Pound Exercise Quotes

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.

If it weren't for my imagination, I would weigh ten thousand pounds. This is because the only way I am able to exercise anymore is through a long and vivid revenge fantasy.

If I liked food and disliked exercise as much as a 400 pound guy, I'd be a 400 pound guy.

Before the first streaks of light at dawn on December 7, 275 miles north of Oahu, the six (Japanese) carriers of the Striking Force turned into the southeast wind. Pounding into heavy swells at high speed, the carriers pitched severely with thunderous impact. The wind, surging seas, and roar of warming aircraft engines made communications possible only by hand signals and handheld signal lamps. Salt spray reached the high flight decks, and Commander Fuchida, the group leader, was very concerned about the conditions for launching planes. If this had been a training exercise the launch might have been delayed until conditions improved. However, this was not an exercise, and there would be no delay.

Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.

So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.

Once upon a time, wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.

On May 26th, 2003, Aaron Ralston was hiking, a boulder fell on his right hand, he waited four days, he then amputated his own arm with a pocketknife. On New Year’s Eve, a woman was bungee jumping, the cord broke, she fell into a river and had to swim back to land in crocodile-infested waters with a broken collarbone. Claire Champlin was smashed in the face by a five-pound watermelon being propelled by a slingshot. Mathew Brobst was hit by a javelin. David Striegl was actually punched in the mouth by a kangaroo. The most amazing part of these stories is when asked about the experience they all smiled, shrugged and said “I guess things could’ve been worse.” So go ahead, tell me you’re having a bad day. Tell me about the traffic. Tell me about your boss. Tell me about the job you’ve been trying to quit for the past four years. Tell me the morning is just a townhouse burning to the ground and the snooze button is a fire extinguisher. Tell me the alarm clock stole the keys to your smile, drove it into 7 am and the crash totaled your happiness. Tell me. Tell me how blessed are we to have tragedy so small it can fit on the tips of our tongues. When Evan lost his legs he was speechless. When my cousin was assaulted she didn’t speak for 48 hours. When my uncle was murdered, we had to send out a search party to find my father’s voice. Most people have no idea that tragedy and silence often have the exact same address. When your day is a museum of disappointments, hanging from events that were outside of your control, when you feel like your guardian angel put in his two weeks notice two months ago and just decided not to tell you, when it seems like God is just a babysitter that’s always on the phone, when you get punched in the esophagus by a fistful of life. Remember, every year two million people die of dehydration. So it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty. There’s water in the cup. Drink it and stop complaining. Muscle is created by lifting things that are designed to weigh us down. When your shoulders are heavy stand up straight and call it exercise. Life is a gym membership with a really complicated cancellation policy. Remember, you will survive, things could be worse, and we are never given anything we can’t handle. When the whole world crumbles, you have to build a new one out of all the pieces that are still here. Remember, you are still here. The human heart beats approximately 4,000 times per hour and each pulse, each throb, each palpitation is a trophy, engraved with the words “You are still alive.” You are still alive. So act like it.

A pound of fat contains more energy than a pound of dynamite.

Faith by its very nature must be tried... what God does with our faith must be something like workouts. He sees it to that our faith gets mushed and pulled, stretched and pounded, taken to it's limits so its limits can expand... If it doesn't get exercised, it becomes like a weak muscle that fails us when we need it.

I change the channel to another movie. An old one, but new to me. And, ironically, a thin, gorgeous blonde—Meg Ryan, maybe—rides her bike on a country road. She smiles like she has no cares in the world. Like no one ever judges her. Like her life is perfect. Wind through her hair and sunshine on her face. The only thing missing are the rainbows and butterflies and cartoon birds singing on her shoulder. Maybe I should grab my bike and try to catch up with Mom, Mike, and the kids. They can't be going very fast. I would love to feel like that, even if it's just for a second—free and peaceful and normal. Suddenly, there's a truck. It can't be headed toward Meg Ryan. Could it? Yes. Oh my God. No! Meg Ryan just got hit by that truck. Figures. See what happens when you exercise?

It feels so good to vent out your anger through exercise, especially running. And when you gasp, when your legs feel numb, when your heart pounds. At that moment you feel good because you feel nothing else.

Starvation was the first indication of my self-discipline. I was devoted to anorexia. I went the distance of memorizing the calorie content within every bite of food while calculating the exact amount of exercise I needed to burn double my consumption. I was luckily young enough to mask my excessive exercise with juvenile hyperactivity. Nobody thought twice about the fact that I was constantly rollerblading, biking, and running for hours in stifling summer humidity. I learned to cut my food into tiny bites and move it around my plate. I read that standing burned more calories than sitting, so I refused to watch television without doing crunches, leg lifts, or at least walking in place. When socially forced to soldier through a movie, I tapped my foot in desperation to knock out about seventy-five extra calories. From age eleven to twelve, I dropped forty pounds and halted the one period I’d had.

The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

Well, for what it’s worth, celibacy looks good on you.” He snorted. “Because I’ve put on a few pounds? Happens. You eat, because you crave the endorphins you’re not getting with an orgasm, and you get less exercise, because you’re not practicing any mattress gymnastics.” “Cary.” I laughed. “Look at you, baby girl. You’re all tight and toned from Marathon Man Cross over there.

We hated the gym. We loved it. We escaped to it. We avoided it. We had complicated relationships with our bodies, while at the same time insisting that we loved them unconditionally. We were sure we had better, more important things to do than worry about them, but the slender yoga bodies of moms in Lululemon at school pickup taunted us. Their figures hinted at wheatgrass shots, tennis clubs, and vagina steaming treatments. We found them aspirational. So we sweated on the elliptical and lifted ten-pound weights, inching closer to the bodies we told ourselves we were too evolved to want.

From then on, my computer monitored my vital signs and kept track of exactly how many calories I burned during the course of each day. If I didn’t meet my daily exercise requirements, the system prevented me from logging into my OASIS account. This meant that I couldn’t go to work, continue my quest, or, in effect, live my life. Once the lockout was engaged, you couldn’t disable it for two months. And the software was bound to my OASIS account, so I couldn’t just buy a new computer or go rent a booth in some public OASIS café. If I wanted to log in, I had no choice but to exercise first. This proved to be the only motivation I needed. The lockout software also monitored my dietary intake. Each day I was allowed to select meals from a preset menu of healthy, low-calorie foods. The software would order the food for me online and it would be delivered to my door. Since I never left my apartment, it was easy for the program to keep track of everything I ate. If I ordered additional food on my own, it would increase the amount of exercise I had to do each day, to offset my additional calorie intake. This was some sadistic software. But it worked. The pounds began to melt off, and after a few months, I was in near-perfect health. For the first time in my life I had a flat stomach, and muscles. I also had twice the energy, and I got sick a lot less frequently. When the two months ended and I was finally given the option to disable the fitness lockout, I decided to keep it in place. Now, exercising was a part of my daily ritual.

Prozac doesn’t do it unless we help it along. Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.

Late in the evening, someone in the White House decided to vent to Ben Smith: 'A senior White House official just called me with a very pointed message for the administration's sometime allies in organized labor, who invested heavily in beating Blanche Lincoln, Obama's candidate, in Arkansas. "Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."' Boy, good thing for this source there's no member of Obama's staff who's known for blowing his stack and venting furiously at political defeats. I'll bet he was pounding the desk like a battering Rahm and that he threw out the E-manual on how to talk to the press when he did it.

efficiently means providing slots in our schedules where we can maintain an attentional set for an extended period. This allows us to get more done and finish up with more energy. Related to the manager/worker distinction is that the prefrontal cortex contains circuits responsible for telling us whether we’re controlling something or someone else is. When we set up a system, this part of the brain marks it as self-generated. When we step into someone else’s system, the brain marks it that way. This may help explain why it’s easier to stick with an exercise program or diet that someone else sets up: We typically trust them as “experts” more than we trust ourselves. “My trainer told me to do three sets of ten reps at forty pounds—he’s a trainer, he must know what he’s talking about. I can’t design my own workout—what do I know?” It takes Herculean amounts of discipline to overcome the brain’s bias against self-generated motivational systems. Why? Because as with the fundamental attribution error we saw in Chapter 4, we don’t have access to others’ minds, only our own. We are painfully aware of all the fretting and indecision, all the nuances of our internal decision-making process that led us to reach a particular conclusion. (I really need to get serious about exercise.) We don’t have access to that (largely internal) process in others, so we tend to take their certainty as more compelling, in many cases, than our own. (Here’s your program. Do it every day.)

