Picture two male figures in the cartoon’s examining room: the doctor in his lab coat is recording answers on a clipboard as he poses questions to his lumpy patient with a big, flabby belly, sitting on the exam table in his skivvies: “Okay, Any history of physical activity in your family?”
Ooo…Ouch! Clearly, NO history of any physical activity in that family. It’s funny, but how would you answer honestly? Are you more like the fleshy patient or his smug, smarty-pants doctor?
For the love of springtime and sunnier days and feeling happier, simply move. You don’t need to do anything more than start adding some extra steps to your daily routine to start looking more svelte in your examining gown.
Careful that you’re not buried in the avalanche of advice about exercise and well-being. From New Year’s Eve through swimsuit season every year, there’s a steady drumbeat from advertising and infomercials and magazine promos for the latest diet ingest-ibles, slimming gadgets with catchy names like XYZ3000 and bloody SYSTEMS for crunching your abs and carving your thighs and convincing you that you need to drop a big bucket of money and your job and all of your significant relationships and devote yourself to getting into “The Best Shape of Your Life.”
Move out of the way of that avalanche, Love: Simply Move. Just by adding a few extra steps to the ones you walk each day, you can begin to feel better. Honestly, it’s just that simple and inexpensive. Most reasonable people with good health and wellness advice will tell you to start just like that. Just add a few extra steps to your daily stepping. Here’s proof this easy start is a recipe for feeling better and living longer: it comes from research documented in a terrific book my daughter gave me titled Fifty Secrets of the World’s Longest Living People (Beare, 2006).
The book presents results from significant longevity studies that reveal the habits of people in five places around the world “where people often reach their 100th birthday and the number of centenarians per 100,000 people is as much as three times higher than in the United States” (xix). These places aren’t wealthy enclaves where the super-rich wear fancy workout clothes and have other people do their sweating and starving for them. The healthiest people in the world walk almost everywhere they go! They live and work outdoors most of their lives, spending time growing crops or fishing in fresh air and sunshine. They are also fond of sports and leisure activity and enjoy martial arts or a night of dancing to folk music after a light supper and glass of red wine. As the author says, “You will be hard-pressed to find exceptionally long-lived people who don’t take plenty of regular exercise” (192).
The key for us is to start simply by adding some extra steps and pursuing the self-satisfied feeling of accomplishment we get from them by searching for more and more ways to skip the elevator and take the stairs or park in the farthest space away from the storefront and push the shopping cart over the extra distance. Little by little, you’ll start feeling better and taking more pride in looking and staying fit.
Put some SPRING in your step, Love! Simply move.
Much Love,
Dr Mell
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Baure, S (2006). Fifty secrets of the world’s longest living people. New York: MJF Books.
