Where Thin People Roam, and Sometimes Even Eat

NEW YORK TIMES



By ANNE BARNARD

Published: July 22, 2009

For Brian Ermanski, a slender yet muscular painter who lives among the trendy boutiques and bars of SoHo, the news that Manhattan was the thinnest county in New York State was no surprise. What shocked him was that, even still, 42 percent of Manhattanites were overweight or obese — a figure he found vaguely disturbing, as if it gave his borough a bad name.

“It’s probably more like 20 percent overweight down here,” said Mr. Ermanski, 28, sitting on a bench outside Balthazar, the brasserie that is a crossroads of the neighborhood, where he spends an hour a day watching the beautiful people go by.

“It might even go down to zero percent during Fashion Week, when all the models are here,” added Mr. Ermanski, who attributed his slim frame (5-foot-11, 160 pounds) to a combination of healthy and unhealthy habits: daily two-mile walks, weekly soccer, and breakfasts of coffee and cigarettes.

Manhattan is far thinner than the nation (with 67 percent of the population overweight), the state (nearly 60 percent) or the city’s other boroughs (58 to 62 percent), according to the study released Tuesday by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand that relied on federal data on body-mass index, a calculation based on height and weight.

Manhattan’s wiry and willowy were eager on Wednesday to dissect how they brought home such an honor. First and foremost, they said, Manhattan is a place where people walk. Even subway riders need to climb stairs. Storefront yoga studios, parks and pedestrian-friendly streets make working out relatively easy.

Beyond that, Manhattan is the national capital of disparate subcultures of the skinny: Aspiring models. Nightclubbing hipsters. Gay men with the time and money to chisel their physiques at the gym. Park Avenue society matrons who remain preternaturally slender into their 70s, the “social X-rays” satirized by Tom Wolfe.

And, too, Manhattan is a borough of extreme inequality — in socioeconomic status and obesity rates, which generally correlate. The island’s poorest areas, like Harlem, have high rates of obesity and diabetes, and advocates are working for improved nutritional education and access to healthy foods there. Meanwhile, the borough’s richest swaths have the lowest obesity rates — and, some argue, an obsession with thinness.

“My mom always says, ‘The smaller the dress size, the larger the apartment,’ ” said one lifelong Upper East Sider, who said she did not want to be named because she disapproves of the maxim.

What better place to test that hypothesis than the Exhale gym and spa, looking out on Madison Avenue from the banklike Carlyle Gallery building. (As if to prove the point, the gym sits directly above the Douglas Elliman real estate office advertising a “Trophy Mansion Townhouse” for $22 million.)

Behind a front desk that offered $1,600 Caribbean yoga weekends, a core fusion class huffed and puffed to an instructor’s stentorian count and a Corey Hart song.

The gym’s director, Susan Tomback (5-foot- 7, 118), said that for women who can afford leisure and child care, exercise is “a lifestyle thing,” not a chore.

“All the neighborhood women drop their kids off and come here,” said Ms. Tomback, 29. “It’s like a club. They go to brunch afterwards at Sant Ambroeus,” the ladies-who-lunch mecca on the next block featuring $22 salads.

For an even more rarefied crowd, there is Verve Private Training, sharing the fifth floor with the Gagosian Gallery, a temple of contemporary art. There, Mary Ann Browning gives $300 coaching sessions designed to produce the narrow hips required to wear, say, Carolina Herrera.

Leaving with a bottle of spring water was Gail Zweigenthal, a former editor of Gourmet magazine, where she had to balance Manhattan’s twin obsessions — eating well and looking good.

“I exercise so I can eat,” said Ms. Zweigenthal (5-foot-3 ½, 114; like many residents of the Upper East Side, she was quicker to give her weight than her age).

“If I feel fat, I can’t enjoy eating,” she said. “This is unhealthy — that if I gain a few pounds, I’m not happy — but it’s the truth of me.”

Now training to be a psychoanalyst — she wrote a master’s thesis called “Food Beyond Pleasure” — Ms. Zweigenthal lifts weights and walks three miles a day.

“Look at my cute little triceps!” she exclaimed, pinching them.

Fear can be a motivator, too.

“Our closets are filled all these expensive clothes that are like swords of Damocles, because we may not fit into them anymore,” said Simon Doonan, (5-foot-4, 135), emerging from the Crunch gym on Lafayette Street, where men on treadmills could be seen through the windows.