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.

My relationship had ended and Red had taken my son. My life was my own and I could do anything I wanted, yet I felt nothing. As I stood staring at the walls, searching inside myself for some kind of emotional response, the nothingness suddenly welled up inside me, like a physical mass, so vast and empty and infinite I was terrified. The very first time I went running, it was from that terror, from the possibility of being sucked down into emptiness for ever, and as I ran I discovered I was able to feel; pressure in my lungs, pain in my legs, my skin perspiring, the pounding of my heart. My routine was erratic, I ran when I felt like it, usually five or six times a month. So was my style. It was nothing like that of the runners I grew accustomed to seeing, the ones who regulated themselves, jogged two or three times a week, who did a warm-up first and stretching exercises afterwards, the people for whom the activity was a hobby. I ran like my life depended on it, as fast and as hard as I could. Sometimes, passers-by would look beyond me as I ran towards them, with fear in their eyes, trying to see who or what was pursuing me, trying to work out whether they should be running too. As long as I was feeling, I didn’t care.

When people are randomized into diet-and-exercise interventions versus diet alone, the diet-and-exercise groups do better, but the difference in weight loss only averages about two pounds.3095 The studies lasted between three and twelve months, and all that extra prescribed exercise seemed to translate into only a few pounds lost.

Can you really drop up to 11 pounds from your body (and belly) in just 7 days (and keep losing it at a record pace for weeks to come)? Believe it or not…the answer is a shocking YES! (And you don’t have to starve yourself or do endless exercise…and you can still eat your favorite foods. In fact, it’s an important part of the program…YIPPEEE!)

1. She switched her breakfast to a high-protein meal (at least 30% protein) à la the Slow-Carb Diet. Her favorite: spinach, black beans, and egg whites (one-third of a carton of Eggology liquid egg whites) with cayenne pepper flakes. 2. Three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday), she performed a simple sequence of three exercises prior to breakfast, all of which are illustrated in the next few pages: One set: 20 two-legged glute activation raises from the floor One set: 15 flying dogs, one set each side One set: 50 kettlebell swings (For you: start with a weight that allows you to do 20 perfect repetitions but no more than 30. In other words, start with a weight, no less than 20 pounds, that you can “grow into.

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong;take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.

There are 3,500 calories in a pound of stored body fat. In theory, if you create a 3,500-calorie deficit per week through diet, exercise, or a combination of both, you will lose one pound (assuming you lose 100 percent body fat). If you create a 7,000-calorie deficit in a week, you will lose two pounds. You can create the calorie deficit by reducing food, increasing exercise, or preferably a combination of both.

SMART Goal NICE Goal Fitness Lose 20 pounds within the next three months. Exercise for 30 minutes daily, focusing on activities that are enjoyable and manageable. Career Get a promotion to a senior management position within two years. Dedicate an hour each week to improving one key skill or networking with industry professionals. Education Complete a Master’s degree in two years. Spend 30 minutes each day reviewing course material and work on assignments in manageable chunks.

67 percent of the women told the researchers that they didn’t exercise regularly, and 37 percent said they didn’t get any exercise. After this initial assessment, Crum and Langer divided the maids into two groups. They explained to the first group how their activity related to the number of calories they burned and told the maids that just by doing their jobs, they got more than enough exercise. They didn’t give any such information to the second group (who worked in different hotels from the first group and so wouldn’t benefit from conversations with the other maids). One month later, the researchers found that the first group lost an average of two pounds, lowered their percentage of body fat, and lowered their systolic blood pressure by an average of 10 points—even though they hadn’t performed any additional exercise outside of work or changed their eating habits in any way. The other group, doing the same job as the first, remained virtually unchanged. This

All right,” she said. “Inductive reasoning. It’s what those so-called detectives on CSI, SVU, LMNOP and all the rest of them call deductive reasoning, which is wrong and they should know better. It’s inductive reasoning, a tool you will use frequently in geometry as well as calculus and trigonometry, assuming you get that far and that certainly won’t be you, Jacquon. Stop messing with that girl’s hair and pay attention. Your grade on that last test was so low I had to write it on the bottom of my shoe.” Mrs. Washington glared at Jacquon until his face melted. She began again: “Inductive reasoning is reasoning to the most likely explanation. It begins with one or more observations, and from those observations we come to a conclusion that seems to make sense. All right. An example: Jacquon was walking home from school and somebody hit him on the head with a brick twenty-five times. Mrs. Washington and her husband, Wendell, are the suspects. Mrs. Washington is five feet three, a hundred and ten pounds, and teaches school. Wendell is six-two, two-fifty, and works at a warehouse. So who would you say is the more likely culprit?” Isaiah and the rest of the class said Wendell. “Why?” Mrs. Washington said. “Because Mrs. Washington may have wanted to hit Jacquon with a brick twenty-five times but she isn’t big or strong enough. Seems reasonable given the facts at hand, but here’s where inductive reasoning can lead you astray. You might not have all the facts. Such as Wendell is an accountant at the warehouse who exercises by getting out of bed in the morning, and before Mrs. Washington was a schoolteacher she was on the wrestling team at San Diego State in the hundred-and-five-to-hundred-and-sixteen-pound weight class and would have won her division if that blond girl from Cal Northridge hadn’t stuck a thumb in her eye. Jacquon, I know your mother and if I tell her about your behavior she will beat you ’til your name is Jesus.” The

Chaos awaited him on the beaches near Arzew. An unanticipated westerly set had pushed the transports and landing craft off course. Dozens of confused coxswains tacked up and down the coast in the dark, looking for the right beaches. Most of the soldiers carried more than 100 pounds of equipment; one likened himself to a medieval knight in armor who had to be winched into the saddle. Once ashore, feeling the effect of weeks aboard ship with a poor diet and little exercise, they staggered into the dunes, shedding gas capes, goggles, wool undershirts, and grenades. Landing craft stranded by an ebb tide so jammed the beaches that bulldozers had to push them off, ruining their propellers and rudders. The

Let’s start with “leaner.” Legions of Atkins and Paleo dieters—as well as obesity experts—fiercely contest the superiority of a plant-based diet for making you “leaner.” Like all nutrition science, the science of weight loss is complicated and uncertain. The relative effectiveness of moderate exercise, long thought a key component in reducing obesity rates, is now under scrutiny. (A recent editorial in the International Journal of Epidemiology is titled “Physical activity does not influence obesity risk: time to clarify the public health message.”) Even the wisdom of gradual weight loss is questionable, in light of a new study that suggests crash dieters don’t gain back weight any more than dieters who drop pounds gradually.

You use more than thirty pounds of ATP during a one-hour walk and more than your entire body weight of ATP over the course of a typical day—an obviously impossible amount to lug around in reserve.15 Consequently, a human body stores in toto only about a hundred grams of ATPs at any given moment.16 Fortunately, before our first few steps deplete the leg muscles’ scant supply of ATPs, they quickly tap into another ATP-like molecule known as creatine phosphate that also binds to phosphates and stores energy.17 Unfortunately, those creatine phosphate reserves are also limited, becoming 60 percent depleted after ten seconds of sprinting and exhausted after thirty seconds.18 Even so, the precious short burst of fuel they provide gives muscles time to fire up a second energy recharging process: breaking down sugar.

