Live Free, Laugh Hard

Mt. Agung eruption 2017.  I was staying on the island of Gili Trawangan as the volcano erupted in Bali, Indonesia. The event lasted a couple of days and put life on pause for about a week as we prepared for the potential for a larger eruption, which did not happen.    The following down-turn in economy due to media and false and late posts on social media lasted months and spanned across the thousands of islands in Indonesia. The world is beginning to have two new separate groups of people, who see the world from a very different viewpoint.   There are those who go outside and do things.   They go out to the park, to parties and attend events.   They love riding a bike, going on a hike, or dancing all weekend long at a festival.   They learn new skills like how to play a guitar to play with other people in a band. They meet new people, they travel, and they may enjoy the beach, the forest, or the desert.   They value experiences ...

I grew up in Finland knowing a term that directly translates to "New Helpless" in English. This term was used to describe a phenomenon that was reported to be on the rise in Generation X. New helplessness referred to young adults who were moving out on their own just to discover that they were completely ill-equipped for "adulting." They lacked basic life skills, such as cleaning, cooking, and self-care because of either excessive pampering by their parents or simple laziness to learn. In today's world, we can add a third group of "new helpless" young adults - those raised by "new helpless" parents and thus lacking a role model for learning life skills. In my early teens, I heard a lot about the "new helpless" because my dad was a particularly harsh critic of these people he described as, "dummies whose parents did too much for them so they never learned anything and are now out there walking around with their t...

This morning, while training a client, I was reminded how language can mislead us or play tricks on our mental image of something we don't quite understand. As I was leading my client through stretches, I explained that the movements we were doing targeted our hip flexors and hamstrings and that ultimately the stretches could be used to gain flexibility to do the splits. She smiled and said, "Oh! I would love to learn how to do the splits" and I replied, "Well, these stretches are a great start. Just keep at it and do these several times a week." Her statement left me thinking about how often I hear people say, "I want to learn how to..." when the skill they are looking to learn isn't so much a matter of learning "how" but rather something that can only be gained by persistent training that develops the body.  Recently, at a consultation, a prospective student told me, "I want to learn how to do pull ups. I've tr...

"Being Angry Isn't a Sign of Intelligence" - I found this note scribbled down in the middle of one of my comedy notebooks. I had written it down in 2011. At that time, I was coming out of a two year spin of depression. I don't know what exactly caused that depression because today it seems weird to me that I had ever felt that way but that depression was followed by a rather typical cycle of hopelessness, anger, and eventual acceptance and healing. At the time, I didn't know this was going on. I felt entitled to my mellow mood and mood swings. I felt certain that the whole world was a terrible, horrible place where I would, in fact, be a bad person, if I felt too good about my life. I didn't go to the doctor, I wasn't medicated, and I didn't go to support groups. I did what came natural to me - I got upset a lot, I cried, I wrote, I got drunk a lot, and eventually, I decided to pull myself up by my neck. I got up, I started exercising...

We have a state of emergency going on and no one wants to acknowledge it. Our diet is literally so bad that we are killing ourselves! Almost everyone is overweight or obese and as a nation our eating habits are so out-of-control and far off from what is scientifically considered a healthy diet that health experts, like myself, don’t even know where to start trying to change this behavior.  We have tried being nice about it and published public service announcements about eating at least five servings of produce each day. We have tried educational programs and pamphlets to tell people that their food is causing high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and all the other illnesses that are disabling or killing them. We have told people that they should get at least an hour of physical activity every day. Yet, some days, it seems that none of that is working and that all I can do is stand there in the middle of the street, looking up...

Have you ever seen someone fit in the gym, who despite all those muscles and their ability to stay on the treadmill running for hours on end, still look a little "off."  Maybe their posture is bad or their legs look skinny or they have a bird chest despite all that bench pressing. This is where proper form, muscle balance, and activation of the correct muscles for a specific movement come to play. All too often, I see someone doing a movement wrong. Some of them use tons of momentum to lift a weight too heavy for the muscles that exercise was intended to target. Others use their major muscle groups to plow through a movement that was intended to develop the finer, supporting muscles. I've heard the excuse, "I'm bulking up right now, so it's OK to sacrifice form a little. I'll work on that later."  What they may not realize is that muscles are highly specific in their action and range of motion. If you train in the wrong position or usi...

The current culture of political correctness and circling around issues to assure no one has a chance to find anything offensive in our words have me often feeling powerless. I want to help people understand health and weight loss and it seems that plenty of people still want to get healthy and would like to lose weight. However, I feel that it's just so easy to end up the target of an attack, if you give unsolicited or public advice. Your words can be taken out-of-context and your well meaning advice be labeled extremist. Yet, now at 42, my friends and family are getting sick. They're not just getting randomly sick either. They're getting the ailments that their lifestyle would predict. Those who always ate a lot of meat are getting cancer and they have intestinal issues ranging from constipation and diverticulitis, to IBS. Those who drank a lot of alcohol have elevated liver enzymes, cancer, and auto-immune diseases. Those who have been overweight get ...

