Monthly Archives: February 2006

Healthy, wealthy and…life?

A post or two ago I mentioned that one of the key factors to living longer and being healthier was financial wealth.

Well, take a looksee!

But what does this really tell us?

It tells us to reduce stress. To be happy. And we certainly don’t need to be rich for that. Perhaps Shaw can help. (The italics are mine.)

"This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." — George Bernard Shaw

I wish I could write like this!

How sweet it is…or isn’t

We’ve recently banned all candy and sweets of any kind as our daughter’s after dinner treats.

Dangerous I know.

But so far all is well.

Why? How? What’s our family secret?

No. It isn’t electric shock. It’s fruit. And they love it.

The thing is, candy is more fun. Fun labels, fun shapes, fun flavors. Just plain old fun.

Fruit is boring.

But it can be made fun.

Little bowls with funny eyeballs, little weird feet, funny pictures on the inside and, of course big wacky straws to suck up the juice and funkadelic spoons and forks to stab and scoop.

But here’s the trick – the fruit has to be SWEET. Yep. As sweet as the candy. Otherwise, you’re going to find yourself a frazzle with their peels for skittles and wind up threatening to hang your kids by their Buster Browns.

The answer: Ripeness.

My wife is a master at picking out fruits that are so ripe and sweet they’d embarrass a bag of M&M’s.

Choose incorrectly though thus proving to your kids that fruit tastes like corrugated cardboard and you’ll be finding yourself down that grocery aisle of a child’s dreams.

A word that means everything means nothing

Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian was right. (At least I think it was Mitchell who said it.)

And it came to me in a flash one day that most people are of the belief that any exercise they do is as good as the other.

There truly is a widespread misconception that as long as an activity is, well, active, it’s doing the job.

Exercise has many meanings. You can do an exercise in mathematics, an exercise in piano class or go out and hit the treadmill. There are also exercises in futility which hitting the treadmill pretty much is.

"A word that means everything mean nothing."

What most people don’t realize is the actual problem that exercise is supposed to fix. I mean, if you had to hammer a nail into the wall to hang up a picture of Nanna, would you use a wrench? (Well, some people might I suppose.)

No. You’d reach for a hammer. And the right hammer at that.

You wouldn’t grab a roofers hammer

or a mason’s hammer,

you’d pick a regular old hammer

to do it right.

When it comes to exercise, people in their innocent ignorance pick the wrong tool for the job. I am completely convinced this is because they don’t know what the job is!

Well I’ll tell you – stopping the loss of and rebuilding muscle tissue.

Yoga can’t do this. Neither can Pilates (the way it’s usually performed) or golf or jogging or tennis or swimming or hiking or biking or…

You get the idea.

No. I wish it were so. I wish a lovely stroll in the park or a pleasant bike ride ’round the park did the trick.

Fun, pleasant and enjoyable activities are the wrong tools for this particular job. A job that desperately needs to be done – by everyone.

The tool that we all need is strength training. And when that right tool is used for the right job, you can enjoy the resulting outcomes.

If you really love Yoga, if you adore a stroll with your loved one, if you live for tennis or golf, do yourself a favor and spend a mere 30 minutes a week adding strength training into your lives.

Another health/fitness fib bites the dust

Fat is bad. Fat makes you fat. Fat clogs your arteries. Fat kills your heart.

Nope.

Actually, science has been telling us this for a decade or more. Experts like Drs. Michael and MaryDan Eades have been educating us on this fact for just as long.

But the happy folks at the RDA/AHA/AMA/ACSM etc. have managed to brainwash us using our very own tax dollars to fund the scheme.

We should all be mad.

In fact, fat is REALLY healthy for you (the good fat like saturated fat) and contributes to longevity and healthy hormonal tone.

I can hear our caveman ancestors splitting their sides in their graves.

I mean, can you imagine Oog and Og carefully stripping away the skin from a freshly killed chicken and tossing it aside or using their prehistoric Henkel knife set to slice away the Bison fat from the meat and leaving it to rot?

No way Ray. They’d practically inhale the stuff.

A few years ago (give or take a century), it was discovered that the Earth revolved around the sun. A few months ago we learned that fiber in the diet does squat to protect us from rectal/intestinal cancers. Now we learn that fat is not Nosferatu.

What’s next?

Out of the mouths of babes

This story had me smiling from ear to ear.

It’s like in the Jewish religion – if every person on Earth on a single Sabbath kept the Sabbath the messiah would come.

Well if every kid on the planet could do what these kids did, an epidemic would be in sharp decline. (Pediatric dentistry would suffer but hey, there’s got to be some give and take!)