As I said, if I don’t do anything I tend to put on the pounds. My wife’s the opposite, since she can eat as much as she likes (she doesn’t eat a lot of them, but can never turn down anything sweet), never exercise, and still not put on any weight. She has no extra fat at all. Life just isn’t fair, is how it used to strike me. Some people can work their butts off and never get what they’re aiming for, while others can get it without any effort at all. But when I think about it, having the kind of body that easily puts on weight was perhaps a blessing in disguise. In other words, if I don’t want to gain weight I have to work out hard every day, watch what I eat, and cut down on indulgences. Life can be tough, but as long as you don’t stint on the effort, your metabolism will greatly improve with these habits, and you’ll end up much healthier, not to mention stronger. To a certain extent, you can even slow down the effects of aging. But people who naturally keep the weight off no matter what don’t need to exercise or watch their diet in order to stay trim. There can’t be many of them who would go out of their way to take these troublesome measures when they don’t need to. Which is why, in many cases, their physical strength deteriorates as they age. If you don’t exercise, your muscles will naturally weaken, as will your bones. Some of my readers may be the kind of people who easily gain weight, but the only way to understand what’s really fair is to take a long-range view of things. For the reasons I give above, I think this physical nuisance should be viewed in a positive way, as a blessing. We should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so clearly visible.

Oh, it's a good story, as a story,' returned that gentleman; 'as good a thing of its kind as need be. This Mr Dorrit (his name is Dorrit) had incurred a responsibility to us, ages before the fairy came out of the Bank and gave him his fortune, under a bond he had signed for the performance of a contract which was not at all performed. He was a partner in a house in some large way—spirits, or buttons, or wine, or blacking, or oatmeal, or woollen, or pork, or hooks and eyes, or iron, or treacle, or shoes, or something or other that was wanted for troops, or seamen, or somebody—and the house burst, and we being among the creditors, detainees were lodged on the part of the Crown in a scientific manner, and all the rest Of it. When the fairy had appeared and he wanted to pay us off, Egad we had got into such an exemplary state of checking and counter-checking, signing and counter-signing, that it was six months before we knew how to take the money, or how to give a receipt for it. It was a triumph of public business,' said this handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily, 'You never saw such a lot of forms in your life. "Why," the attorney said to me one day, "if I wanted this office to give me two or three thousand pounds instead of take it, I couldn't have more trouble about it." "You are right, old fellow," I told him, "and in future you'll know that we have something to do here."' The pleasant young Barnacle finished by once more laughing heartily. He was a very easy, pleasant fellow indeed, and his manners were exceedingly winning. Mr Tite Barnacle's view of the business was of a less airy character. He took it ill that Mr Dorrit had troubled the Department by wanting to pay the money, and considered it a grossly informal thing to do after so many years. But Mr Tite Barnacle was a buttoned-up man, and consequently a weighty one. All buttoned-up men are weighty. All buttoned-up men are believed in. Whether or no the reserved and never-exercised power of unbuttoning, fascinates mankind;

Trump was actively involved in the pageants. After Miss Universe Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan, gained considerable weight in 1996, Trump publicly excoriated her. He staged a photo op to show Machado exercising at a Manhattan gym. In front of about eighty reporters and photographers, Trump said, “When you win a beauty pageant, people don’t think you’re going to go from 118 to 160 in less than a year, and you really have an obligation to stay in a perfect physical state.” Machado called the photo op an ambush designed to humiliate her. “He had his triumphant entry,” she recalled, “and I got to feel like a hamster on a wheel for an hour. I was his first Miss Universe when he just bought the company. Unfortunately, this also meant that I experienced, firsthand, his rage and racism and all the misogyny a person can demonstrate.” Trump wrote years later that he did what he did to protect her from being fired: “God, what problems I had with this woman. First, she wins. Second, she gains fifty pounds. Third, I urge the committee not to fire her.” Trump

In fact, several studies have shown that losing weight and exercising vigorously can sometimes actually reverse the disease, at least during its early stages. One extreme study placed eleven diabetics on a grueling ultra-low-calorie diet of just 600 calories per day for eight weeks. Six hundred calories is an extreme diet that would challenge most people (it’s about two tuna fish sandwiches a day). After two months, however, these seriously food-deprived diabetics had lost an average of 13 kilograms (27 pounds), mostly visceral fat, their pancreases doubled how much insulin they could produce, and they recovered nearly normal levels of insulin sensitivity.51 Vigorous physical activity also has potent reversal effects by causing your body to produce hormones (glucagon, cortisol, and others) that cause your liver, muscle, and fat cells to release energy. These hormones temporarily block the action of insulin while you exercise, and then they increase the sensitivity of these cells to insulin for up to sixteen hours following each bout of exercise.

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake. . . . The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. . . . Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. . . . So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it. . . . There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties. . . . Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians. The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. . . . Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more. This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.

HUNGER AND OBESITY The change in diets around the world is also creating a global obesity epidemic—and in its wake a global diabetes epidemic—even as more than 900 million people in the world still suffer from chronic hunger. In the United States, where many global trends begin, the weight of the average American has increased by approximately twenty pounds in the last forty years. A recent study projects that half the adult population of the United States will be obese by 2030, with one quarter of them “severely obese.” At a time when hunger and malnutrition are continuing at still grossly unacceptable levels in poor countries around the world (and in some pockets within developed countries), few have missed the irony that simultaneously obesity is at record levels in developed countries and growing in many developing countries. How could this be? Well, first of all, it is encouraging to note that the world community has been slowly but steadily decreasing the number of people suffering from chronic hunger. Secondly, on a global basis, obesity has more than doubled in the last thirty years. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1.5 billion adults above the age of twenty are overweight, and more than a third of them are classified as obese. Two thirds of the world’s population now live in countries where more people die from conditions related to being obese and overweight than from conditions related to being underweight. Obesity represents a major risk factor for the world’s leading cause of death—cardiovascular diseases, principally heart disease and stroke—and is the major risk factor for diabetes, which has now become the first global pandemic involving a noncommunicable disease.* Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to suffer heart disease or a stroke, and approximately two thirds of those suffering from diabetes die from either stroke or heart disease.† The tragic increase in obesity among children is particularly troubling; almost 17 percent of U.S. children are obese today, as are almost 7 percent of all children in the world. One respected study indicates that 77 percent of obese children will suffer from obesity as adults. If there is any good news in the latest statistics, it is that the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. appears to be reaching a plateau, though the increases in childhood obesity ensure that the epidemic will continue to grow in the future, both in the U.S. and globally. The causes of this surge in obesity are both simple—in that people are eating too much and exercising

5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

What the devil was Davy doing up there with a marlinespike? That’s what I’d like to know. It’s a sailors duty.” She put her head in her hands. “I’m afraid that’s my fault, too. I’d been talking to him about moving up to the forecastle, and I…I think he wanted to impress me.” Gray choked on a laugh. “Well, of course he did. You ought to take care how you bat those eyelashes, sweetheart. One of these days, you’re likely to knock a man overboard.” The legs of her chair scraped the floor as she stood. The color returned to her cheeks. “If Davy was trying to impress me, it’s as much your fault as mine.” “How is that my fault?” Gray’s frustration came right back to a boil. He hated himself for growling at her, but he couldn’t seem to help it. “You’re the one who humiliated him in front of the crew, with all those questions. You goaded him into saying he…well, you know what he said.” “Yes, I know what he said.” Gray stepped toward her until only the table separated them. “I know what he said. And don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy it. Don’t pretend you don’t use those men to feed your vanity.” “My vanity? What would you know about feeding my vanity? You don’t so much as breathe in my direction. At least the sailors speak to me. And if that entire ‘Kind of the Sea’ display wasn’t one long exercise in feeding your own vanity, I’m sure I don’t know what is.” She jabbed one finger on the tabletop and lowered her voice. “Those men may flirt with me, but they worship you. You know it. You wanted to feel it. Bask in it. And you did so at Davy’s expense.” “At least I only teased the boy. I’m not the one poised to break his heart.” She blinked. “It’s only infatuation. He’s not really in love with me.” He pounded the table. “Of course the boy’s in love with you! They all are. You talk to them, you listen to their stories-even Wiggins’s prattling, God only knows why. You draw them little sketches, you make them paintings for Christmas. You remind them of everything they’ve left behind, everything they pray they’ll one day hold again. And you do it all looking like some sort of Botticelli goddess, surely the most beautiful thing they’ve ever laid eyes on. Damn it, how’s a man to keep from falling in love with you?” Silence. She stared at him. She blinked. Her lips parted, and she drew a quick breath. Say something, Gray silently pleaded. Anything. But she only stared at him. What the hell had he just said? Was it truly that bad? He frowned, reliving the past minute in his mind. Oh, God. Gray rubbed his face with one hand, then gave a sharp tug on his hair. It was that bad. Damn it to hell. If Joss were here, he’d have a good laugh at his expense.