In this culture of body acceptance, I find that a slim or fit person now gets pointed at for not being normal or judged as not having a "desirable human form." In the current social climate on fitness, it no longer takes an underweight physique for someone to be judged as being "too skinny" because the world's reference point, the so-called "average person" is now clinically overweight. Being called "too skinny" or to "go eat a sandwich", can creep into the psyche of even the most athletic, health conscious person. Unfortunately, in the back of their mind, this negative message can make one feel unattractive and persuade someone to begin overeating to "fix" this suddenly perceived lack in one's external beauty. This pressure to have a fuller body or to "not look like a boy" can occur despite our knowledge that being overweight, along with the lifestyle factors that lead to being overweight i...

We do not exist in a vacuum as just simple individuals traveling through space but as a part of the environment that we live in.  This environment impacts us in many ways.  We adopt behaviors from those around us, we are challenged by the stresses of the environment that we live in, and on the most profound level, we are  physically built by the environment through the foods that we consume.  Just as a head does not exist without a body, the human being does not exist without a connection to their environment.  Some people are surprised to find out that their body today is not the same body they had a few years ago.  It's a common misunderstanding that our bodies grow throughout childhood and teenage years and is somehow complete and "final" by the age of maturity with a subsequent slow decay and breakdown as we age.  This image of a "permanent structure" couldn't be farther from the truth for a biological being.  In fact, our cells die ...

I have been studying weight loss for over 20 years. I have studied anatomy and physiology, behavioral science, and motivational theories related to weight loss. I have read thousands of scientific journal articles and books on nutrition, exercise physiology, and medicine and based on my knowledge, I have designed personalized programs for people to lose weight and regain their health. I have researched the quick fixes and gimmicks from cabbage soup diet to liposuction, interviewed people who tried them, and analyzed these fads for any potential effects and harmful side effects. I have used my knowledge to lose weight, when my person health behaviors deteriorated and when I struggled to overcome binge eating and sugar addiction and I taught the behaviors I learned to work to all types of people in various settings. I have designed and implemented fitness programs, motivational group programs, and lecture series on health, weight loss, and fitness. I have gone to doctors ap...

I had been a health focused person all my life.  Yet, there were several poor health behaviors that I couldn’t quite kick.  The worst of them was my tendency to binge eat and binge drink.  I was also extremely hooked on sugar, finding my cravings often impossible to control.     In my 20s, I compensated for my binging and sugar consumption by exercising more after a “bingy” weekend or evening and by limiting my calories 4-5 days a week to allot for a few binges each week.  It worked well enough to keep my weight in control but inside my head, I was often going crazy with the desire to stuff myself silly or to eat a half a German chocolate cake in one sitting.  I was often bloated, my skin would break out after particularly bad weekends, and I always gained about 10 pounds on vacations when I would allow a total loss of control.     In my 30s, I got busy with school and life and my poor choices got out-of-control.  Ins...

The way to the middle-way is to not succumb to the perceived value of extremes.  This is why I caution people when they believe in the value of extreme behaviors as a solution to their problems - no matter which end that extreme is in.  Those extremes are the opposite ends of the same stick and usually picking that stick up from one end means that you end up smacking yourself in the head with the other end. You can balance the stick holding it in the middle a lot essier than trying to stand it on it's end. Nowhere is this perception, that extreme change is the way to success, more apparent than in health behaviors and fitness goals.  People are forever searching for the most intense program with immediate, extreme results.  They believe that quitting "cold turkey" is easier than reducing their vices, so they go on for years and decades waiting for the right moment to quit all while talking the talk of quitting without any action.  Some order the m...

If you prepare yourself for a jump thinking that you’ll probably fall and hurt yourself, where do you think your body will end up? Every muscle in your body is tensing in preparation to catch you falling, rather than to succeed in your jump. Your attention is on the ground, where you are expecting to end up, not forward where you should be landing. You are ready to fall, not to clear your jump. The same concept applies to any goal. If you assume you’re not going to make it, you begin to prepare to fail. You visualize failure and the reasons why you failed. You give yourself an out instead of pushing yourself harder when things don’t quite workout. You prepare to tell your friends about all the obstacles that kept you from making it, rather than focusing on your moments of small successes along he way. Your thoughts become your biggest obstacle. To beat them, you must identify and change the visual that you allow into your mind. You must practice this process of s...