Mr. Doonan, 56, the creative director of Barney’s — the designer emporium where real estate brokers lunch on chopped salads — said he did not want to appear “fatist.” Yet, he admitted, he notices the weight of people in other states.

“I’m appalled by people my age who can’t get through the airport without a wheelchair,” he said.

Fashion, indeed, is merciless. Intermix, a designer boutique, doesn’t usually carry sizes larger than 8, said the manager of the Madison Avenue store, Lynn Bacci (5-foot-8 ½, 137), who works out to fit into skinny jeans and tank tops.

Chuck Ortiz, 52, a plumber from the Bronx who was ordering $5 sandwich from a halal cart near Intermix — chicken, his version of a diet — scoffed at the way Upper East Siders spend money to get thin “when there’s a park right there.” A brawny 6 feet, 220 pounds, he said he stays fit by hiking and working hard renovating the Surrey Hotel.

Nearby, in Central Park, New Yorkers’ willingness to exercise in public was on display — not only defined pectorals but also jiggling thighs.

Meanwhile, Verve’s founder, Ms. Browning, supervised as Ilene Zatkin-Butler (5-foot-4, 118), a lawyer who has dropped three pants sizes under her tutelage, fast-walked on a treadmill. “Everything is in excess in Manhattan — whether it’s how beautiful you are, how thin you are, or how hard you work,” said Ms. Browning, (5-foot-8, 119, and healthy, she added with emphasis, “No eating disorders going on here!”)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/nyregion/23slim.html?scp=3&sq=thin&st=cse

YouTube - Nickelback - Rockstar

We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat, hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

Nothing wrong with skinny. It's the excesses and greed that have ruined our economy.

Oh yes I totally agree actually Ninja San.

And anyway, staying slim isn't exactly rocket science either is it.

You sayin' I'm fat???

It's puppy fat, I tell you. Erm. It's kitten fat, I tell you.

Actually, to a large extent ('scuse the pun), you're right. It is eat less, move more. I've studied various diets as I'm very interested in healthy eating and sports nutrition. There are some little tricks but mostly, in the long run, it is about input < output.

shadowninja said:

Nothing wrong with skinny. It's the excesses and greed that have ruined our economy.

Click to expand...

its increasing of human population

And that. We need to breed less.

That said, sounds like swine flu is starting to do a good job of controlling population size.

Doesn't seem too fussed about class, either. I hear Cheri Blair has it. Which is odd. I always thought she looked like a frog not a pig. Oh, how very catty of me.

there is a noticeable increase in fat *******s...where do they come from ?

A frog:


Cheri Blair:

LOL Ninja San !



I do feel bad for her if it's true that she's got swine flu.

But then that doesn't have to be fatal does it.

Sounds like a cure is potentially just round the corner if one believes the news.

Btw, re diets, this is a good read and pretty much what I do. Just common sense anyway, basically.


Raising the bar

At 88, fitness guru Jack LaLanne can run circles around those half his age

This figures to be the last place you would find Jack LaLanne, fitness icon to countless Americans of a certain age, on a gloriously sunny afternoon along the Central Coast. But there he is, supine on a sofa. His shoes are kicked off, his nose buried in a newspaper. The man is, for maybe the first time in his 88 years, completely at rest. In fact, he is not moving.

Elaine, LaLanne's wife of 45 years, calls from the entryway.

"Jack, you've got a visitor."

No response.

"Jack!"

She leads the visitor into the family room. "Jack, he's here."

Still, LaLanne is not moving. You start to worry. Is this repose or rigor mortis? Look closely, though, and the newspaper flutters slightly in his hands.

Then, without warning, LaLanne jumps to life, so energetically that you wonder whether a loose sofa spring has catapulted him to his feet.

Do not fear. Jack LaLanne is alive and well. He was not sleeping, either, he wants you to know. No couch potato, this guy. He just loves reading so much that he blocks out everything else. As for that brief fear that the "ageless man" has passed on, well, that notion is shattered after feeling his bone- crushing handshake and taking him up on the offer to punch his slate-hard abs.