Wayne Wescott took nonambulatory seniors from a nursing home and had them participate in a brief workout involving one set of six different exercises for a fourteen-week period. The average age of the subjects was eighty-eight and a half. At the end of the study, the seniors had averaged a four-pound gain in muscle, a three-pound loss of fat, an increase in strength of more than 80 percent in their lower-body musculature, and an increase in strength of almost 40 percent in their upper-body musculature. They improved their hip and shoulder flexibility by an average of 50 percent and 10 percent, respectively. More important, at the end of the study, many of the formerly wheelchair-bound subjects were able to walk again. They were out of their wheelchairs and no longer required around-the-clock nursing.16

There is not one study that demonstrates that exercise alone causes significant weight loss, and a meta-analysis (designed to assess significance over many studies at once) proved it; moderate exercise resulted in a weight loss of 2.2 pounds and vigorous exercise in a loss of 3.5 pounds.

surprising results about a phenomenon he called “asymmetric weight gain and loss,” based on the experiences of 55,000 runners in his National Runners’ Health Study. Put simply, he found that you gain more weight when you stop exercising than you lose when you subsequently resume the identical exercise program. “In other words,” he says, “if you stop exercising you don’t get to resume where you left off.” Falling off the exercise wagon for a few weeks may just add a pound or two, but if it happens every year it can lead to steady accumulation of weight even though you’re working out diligently for the other 50 weeks of the year. Williams found that, after a break in exercise, women didn’t start losing weight again until they were running at least 10 miles a week, and men had to hit twice that total. Once they exceeded that level, the subjects were able to start reversing weight gained over holiday and other breaks.

With any of the above techniques the reps ought to be limited. It makes sense to apply Prof. Verkhoshansky’s depth jumps guidelines—experienced athletes should not exceed 4x10. Once or twice a week. This is exactly what Donnie Thompson, RKC, the man who has posted the highest powerlifting total of all time, 3,000 pounds, does—four sets of ten spiked swings with a 48kg “Beast” once a week.

WAHLS WARRIORS SPEAK In August 2012, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The symptoms came on suddenly: tingling and numbness in my right arm and right and left hands, bladder urgency, cognitive issues and brain fog, lower back pain, and right-foot drop. One Saturday, I was playing golf, and by the next Friday, I was using a cane to walk. I was scared and I did not know what was happening. I was started on a five-day treatment of IV steroids. I began physical and occupational therapy, and speech therapy to assist with my word-finding issues. Desperate, I searched the Internet and read as much as I could about multiple sclerosis. I tried to discuss diet with my neurologist because I read that people with autoimmune diseases may benefit from going gluten-free. My neurologist recommended that I stick with my “balanced” diet because gluten-free may be a fad and it was difficult to do. In October 2012, I went to a holistic practitioner who recommended that I eliminate gluten, dairy, and eggs from my diet and then take an allergy test. About that time, I discovered Dr. Wahls, whose story provided me hope. I began to incorporate the 9 cups of produce and to eat organic lean meat, lots of wild fish, seaweed, and some organ meat (though I still struggle with that). My allergy tests came back and, sure enough, I was highly sensitive to gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, and almonds. This test further validated Dr. Wahls’s work. By eliminating highly inflammatory foods and replacing them with vegetables, lean meat, and seaweed, your body can heal. It’s been four months since I started the Wahls Diet, and I’ve increased my vitamin D levels from 17 to 52, my medicine has been reduced, and I have lost 14 pounds. I now exercise and run two miles several times per week, walk three miles a day, bike, swim, strength train, meditate, and stretch daily. I prepare smoothies and real meals in my kitchen. Gone are the days of eating out or ordering takeout three to four times a week. By eating this way, my energy levels have increased, my brain fog and stumbling over words has been eliminated, my skin looks great, and I am more alert and present. It is not easy eating this way, and my family has also had to make some adjustments, but, in the end, I choose health. I am more in tune with my body and I feed it the fuel it needs to thrive. —Michelle M., Baltimore, Maryland

If you want to transform yourself into an upbeat, positive, energetic, and passionate human being, you can—by becoming what you say you are. Say that you’re happy. Say that you’re beautiful. Say that you can do whatever you need to do, whether it’s losing weight or exercising more. Tell yourself you are what you want to become and you will become it. Then practice it.

Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

This diet of Elizabeth Arden is very good. I have gone down between 5 and 7 pounds already living on salads, egg at night, meat once a day, fish if I want, spinach and soup. Wait to [sic] you see me. I will be thin when Jack sees me.” In spite of the pressure from home to conform both physically and intellectually, Rosemary flourished under the Assumption school’s individual instruction, constant reinforcement, repetitious exercises, and emotional support, a program better suited to Rosemary’s needs than that of any other institution she had attended.

Dee thought that this was a good idea. She approved of exercise and took it herself, in theory at least. But exercise without a good diet was not enough. What was the use of pounding the pavements if one was deficient in selenium, or magnesium for that matter?

      It never occurred to me that adopting a vegan diet would cause me to lose fifty pounds in two years, but that’s what happened. I lost the first twenty or so pounds before I left for college. People were beginning to notice that I was slimming down, but I didn’t notice a huge difference that first year until my mom took me shopping the summer before I left for my freshman year of college: I hadn’t worn a size medium shirt or a pair of pants with a 34-inch waist since I started high school.       The rest of the weight came off my freshman year, and that’s when the difference really became apparent. Gradually, over the course of that year, my body completely changed. My face looked slimmer, my waist leveled off at a size 32, and I even lost what my mother had always affectionately referred to as the “baby fat” on my hands.       Since the weight came off so slowly, it wasn’t until I went home for Christmas that year that I fully understood the extent of the changes. My friends and family couldn’t believe their eyes, and my grandmother found it rather unacceptable that I had yet to replace my new baggy clothes.       I didn’t get substantially more exercise or eat any less than I ate before: I just ate differently.

No work again today, huh? You should be pounding the pavement instead of playing computer games. At least get some exercise. How do you expect to find a woman if you’re all pasty and scrawny? Guess the family name’s dying with you. No work again today, huh?

When I talked with God about the stuff I faced, first on the list was the face I stuffed.

dumbbells  (5-pound, or 10-pound will do).  From the beginning, keep a running record of your measurements:  chest, waist, hips, thighs, and calves.

Out of nowhere, our problem was solved. We had a stringer in New York whose life was spent collecting awful things for us off the cable channels: biker astrologists, transvestite psychics, body-building sexologists, stuff like that. He lived in a cold-water flat somewhere on the Upper West Side dodging cockroaches the size of rats while he survived on pizza. One night he was watching a cable channel unbelievably called Channel 69. Exercising their rights under the First Amendment, anyone at all could pay ten dollars and go on Channel 69 to do a number, because in America everyone is entitled to self-expression: it’s in the Constitution. Our stringer was halfway though a five-cheese pizza with extra cheese when he was suddenly face to face with an Hispanic woman in a green feather boa singing the Lionel Ritchie hit ‘Hello’ while she pounded away at a Yamaha portable piano. He had never seen anything like her in his life and for a while he thought there might be something wrong with the pizza, but when he recovered his mind he sent me a video by courier. The video had the artist’s name handwritten on the label. It was Margarita Pracatan.

