out with Jack and since I was too young to go to school I would join in the workouts. There was the chair workout and the leg lifts, and there were all kinds of stretches and repetitions and they were all done to the accompaniment of organ music. I remember when we would finish a sequence of moves, Jack would tell us to take a big breath, he would spread his arms wide and bend forward bringing his arms together and take a deep breath and the organ would make the sound of an upscale followed by a downscale as Jack stood up again to let his breath out. He made it seem so easy, even fun. But recently I found out a secret that Jack Lalanne kept from us.

He hates to work out! No, really, he does, I read about it in the New York Times.

Jack is 95, and he still does a 90 minute workout everyday, with push-ups! In the article he says  it’s not something he enjoys. “I hate it,’’ he said of working out. “But I like the results. Exercise is something you’ve got to do the rest of your life.’’ Man, can you believe that! Jack Lalane hates to work out! So that made me think, “Who the heck am I to whine about working out if Jack LaLanne who is 95 and still does 90 minutes everyday hates it and still does it.

Think about it. Jack is the man who almost single handedly “invented” the TV exercise show. He preached to millions of Americans the virtues of being healthy and in shape. He gave people ideas about how to exercise, where to exercise, what bits of the body to exercise. He served as cheerleader and cajoler all in one, advocating the benefits of workouts. Yet it turns out that he hates it.

Maybe he should have shared that news with us. Think about it, that one piece of advice could actually have helped people! Most of us slog away in the gym wondering why we are doing what we are doing, why we aren’t enjoying it, why even after years and years of doing it we still have to talk ourselves into going most of the time.

Now, if you look at Jack you can see the obvious benefits. He’s in incredible shape. Trim, muscular, vital. He’s living, walking proof of how regular exercise can keep your body and your brain in great shape. It might have been reassuring to know that he really doesn’t get a kick out of going to the gym, anymore than most of the rest of us do. It might help people understand there is nothing wrong with how they feel, in fact, their attitude is perfectly normal and healthy. Knowing that even avid exercisers hate the routine might also help motivate people to stick with it.

The key is ultimately not what you do, it’s the fact that you do it and the way you look and feel as a result. Jack LaLanne has made a living out of preaching the benefits of exercise. And he’s lived what he preaches, getting out there everyday and working out even though he doesn’t like it. I think most of us would agree, that’s a small price to pay for a long, healthy life. And long may he continue to enjoy the benefits. Go Jack!

And thank you Jack LaLanne, so long!

Over the holidays it’s almost impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine, or read a blog or health-related website, that doesn’t seem to be full of  articles and good advice about how to avoid all the pitfalls of the holiday season. You know the stuff. Don’t eat too much. Only have one desert. Eat before you go to a party. Don’t drink too much at the work Christmas party. It’s all wise and good. But to be honest. It’s a bit dull and boring.

It’s called the Holiday Season for a reason. You are on holiday. So enjoy yourself.

So. If people ask you what you are doing to avoid putting on weight this time of year, here are some ready-made excuses for you. That way you don’t have to come up with one of your own, you can just trot one of these out and carry on enjoying life.

Cheers!

I don’t work out because all the exercise programs say that when you start you should wear “loose-fitting clothes” and I don’t have any loose-fitting clothes!

I’ve already had a complete workout at the office because I spent the day jumping to conclusions, pulling out all the stops, bending over backwards, passing the buck, pushing my luck, dragging my heels and climbing the walls. That’s enough exercise for one day.

I checked with my doctor and he told me my heart couldn’t stand the shock of seeing how much exercise equipment or gym membership cost.

My allergies are bothering me. I’m allergic to exercise.

I read a study that said we are all born with a pre-determined number of breaths. Once we use those up we die. So I can’t exercise because it will only make me breathe faster and shorten my life.

Or the flipside of that one. It’s a proven scientific fact that for every mile you run you add one minute to your life. This means that if you keep exercising until you are 85 years old you will get to spend an extra 5 months in a nursing home at $4,500 a month. I can’t afford that.

I’m already in shape. I think round is a great shape.

Exercising is dangerous. My grandmother started a new exercise program where she walks five miles a day. That was two weeks ago. Now we have no idea where the heck she is so I have to go look for her.

I prefer to exercise early in the morning before my brain and my body figure out what’s going on.

I think if God meant me to touch my toes he would have put them further up my body.

I started exercising because I wanted to take up cross-country skiing. Then I realize the US is way too big, there’s no way I’ll ever ski across it, so I stopped.

Last time I exercised it made me spill the ice cubes right out of my glass.

So there are plenty of excuses why you can’t or won’t exercise. But there is only one good reason. Because it’s good for you. Ultimately you have to decide which is the most important.