He knows what you are thinking, too. Reporters periodically come to this fishing village to see how the "Godfather of Fitness," who opened the country's first health club in Oakland in 1936 and who was a staple of morning television for 30 years with the syndicated "Jack LaLanne Show," is getting along. After all, it's been a decade or two since he pulled one of his fitness stunts, such as swimming underwater from Alcatraz to the Golden Gate Bridge, towing 60 boats behind him.

LaLanne cackles in his mock gruff manner, then spits out the line he's being telling folks for decades.

"I can't die, young man. It would ruin my image."

These kids today, they don't know Jack.
They know Schwarzenegger and Richard Simmons. They know Dr. Atkins and Jenny Craig. They know Pilates and yoga and low-impact aerobics. They know Nautilus and NordicTrack and the Thighmaster.

But they may not know the cult of LaLanne, how he influenced a generation of men and women to lift weights for exercise and eat organically in an era when both were considered anathema to good health. If people under 40 know LaLanne at all, it's from his late-night infomercial plugging his Power Juicer or his personal appearances on the corporate lecture circuit, the remaining business enterprises left from his erstwhile empire that included a chain of health clubs and health food line.

To them, he is just someone his parents or grandparents watched on the tube.

If they were to ask Grandma about "The Jack LaLanne Show," they might be aghast at the low-tech, low-budget nature of the program. You mean he did all these leg lifts and stuff with just a chair? And you took him seriously?

Indeed, people did. Back in the day, those who didn't mock LaLanne as a crackpot -- remember, he had the gall to ask folks to give up their beloved red meat and stick to high-protein, low-fat diets -- worshiped at his altar of fitness. His TV show ran from 1951 to 1985, insisting to housewives that they would be more feminine with a toned, muscular body. In the show's heyday in the '60s, the message resonated such that LaLanne was estimated to have 50 million viewers. And he made a pretty penny selling nearly 20 million of his upper-body-toning Glamour Stretcher.

"Yeah, boy," LaLanne said, "I spent a lot of time on the floor with your mother."

By the mid-1980s, though, LaLanne's brand of physical fitness and nutrition seemed passe, as younger and hipper fitness fanatics hoisted the mantle of bringing bodybuilding to the masses. He faded into the margins of celebrity, was trotted out occasionally in "where are they now?" segments and, of course, making his mark in the infomercial wars.

But neither LaLanne's lasting impact nor his physique has significantly diminished with time. In the past few months, he has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was an inductee into the San Francisco Golden Circle by a Bay Area television broadcasters' organization.

Recent wire photographs of LaLanne flexing in front of his Hollywood star show the same old Jack -- 46-inch chest, 30-inch waist, 16-inch biceps. He's kept muscle atrophy at bay in typical LaLanne fashion, waking at 5 a.m., seven days a week, to lift weights for an hour and swim for another hour, eating a strict organic and vegetarian diet. Sure, there are concessions to age. His hair is thinner and has gone mostly gray. His face is etched with deep seams of flesh. He limps slightly -- just slightly -- as a result of knee replacement surgery in the '80s after being involved in a serious auto accident.

Golden years? To look at LaLanne, he's never left his salad days. He couldn't live with himself, literally, if he were to take people's advice and take it easy. He is too regimented, too obsessive about his health. After all, he doesn't consider this his dotage, steadfastly refuses to believe in inevitable bodily decay. He will tell anyone who'll listen, with the flinty- eyed stare of a street-corner preacher, that gerontologists have it all wrong, that man can live to 150.

He cackles again and delivers another of his signature aphorisms.

"Billy Graham preaches the hereafter. I preach the here-and-now."

Nonbelievers to LaLanne's age-defying physical prowess only need to spend a day in his company. He will throw himself down on the bench and huff and puff doing bench presses, just to show he's still got it. He's exhausting to be around, really. A 5-foot-4 dynamo who still wears his trademark clingy black jumpsuit around the house, LaLanne seems afraid to slow down, lest decrepitude catches up to him.

To be weak, to be frail is the worst thing LaLanne can imagine. He knows. He was that way as a child growing up in Berkeley, and it'll be over his dead body if he ever lets that happen to him again.

Catholicism wasn't structured enough for Jennie LaLanne. Not enough discipline for her liking. So she became a Seventh-day Adventist in an effort to keep the family together. Her husband, John, had died in 1928 at 50 of a heart attack. He was overweight, ate poorly, drank too much, didn't exercise, the usual story. Jennie was not going to let that happen to her youngest son, Jack.