Each camp provided about 200 men with food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. According to one report, enlistees who entered the camps malnourished gained, on average, more than eight pounds from exercise and proper nutrition.67 Enlisted men earned $30 a month, but all except $5 was sent to their families to broaden the program's beneficiaries. Educational programs introduced by the late 1930s taught some 50,000 men to read and write, while another 400,000 took high school and college courses.68

Ever plod along on a treadmill that tells you the number of calories burned? You might go 45 minutes before you hit 300 calories. Well, guess what? That’s 300 total calories burned in that time, and not 300 calories above what your baseline metabolism would have burned anyway, even while at rest. That’s the reason the exercise machine asks your weight: To calculate your baseline metabolic rate. The average male burns 105 calories at rest in 45 minutes. Those 195 extra calories that the exercise actually burned–only 195 calories more than if you had been taking a nap–can be undone by half a bagel in half a minute. And aerobic exercise typically spurns your appetite enough to more than offset those few actual calories burned. Here’s the skinny: One pound of fat can fuel a 130-pound female for 15 hours at target “cardio” heart range. If we were so metabolically inefficient as to burn calories at the rate the exercise equipment advertises, we would never have survived for so long, and certainly not endured the hardship of the Ice Ages. The calories expended hunting and gathering would have caused us to die of starvation long before we ever found a Wooly Mammoth. By today’s standards, we would hardly have enough metabolic economy to survive a trip to the super market, let alone hump it across enemy lines for a week-long reconnaissance mission with 120 pounds of gear.

The reason many people gain weight as they age, especially beginning in their 30s, is because they have less muscle than they had in their late teens and early twenties. As we age, our bodies naturally lose muscle, especially as we are less active in our lives. This muscle tissue loss results in a decreasing metabolic rate. And then, if you continue to eat like you did when you were younger … well, you’ll slowly gain weight, pound by pound, month by month, year by year, until one day you look in the mirror and wonder, “What happened?” This is how the average American adult gains 2.2 pounds per year. The key to eliminating accumulated body fat is regaining your youthful metabolism by regaining your muscle through strength training.

It takes about 10 calories a day just to keep one pound of muscle alive, for both men and women, even if you are completely inactive. An extra five pounds of muscle can burn up to 1500 calories in a month–that’s the equivalent of 5 pounds of fat per year, which more than reverses the negative affects of aging on your metabolism. But with consistent aerobic exercise, over time, you’re far more likely to burn five pounds of muscle. That means your body will burn about 50 less calories a day. And as your body becomes more efficient at running, that 195 calories you burn on the treadmill will decrease to about 125. So let’s do the math: You burn 125 calories above your resting metabolic rate each day you do aerobic exercise. Then subtract the 50 calories you do not burn due to muscle loss caused by this exercise. After all your huffing and puffing you are only burning 75 calories more than if you were sitting in front of the tube, doing nothing at all. That’s undone by drinking half a Coke or “rehydrating” with 12 ounces of Gatorade. This is the reason why millions of people, at gyms across the world, are unable to look and perform as they’d like after countless hours of “cardio.

Losing .5 – 1.5 lbs a week is optimal. If you are very overweight, you should be closer to 1.5 pounds a week (750 calorie daily deficit), and if you only have a few pounds to shed, .5 lbs a week is ideal (250 calorie deficit daily).

The term “jogging” became widely used in the United States in the late 1960s, as it was a result of a popular book with the title Jogging. Its author was University of Oregon track coach and Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman. He had been exposed to jogging while on vacation in New Zealand with his college team. He took time off and went for some easy runs with legendary running coach Arthur Lydiard, who had trained several Olympic running champions. On weekends, Lydiard would invite locals to join him for “fitness and sociability” runs, or what he called jogging. Lydiard wanted New Zealanders to stop being sedentary and get some easy, non-strenuous exercise. Bowerman enjoyed these easy runs, and lost ten pounds in the process. He was eager to spread the message about jogging to residents in Eugene, Oregon, where he lived and coached. When these jogging get-togethers became popular, Bowerman decided to broaden the message, and co-wrote the 126-page bestselling Jogging book with the help of a local cardiologist.

Lo and behold, studies that prescribe higher, more evolutionarily normal levels of exercise, including walking, have the potential to be more effective for weight loss. One intriguing study asked fourteen overweight and unfit men and women to hew to the standard 150 minutes a week by walking briskly five times a week, but assigned another sixteen individuals the task of walking twice as much. Apart from the prescribed exercise, both groups were otherwise free to eat and sit as much as they wished. After twelve weeks, the 150-minute-a-weekers barely lost any weight, but the 300-minute-a-weekers lost an average of six pounds.42 At this rate they potentially could lose twenty-six pounds in a year. An even more demanding study compared obese men prescribed seven hundred calories of exercise a day (about five miles of jogging) with men asked simply to cut back their diets by the same number of calories. Over three months, both groups lost almost seventeen pounds (seven and a half kilograms), but the ones who exercised lost more unhealthy organ fat, even though they also ate more.43

What counts is now. The past is in the past. If you haven’t been eating healthfully and exercising for quite a while and feel regret and guilt about your condition and appearance, try to forget it. What you need to work on is present condition. No matter how bad your fitness level is and how many extra pounds you have to lose, now is when things will start to change. You just need to really want it, plan it, and commit to it.

Approximately three thousand people work for the Bureau of Engraving. It takes 490 notes to make a pound, and it would require 14.5 million notes to make a stack one mile high. Coin and paper account for only about 8 percent of all the dollars in the world. The rest are merely numbers in a ledger or tiny electronic blips on a computer chip. At the end of the process, the workers bundle the bills into packages of 100, which they then stack into bricks of 4,000. These bricks are loaded onto a pallet for transport to the basement from where they will be sent to the various Federal Reserve offices around the nation for distribution to banks and the public. Along the way, the curious visitors pepper the guides with questions: Q. Why are so many employees listening to music on headphones? A. To block the loud sound of the printing, cutting, and stacking machines. Q. Why are some of them eating? A. They are on break. Q. Why are all of the checkers so fat? A. Because they sit all day and watch money go by with little chance for exercise.

What about it being the thought that counts?” “If that were true, then I would lose ten pounds today because I thought about eating healthier and exercising and instead I ate an entire bag of Fritos and had a two-hour nap.

The most common arguments against using exercise to control weight are that calories from diet dwarf those spent on physical activity and that exercise increases hunger and fatigue, thus supposedly causing us to compensate by eating more and becoming couch potatoes after we exercise. A two-mile walk burns about 100 more calories than sitting, but that refreshing Coca-Cola afterward contains 140 calories. However, studies show that people who exercise more don’t necessarily compensate by eating more and they usually don’t become less active for the rest of the day.5 It is untrue you can’t lose weight by exercising. Instead, weight loss from exercise is much slower and more gradual than weight loss from dieting. Over the course of a year, walking an extra two miles a day can potentially lead to five pounds of weight loss. In addition, exercise definitely helps prevent weight regain following a diet, and likely plays a major role in preventing weight gain in the first place.6

If I follow a standard prescription of briskly walking thirty minutes a day, almost two extra miles, I’ll spend about a hundred extra calories per day, theoretically allowing me to shed approximately five pounds in half a year—about the reductions most studies report. If a skinny hunter-gatherer mother loses five pounds in six months, she’s in trouble, but many obese American dieters aim to lose about fifty-five pounds.39 Losing that many pounds that quickly through exercise alone would theoretically require Herculean efforts like running eight miles a day. Although far from easy, dieting is unquestionably more effective for shedding many pounds. While walking 30 minutes a day won’t lead to rapid, spectacular weight losses, an evolutionary and anthropological perspective puts a different spin on the argument that walking expends too few calories to shed excess pounds. While the commonly prescribed two-mile daily walk expends a pittance—just 4 percent—of the average person’s daily energy budget of twenty-seven hundred calories, that pittance is partly attributable to setting the exercise bar so low. It bears repeating that the standard public health recommendation is 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week. This amounts to a paltry 21 minutes a day, one-sixth the level of physical activity among nonindustrial people like the Hadza.40 Although jobs, commuting, and other obligations fill our days with necessarily sedentary activities, the average American still spends at least eight times as much time (170 minutes per day) watching television.41 It is no wonder that studies using modest exercise doses report modest weight losses.

To what extent and in what circumstances physical activity shifts metabolisms thus offsetting efforts to lose weight remains to be elucidated, but the fact remains that many studies have shown that exercise, including walking, can lead to weight loss. But to do so, one needs to walk considerably more than half an hour per day for many months. In addition, people who exercise more may compensate metabolically, negating some of the effects of added physical activity. Finally, it truly is faster and it’s often easier to lose weight by dieting because everyone needs to eat but no one has to exercise, and not eating five hundred calories of energy-rich food (four slices of bacon) requires less time and effort than walking five miles a day. Please, I do not wish to trivialize how hard it is to exercise if one is unfit and overweight: it can be uncomfortable, unpleasant, and disheartening, and disabilities can make it challenging or impossible. But for those unwilling or unable to run, swim, or do other vigorous exercises, walking remains an inexpensive and pleasant way to get a moderate and useful dose of physical activity. Even more important, regardless of how one initially loses weight, keeping the weight off almost always demands physical activity. The majority of dieters who do not exercise regain about half their lost pounds within a year, and thereafter the rest typically creeps back slowly but surely. Exercise, however, vastly increases the chances of maintaining weight loss.49 One example of this payoff comes from an experiment conducted here in Boston. When doctors put 160 overweight police officers on low-calorie diets for eight weeks, some with and some without exercise, all the officers lost sixteen to thirty pounds (seven to thirteen kilograms) with the ones who exercised losing slightly more. But once the crash diet was over and the policemen went back to their normal diets, only the officers who continued to exercise avoided weight regain; all the rest regained most or all of the pounds they initially lost.50 Many other studies confirm that physical activity, including walking, helps keep those lost pounds off.51 Maybe those ten thousand steps a day aren’t such a bad idea after all….

This concept can seem a little daunting when doing your first swings. These first swings can feel tiring, as I described my first 25 swings with a 30 pound weight. This is not unlike the first minutes of a jog, where sometimes the transition from resting state to vigorous exercise seems punishing. Within minutes of beginning jogging, though, your body adjusts to the new workload and any unpleasantness is reduced. The same occurs with kettlebell swings and soon you realize that your 50th swing feels no more tiring, even less so, than your tenth swing.

On the face of it, it seems preposterous to think that walking doesn’t help with weight loss. Recall that energy balance is the difference between the calories one ingests and the calories one spends. You probably burn roughly 50 calories more by walking a two-thousand-step mile than driving the same distance. So trudging ten thousand additional steps a day (five miles) will expend a respectable extra 250 calories per day.30 To be sure, those ten thousand added steps might make you hungrier, but if you snack sensibly and consume 100 calories less than you walked off, those supplementary steps will eventually amount to a deficit of about 3,000 calories a month. That amount is just shy of 3,500 calories, the supposed number of calories in a pound of fat according to a much-cited, overly simplistic, and inaccurate 1958 study.31 Further, low- to moderate-intensity activities like walking burn relatively more fat than carbohydrates (hence the “fat-burning zones” on some exercise machines).32 As a result, lots of people try to trudge away extra pounds. Biological systems such as bodies are messy, and anyone who has struggled to lose weight knows that simple theories rarely apply to the convoluted realities of weight loss. What works for one person fails for another, and while many people successfully shed pounds when they start a new weight-loss plan, satisfaction often turns to frustration as the initial rate of weight loss diminishes and then reverses. Study after study has shown that overweight or obese people prescribed standard doses of exercise for a few months usually lose at most a few pounds. For example, one experiment with the clever acronym DREW (Dose Response to Exercise in Women) assigned 464 women to 0, 70, 140, and 210 minutes of slow walking a week (140 minutes is about five added miles). Apart from their prescribed exercise, the women took about five thousand additional steps per day as they went about their normal activities. After six months, those prescribed the standard 140 minutes a week lost only five pounds, while those assigned 210 minutes lost a paltry three pounds (more on this unexpected result below).33 Other controlled studies on overweight men and women report similarly modest losses.34

For someone who is fifty pounds overweight, losing three to five pounds over half a year is a frustrating drop in the bucket. Accordingly, a stock response to these studies has been to declare exercise futile for trimming your waist. Before we entirely dismiss the weight control benefits of walking, the most fundamental type of endurance physical activity, let’s examine the major arguments behind this contention through the lens of evolutionary anthropology. The first is the specter of compensatory mechanisms, notably fatigue and hunger. If I walk ten thousand extra steps, I’ll be more tired and hungry, so I’ll rest and eat more to recoup lost calories. From an evolutionary perspective, these urges make sense. Because natural selection ultimately favors those who can allocate as much energy as possible to reproduction, our physiology has been tuned over millions of generations to hoard energy, especially fat. Further, because almost no one until recently was able to become overweight or obese, our bodies primarily sense if we are gaining or losing weight rather than how much excess fat we have. Whether you are skinny or stout, negative energy balance—including dieting—causes a starvation response that helps us restore energetic equilibrium or, better yet, gain weight so we can shunt more energy toward reproduction.35 It’s unfair, but losing ten pounds elicits food cravings and the desire to be inactive regardless of whether one is skinny or obese.

I was struck, during COVID-19’s early months, that America’s Doctor, apparently preoccupied with his single vaccine solution, did little in the way of telling Americans how to bolster their immune response. He never took time during his daily White House briefings from March to May 2020 to instruct Americans to avoid tobacco (smoking and e-cigarettes/vaping double death rates from COVID); to get plenty of sunlight and to maintain adequate vitamin D levels (“Nearly 60 percent of patients with COVID-19 were vitamin D deficient upon hospitalization, with men in the advanced stages of COVID-19 pneumonia showing the greatest deficit”); or to diet, exercise, and lose weight (78 percent of Americans hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese). Quite the contrary, Dr. Fauci’s lockdowns caused Americans to gain an average of two pounds per month and to reduce their daily steps by 27 percent. He didn’t recommend avoiding sugar and soft drinks, processed foods, and chemical residues, all of which amplify inflammation, compromise immune response, and disrupt the gut biome which governs the immune system. During the centuries that science has fruitlessly sought remedies against coronavirus (aka the common cold), only zinc has repeatedly proven its efficacy in peer-reviewed studies. Zinc impedes viral replication, prophylaxing against colds and abbreviating their duration. The groaning shelves that commercial pharmacies devote to zinc-based cold remedies attest to its extraordinary efficacy. Yet Anthony Fauci never advised Americans to increase zinc uptake following exposure to infection.

I had learned that a pounding heart is not always a sign of fear. Sometimes, it is proof that your heart is being strengthened.

WORKOUT #1 1. Double arm swing to warm up. –x20 2. Military press (strict). –x10 3. Clean and push press. –x10 4. Cleans. –x10 5. One arm side press. –x5 (each side) 6. Overhead one arm squats. –x10 7. Lunges. –x20 8. Sumo deadlifts. –x20-50 9. Wrestler’s bridge press. –x10 10. Turkish get ups. –x5 (each side) 11. Janda or Ab Pavelizer situps. 12. Chin up ladders. –alternate with a partner. The circuit is done with no rest between exercises for one set of the above repetitions with kettlebells that weight about 23.6 kilograms or 52 pounds each. The workout is under 15.00 and I attempt to lessen the time every workout. Zack and Steve Maxwell are ready to take on their kettlebells.