He was a troubled boy, willful and unruly. His mother nicknamed him tete de mule -- "head like a mule." Twice he tried to kill his brother Norman -- once with an ax, the other time with a butcher knife. Norman, six years older than Jack, was already out of the house in Berkeley and away from harm's way when Jack turned 15 in 1929 and tried to kill himself. He failed, just as he failed at school and at sports and in his one attempt to burn the house down.

This scrawny kid was a mess, and, finally, his mother found the source of his problem. He was a substance abuser. That substance was sugar. Always ahead of his time, LaLanne was a bulimic before the medical term had even been coined.

"I'd eat a quart of ice cream in one sitting, shove my finger down my throat, heave it up and have another quart," LaLanne said. "There's nothing more addictive on this earth than sugar. Not heroin, booze, whatever. It's much worse than smoking. Boy, I tell you, I had blinding headaches every day. I was mentally screwed up by sugar. I was psychotic. I was malnourished. I was always getting sick. I got kicked out of school. I wanted to die."

But Jennie LaLanne, willful in her own right, would have none of that. She read in the newspaper about a lecture by health-food pioneer Paul C. Bragg at the Oakland City Women's Club, and she forcibly took Jack along. They got to the lecture hall late, and the only seats left were onstage near Bragg. The two-hour talk, LaLanne says, saved his life. But at the time, all he felt was abject humiliation. Bragg, who opened America's first health-food store in the 1920s, pointed to the peaked, underweight and pimply teenager on the stage and made an example of Jack. He looked at him dead in the eye and said, "It matters not what your age or condition is, if you obey nature's laws you can be born again."

That night, before bed, Jack prayed for the first time in God knows how long. He made a pact with his deity: If he could remake his body in Bragg's image, he would dedicate his life to helping others. In the subsequent weeks and months, he vowed never to eat sugar, white flour, red meat or any processed foods again. He joined the Berkeley YMCA and swam like a demon. Weight rooms didn't exist in those days, but LaLanne noticed two husky men at the club who would sneak into a back room.

"You're lifting weights, right? I want to go in there," he told them. "But they laughed at me. I bet them that if I could beat them in wrestling, they'd have to let me in. I beat them."

LaLanne started lifting, all right. In fact, every day he would sneak out a different free weight from the YMCA workout alcove, take it down to a foundry near Berkeley's waterfront and copy it. Eventually, LaLanne had enough weights to set up a backyard gymnasium. He spent all of his spare time in the backyard,

huffing and puffing and building his chest to a size 48, sculpting his waist to 28 inches and biceps bulging to 18 inches in diameter.

His fitness regimen and strict diet of raw vegetables, soy protein and fistfuls of vitamins turned LaLanne into a new man. He went back to Berkeley High School and became the captain of the football team and an all-league wrestler and baseball player. Still, he was considered something of a freak in high school.

"They thought I was crazy," he said. "I had to take my lunch alone to the football field to eat so no one would see me eat my raw veggies, whole bread, raisins and nuts. You don't know the crap I went through, boy."

After LaLanne started excelling in sports, he won converts. About 20 classmates asked him how they could sculpt their bodies, and they were invited to Jack's backyard gym. While in high school, the salesman in LaLanne surfaced.

At 19, just out of high school, he won a national World's Best Built Man contest, and he parlayed that notoriety into a cottage industry. He and his high school buddies started selling, door to door, health foods his mother cooked.

But LaLanne had bigger plans for his big body. He dropped out of UC Berkeley and, in between bodybuilding competitions, attended a chiropractic college. At 22, staked with prize money from competitions and income from being a personal trainer to police officers and firefighters, he opened what is believed to be the nation's first health club -- "Jack LaLanne's Physical Culture Studio" -- on the third floor of a building on 15th and Broadway.

He figured people would flock to his fitness haven. But LaLanne said Bay Area newspapers, except for The Chronicle's Herb Caen, treated him like a "crackpot who doesn't eat meat and wants everybody to rupture something lifting weights." Few people joined at first, but one who did, restaurateur Vic ("Trader Vic") Bergeron, gave LaLanne some advice one day while getting a massage from him: Wear a tight T-shirt and strut your stuff on high school campuses.

So LaLanne, physically fit but fiscally anemic, became an apostle on campus.

"I remember going to Oakland High and all the kids would yell, 'Hey, muscleman, flex for us.' They'd wave hamburgers and Cokes in my face because they read about my diet in the papers. Here's what I did, and it saved my butt,

boy. I'd go up to the skinniest kid at school, and the fattest one, sign them up by guaranteeing that I'd put three pounds of solid muscle on them and add three inches to their chest in 30 days or double their money back. I was their personal physical instructor. It was a cult, really. I got so many guys -- and women, too -- that I had to turn people down. Football players from Cal and Stanford would come to me. Clint Eastwood came to me when he was 16.

"Word got around. That Jack LaLanne -- he's not a wacko after all. People started buying me free drinks, and girls were giving me their phone numbers. I was runner-up Mr. America in the '40s. I felt like I was the King of Fitness, boy. It was perfect."

Every king must have a queen, right?
Jack found his in the most unlikely of places -- the KGO-TV studios in San Francisco.

It was 1950, and LaLanne had just broken a world record by doing 1,000 push- ups in 19 1/2 minutes on Art Baker's nationally televised show, "You Asked for It." Back home in the Bay Area, LaLanne was booked for the locally popular "Les Malloy Show." The gimmick was that Jack would do push-ups throughout the one-hour show.

On the set, LaLanne tried to hit on the show's talent booker and co-host, his future wife Elaine. She rebuffed him. In fact, she blew smoke in his face and ate a doughnut right in front of him for spite. Jack curtly told Elaine to eat oranges instead. Then he hit on the KGO secretary, Yvonne Martin, who agreed to a date.

"That got my attention," Elaine, 76, said. "I thought maybe he wasn't such a bad guy."

Jack's romance with Elaine soon expanded to marriage and a business partnership. Elaine and the folks at KGO prodded Jack into doing a daily fitness TV show in San Francisco. A year later, "The Jack LaLanne Show" went national, and the LaLannes moved to the Hollywood Hills.

A TV novice, LaLanne's initial reviews were not great. He heard those same old "crackpot" epithets, this time from newspapers back east: Women will look like men if they work out. That health food is bad for the body. On his very first show, Jack looked into the camera earnestly and said, "If man makes it, don't eat it." Then he took a loaf of Langendorf white bread, smashed it into a tight ball and flung it to the floor with a thud. "See," he said, "that's what it does in your stomach, too."

Langendorf, it turned out, was one of the show's sponsors.

"I learned real fast," he said, "never to mention brand names on TV."

Except, of course, for his own Jack LaLanne brand. LaLanne made millions off his eponymous health food line, which included an high-protein instant breakfast drink and national chain of health clubs. And, steadily, the TV show became a morning staple.

"What the hell did I know about television?" LaLanne said. "So I just made it seem like I was talking to each individual person. I figured, who controls the TV set at 8 in the morning? Kids! How am I going to get kids watching? Get a dog! So I had Happy (his dog) beside me and the chair and I'd turn to the TV and say, 'Boys and girls, come here. Get close to the TV. I want you to go wake up your mom and dad and come out to exercise. If you do, I'll have Happy here do a trick for you.' "

LaLanne fathered three children -- Danny, Yvonne and John Alan. As regimented and disciplined as he was about his own body, and those of his disciples, LaLanne says he never forced his kids to exercise and eat right.

"At home, we had good, healthy food," said Yvonne, 58, a chiropractor in Walnut Creek. "But if we wanted to, we could eat junk food on the sly. We'd go to Hattie's cupboard. Hattie (Montez) was our housekeeper, and my dad taught her really well how to cook healthy food with soy and tofu. But she also kept a cupboard of cookies and cakes. Dad was surprisingly tolerant of our bad habits."

Jack knew all about Hattie's cupboard.

"Let kids live their own lives," he said. "You can set an example and hope for the best. If I had put more pressure on them, they would've gone more the other way. All kids are that way. Remember, I was that way, boy."

Tete de mule, indeed.
When LaLanne gets an idea in his head, he will not be dissuaded. Titanium rods have more flexibility than he does. Every day, for 73 years, he has awakened at 5 a.m. for his workout. It's not that he enjoys it -- "I enjoy the results, not the work; it's an ego thing" -- it's just something he must do.