Some people beginning kettlebell swings may start with no weight. Just doing the swings with your hands holding an imaginary weight is a great way to start and develop good form. The box squat where you squat back and down over a 20 inch box is another zero-weight exercise that helps strengthen muscles and prepare you for kettlebell swings. Swinging no weight or very light weight offers virtually everyone the opportunity to gain the benefits of kettlebell swings. Overweight individuals or those who have not exercised for a period are wise to get a feel for the swings with no weight.  Alternatively, a kettlebell of five pounds (2.3 kg) offers new users the feel and form of the weight and handles to grip.

If you haven’t exercised in a while and you go to a strength class, would you grab twenty-pound dumbbells off the shelf? Probably not. They have lots of different weights for a reason. As with physical strength, the Thoughtfully Fit practice of Strength requires you to start small.

I decided to make a price pact with myself. After making time in my timeboxed schedule, I taped a crisp hundred-dollar bill to the calendar on my wall, next to the date of my upcoming workout. Then I bought a ninety-nine-cent lighter and placed it nearby. Every day, I had a choice to make: I would either burn the calories by exercising or burn the hundred-dollar bill. Unless I was certifiably sick, those were the only two options I allowed myself. Any time I found myself coming up with petty excuses, I had a crystal clear external trigger that reminded me of the precommitment I made to myself and to my health. I know what you’re thinking: “That’s too extreme! You can’t burn money like that!” That’s exactly my point. I’ve used this “burn or burn” technique for over three years and have gained twelve pounds of muscle, without ever burning the hundred dollars.

decided to make a price pact with myself. After making time in my timeboxed schedule, I taped a crisp hundred-dollar bill to the calendar on my wall, next to the date of my upcoming workout. Then I bought a ninety-nine-cent lighter and placed it nearby. Every day, I had a choice to make: I would either burn the calories by exercising or burn the hundred-dollar bill. Unless I was certifiably sick, those were the only two options I allowed myself. Any time I found myself coming up with petty excuses, I had a crystal clear external trigger that reminded me of the precommitment I made to myself and to my health. I know what you’re thinking: “That’s too extreme! You can’t burn money like that!” That’s exactly my point. I’ve used this “burn or burn” technique for over three years and have gained twelve pounds of muscle, without ever burning the hundred dollars.

The act provided that each militiaman must provide himself with arms, ammunition, and accouterments as follows: That every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise, or into service . . . .53 There is no mistaking the act's above language that "every citizen so enrolled . . . shall . . . provide himself with a good musket or firelock." Over two centuries later, a revisionist history purported to quote the act as having read that "every citizen so enrolled, shall . . . be constantly provided with a good musket or firelock," and then asserted that "Congress took upon itself the responsibility of providing those guns."54 Neither statement was true.

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. (James 1:22) I recently read an article about the fattest people on earth, people weighing well over a thousand pounds, people who are eating themselves to death. At a certain point, they lost the ability to walk. Eventually, they were bedridden and depended on others feeding them because they could no longer even feed themselves. It reminded me of a lot of people I find in the church. They are fed more and more knowledge every week. They attend church services, join small group Bible studies, read Christian books, listen to podcasts—and are convinced they still need more knowledge. Truth is, their biggest need is to do something. They don’t need another feast on doctrine. They need to exercise. They need to work off what they’ve already consumed. Some have become so used to consuming the Word without applying it that you wonder if they even can. These are the spiritually bedridden, resigned to spending the rest of their lives studying the Word without ever making disciples or tangibly caring for others. These are the ones about whom James asks: What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? (James 2:14)

I’ve seen too many people spill their guts in group therapy believing that this will make them feel better, only to discover that revealing their deepest, darkest secrets invariably makes things a thousand times worse. Once you know that someone’s uncle molested her while her stepfather recorded it so they could sell the videos on the dark web, or that the cute guy you had a crush on when you were fourteen spent the first seven years of his life believing he was a girl because that’s how his mother dressed and treated him and at sixteen he was still struggling with gender issues, or that your new roommate’s parents tracked every morsel of food that passed her lips and if she gained so much as half a pound, she had to work out for hours in an exercise room that was more like a torture chamber, it’s hard to forget. I remind myself I want to do this. Trevor may have initiated this interview, but I am here by choice.

One of the simplest ways to strengthen a headline is attachment of a Flag. The Flag is brief, as brief as a single word, stuck on the front of the headline, to reach out and grab the attention of certain specific prospects, by telegraphing that the message is specifically for them. This puts the “who is this for?” ahead of what is being advertised and sold. Here are examples of successful generic headlines with different kinds of flags attached. Headlines Before Attaching Flags Corns Gone in 5 Days or Money Back Guaranteed Weight Loss Up to 15 Pounds First 15 Days — With No Exercise How to Have Eager Prospects Calling and Begging for Next-Day Appointments 28 Days to Healthier Gums Headlines After Adding a Who-Is-This-For? Flag Waiters and Waitresses on Your Feet for Hours: Corns Gone In 5 Days or Money Back Disappointed Dieters: Guaranteed Weight Loss Up to 15 Pounds First 15 Days — with No Exercise Annuity Agents: How to Have Eager Prospects Calling and Begging for Next-Day Appointments Seniors: 28 Days to Healthier Gums Another form of flagging is to focus on the “ill to be cured” or “problem to be solved.” This is usually best done by posing a question, as in these examples: Same Headlines After Adding a Problem Flag Foot Pain? Corns Gone in 5 Days or Money Back Embarrassing Belly Bulge? Guaranteed Weight Loss Up to 15 Pounds First 15 Days — with No Exercise No One to Sell to? How to Have Eager Prospects Calling and Begging for Next-Day Appointments Blood on Your Toothbrush? 28 Days to Healthier Gums

But between ages 45 and 65, it’s more important to eat less meat and dairy than it is to go crazy with protein. A person in this age range weighing 150 pounds needs about 55 grams of protein a day. Most people get this amount without too much effort. After age 65, protein becomes extremely important. At this point, your body needs more protein, to combat sarcopenia—loss of muscle mass—which is just a natural part of life (see Maintaining muscle mass is critical for more on this). So you want to increase your protein intake by about 25 percent: A 150-pound person who’s 65 or over should aim for about 70 grams of protein a day. This, combined with exercise, especially strength training, helps minimize the loss of muscle mass.

To celebrate everyone’s hard work, Judi organized the first Jazzercise International Instructors’ Convention, held on a community college football field north of San Diego. Packed with a few thousand instructors, the event featured a surprise appearance from the hit R&B band the Spinners, who sang “Working My Way Back to You” while Judi led the crowd through spirited choreography. For the grand finale, Judi danced to the Rocky III anthem “Eye of the Tiger” while a 200-pound tiger named Asia “prowled across the stage” behind her. At the end, a plane appeared overhead and sky-wrote JAZZERCISE.

Scientists have been exploring the medical mysteries of the human heart for almost as long as poets have been probing its metaphorical depths. It is a wondrous organ, a tireless muscle that pumps blood around the body every moment of our lives. It pounds hard when we are exercising, slows down when we sleep, and even microadjusts its rate between beats, a hugely important phenomenon called heart rate variability. And when it stops, we stop. Our vascular network is equally miraculous, a web of veins, arteries, and capillaries that, if stretched out and laid end to end, would wrap around the earth more than twice (about sixty thousand miles, if you’re keeping score). Each individual blood vessel is a marvel of material science and engineering, capable of expanding and contracting dozens of times per minute, allowing vital substances to pass through its membranes, and accommodating huge swings in fluid pressure, with minimal fatigue. No material created by man can even come close to matching this.

In Muscle for Life, I’ll ask you to do at least a couple of workouts per week when cutting so you can eat at least 9 or 10 calories per pound of body weight per day, which is appropriate for one to three hours of exercise or vigorous physical activity per week. And if you’re moderately active (five or more hours of exercise or vigorous physical activity per week), you should choose the highest number (12).

Small free weights (three to five pounds) used in simple, familiar exercises are a good way to preserve upper body tone and bone density and supplement the cardiovascular benefits of an active lifestyle.

It is vain to shut our eyes to the fact that there is a vast quantity of so-called Christianity nowadays, which you cannot declare positively unsound — but which, nevertheless, is not full measure, good weight and sixteen ounces to the pound. It is a Christianity in which there is undeniably “something about Christ, and something about grace, and something about faith, and something about repentance, and something about holiness,” but it is not the real “thing as it is” in the Bible. Things are out of place and out of proportion. As old Latimer would have said, it is a kind of “mingle-mangle,” and does no good. It neither . . . exercises influence on daily conduct, nor comforts in life, nor gives peace in death. And those who hold it often awake too late to find that they have got nothing solid under their feet.

A Note About Hunger It is almost impossible to describe the hunger caused by many bipolar disorder drugs. It is virtually insatiable—just as thirst can be insatiable with lithium. There are few things you can do about it. Weight gain is often inevitable, even when you eat less and exercise more. This is because some medications appear to change metabolic rates—how fast your body burns calories. Reducing caloric intake helps, but for some people it’s often not a very successful option, especially with antipsychotic drugs and mood stabilizers such as Tegretol and Depakote. It is not abnormal for someone to gain fifty pounds on these drugs. Then there are some who do not gain weight at all and simply stop eating. It is a very complicated issue. The important thing is to not blame yourself. If

The mind's well-being was the well that was poisoned. One doesn't own a little anti-Semitism as if it were a puppy that isn't big enough yet to poop a lot. One yap from the pooch is already too much. Nor is saying "it was only social" a successful excuse. Only social, indeed ... only a mild case. The mild climate renders shirt-sleeves acceptable, loosens ties and collars, allows extremes to seem means, makes nakedness normal, facilitates the growth of weeds. Since the true causes of anti-Semitism do not lie with the Jews themselves (for if they did, anti-Semitism might bear some semblance of reason), they must lie elsewhere--so, if not in the hated, then in the hater, in another mode of misery. Rationalist philosophers, from the beginning, regarded ignorance and error as the central sources of evil, and the conditions of contemporary life have certainly given their view considerable support. We are as responsible for our beliefs as for our behavior. Indeed, they are usually linked. Our brains respond, as well as our bodies do, to exercise and good diet. One can think of hundreds of beliefs--religious, political, social--which must be as bad for the head as fat is for the heart, and whose loss would lighten and enliven the spirit; but inherently silly ones, like transubstantiation, nowadays keep their consequences in control and relatively close to home. However, anti-Semitism does not; it is an unmitigated moral catastrophe. One can easily imagine how it might contaminate other areas of one's mental system. But is it the sickness or a symptom of a different disease? Humphrey Carpenter's level headed tone does not countenance Pound's corruption. It simply places the problem before us, permitting out anger and our pity. -- From "Ezra Pound

Dr. Steven Blair is a renowned exercise researcher at the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. His research shows that excess weight is not “the enemy.” Not getting enough exercise and being cardiovascularly unfit are much greater contributors to poor health than any extra pounds can be. Blair stands firmly by his research showing that fit, fat people outlive thin, unfit people.

And so chubby, sugar-brained Jack invented exercise. He became the hero who could do a thousand jumping jacks and a thousand chin-ups in ninety minutes. The muscle that trained itself to finish 1,033 push-ups in twenty minutes by climbing a twenty-five-foot rope with 140 pounds of weight strapped to his belt.

The athletic sort of Backson - one of the many common varieties - is concerned with physical fitness, he says. But for some reason, he sees it as something that has to be pounded in from the outside, rather than built up from the inside. Therefore, he confuses exercise with work. He works when he works, works when he exercises, and, more often than not, works when he plays. Work, work, work.

the following simple exercise concerning the prediction of the movements of billiard balls on a table. I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry’s computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions!

3 Proven Method for Rapid Weight Gain Looking for a healthy and balanced technique of quick weight gain for the following stage of your physical fitness strategy ? Fast weight gain is feasible via just all-natural techniques. Also if you believe you are consuming sufficient to get weight, you might not also be making up for the additional calories shed by your exercise. A weight loss (or gain, in this instance) calculator will certainly take your dimensions, physical task degree, and also preferred weight to provide you a needed calorie consumption each day. Lots of individuals believe they require to exercise extra in order to attain fast weight gain. However, that breaks down the muscle mass without providing the body a possibility to restore itself. Looking for a healthy and balanced approach to fast weight gain for the following stage of your physical fitness strategy? There are rather a couple of weight gainer tablets out there, however exactly how do you understand which ones are healthy and balanced? Fast weight gain is feasible via just all-natural techniques. A weight loss (or gain, in this situation) calculator will certainly take your dimensions, physical task degree, as well as preferred weight to offer you a needed calorie consumption each day. Integrating this with your online tracking website allows you rapidly as well as quickly see if you are fulfilling your calorie objectives for the day. Trying to find weight gain pills for females? Check out this page weightgainofficial dot com There are changes you could make while you are in the fitness centre to speed up your weight gain. Considerably overwhelming a details muscle mass team with enhancing quantities of weight will certainly optimize your gains in dimension from one exercise to the following. Numerous individuals believe they require to exercise extra in order to attain fast weight gain, however that just breaks down the muscular tissues without providing the body a possibility to reconstruct itself. Usage of the internet calorie checking devices and also weight loss calculators to establish objectives as well as track your development. You had to look up every food in a calorie publication and also compose down your computations in a notepad. Currently, you could conveniently input the food you simply consumed right into an online calorie counting website as well as it will certainly look up the calories for you. This might appear like an apparent pointer, yet problem obtaining weight typically suggests you are not consuming anywhere near sufficient food. Also if you assume you are consuming sufficient to acquire weight, you might not also be making up for the added calories shed by your exercise. Many individuals undervalue the large quantity of calories required to acquire also one extra pound.

Sample Daily Plan: Begin your morning with hydration – think green tea and water. Also, make a breakfast that has lean proteins and don’t forget to do your yoga. If mornings are easy for you, get in your exercise. Try for 30-60 minutes of cardio and 15 minutes of strength training. Have 5-6 mini-meals, making sure you don’t exceed your calculated calorie count. Get your daily intake of water. (1 ounce for every 2 pounds you weigh) Stay away from sugar and salt. Spend your evening time engaged in some relaxing stretches. Soothe your body even more by drinking a warm cup of tea or reading a good book. Get 7-10 hours of sleep. Make all seven days like this. Remember, you need to eat well, exercise often and sleep good at night.

The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

The same drive that makes someone want to run a company can also make them want to complete an Ironman triathlon. But all that exercise on top of a stressful job will drive up your cortisol levels. This causes weight gain, muscle loss, a decline in testosterone, and burnout.

Mondays would be squats and all other leg assistance. Tuesdays would be off. Wednesdays would be bench with chest assistance and a lot of tricep work. I would come in Thursdays, after pre-fatiguing the triceps on Wednesday, and only hit shoulders [primary go-to exercises: seated behind-the-neck barbell press, working up to 400-plus pounds]. I would deadlift on Friday [with light squats as a warmup], do all of my back work. Saturday would be a light bench day for recovery using wide-grip bench, flies, etc., with occasional smaller exercises

We hear all the time about how important it is to be physically fit. Our society has become ultra-focused on fitness and health. Our Facebook feeds are filled with seven-minute workouts. There are YouTube videos galore on seven days to rock-hard abs. The radio plays ads to lose ten pounds in ten days, but only if you call in the next ten minutes. Even the president told us to be physically fit. Remember the Presidential Physical Fitness Test in elementary school? A quick shuttle run, the dreaded flexed arm hang. It tested strength, endurance, flexibility, and agility. All different ways to prove we were physically fit. Or not. As a matter of fact, Americans now spend more on fitness than on college tuition.1 Over a lifetime, the average American spends more than $100,000 on things like gym memberships, supplements, exercise equipment, and personal training.2 Seems shocking, right? But where are the training programs for the thoughts in your head? Those thoughts that tell you that you have no choices when bad things happen. Those thoughts that try to convince you everything is out of your control in difficult situations. Where do you go if you want to be Thoughtfully Fit? Right here in this book.