His diet and exercise regimen "saved my life," so he won't deviate from it. Ever. Breakfast for LaLanne consists of blended soy milk and a protein powder shake, multigrain organic cereal with soy milk, 50 vitamins and supplements. Lunch is four boiled eggs with the yolks removed, five servings of fresh fruit and five raw vegetables. Dinner is always at a restaurant in Morro Bay or neighboring San Luis Obispo.

"I've got all the restaurants trained to cook special for me," he said. "Brown rice, fresh vegetables. Fish is the only meat I'll eat."

Yvonne LaLanne chuckles at her father's regimentation.

"Sometimes, people will come up to me and say, 'You're Jack LaLanne's daughter. He's too perfect,' " she said. "But he's not perfect and he admits that. He can be stubborn. He's compulsive. But he also sticks to his principles he lives by. I don't think I've ever seen him take a sip of coffee or a bite of processed food. That's just the way he is."

Nowhere is LaLanne's stubborn streak more evident than in his publicity stunts to prove that people can maintain fitness as they age. At 40, he swam the 6 1/2-mile Golden Gate channel towing a 2,000-pound cabin cruiser. At 60, he swam from Alcatraz to Fisherman's Wharf while handcuffed and towing a 1,000- pound boat. At 70, he swam 1 1/2 miles of Long Beach harbor with 70 boats carrying 70 people strapped on his back.

Why? Because he could. Also because he likes a challenge and wants to impart his philosophy of healthful living.

Now, at 88, LaLanne is having something of a midlife crisis. (Remember, he says he'll live to 150). For his 90th birthday, he wants to swim underwater from Catalina to Los Angeles, which is 26 miles.

"I figure I'll have to change oxygen tanks every hour and it would take me 22 hours to do it," LaLanne said. "Elaine says if I do it, she'll divorce me. I said, 'You promise?' "

Jack cackles. Elaine rolls her eyes.

"It's true," she said. "I'll leave him. Because those stunts are stupid. Enough is enough. Let him rest on his laurels."

Rest? Jack LaLanne? Never.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JACK

Jack LaLanne, 88, has some strong opinions on fitness and nutrition:

-- On the evils of sugar and junk food: "It destroys the B vitamins. It destroys your mind, affects your memory, your concentration. Why do you think so many of these kids today are screwed up? It's what they're eating. You know how much sugar Americans consume today in white flour, cakes, pies, candy and ice cream? Would you get your dog up in the morning and give him a cigarette, cup of coffee and a doughnut? How many millions of Americans got up this morning with a breakfast like that? And you wonder why people are sick and obese."

-- On get-fit-fast schemes: "There are so many rackets out there it makes me sick -- Ab-busters, Butts of Steel. This gal on the TV with Thighmaster, saying do it for three minutes, you'll get a beautiful figure. It's a lie. It's a big lie. Throw them in jail. It's about time somebody tells people the truth. These people just come along for a buck and tell fat people, just use this gizmo for three minutes a day. They use it for two weeks, get fatter and get discouraged. It casts a bad shadow on my profession. You have 640 muscles. They all need their share of work. Strength, flexibility, cardiovascular, the whole bit."

-- On whether people should consume dairy products: "Are you a suckling calf? No. Do you have two stomachs? No. Name me one creature on this earth, except for man, who uses milk after they wean. Why do you think so many people are fat and have heart attacks? Cholesterol! Butter, cream, cheese, ice cream, whole milk. They got these athletes prostituting their souls by posing with milk mustaches. Those guys ought to be thrown in jail."

-- On steroid use to enhance the physique: "Steroids came along right as I stopped competing in bodybuilding. I wouldn't even take an aspirin. Steroids. That's cheating. But these kids today, it's all money, money, money. Everybody wants the quick fix. I wish there were one, but there isn't."

-- On aerobics: "Ack! All that dancing and pounding. I guess it's better than nothing."

-- On celebrity: "I hated it. I was just doing my job. Celebrities give me a pain in the butt. Some of the biggest bums in this world are Hollywood people. They're drunkards, do dope, don't exercise."

-- On his legacy: "The older I get, the more believable it is that the Jack LaLanne system of diet and fitness works. I've outlived the age of maturity."

Raising the bar / At 88, fitness guru Jack LaLanne can run circles around those half his age

Anti-cancer diets basically corroborate that:

THE ANTI-CANCER DIET

It ain't rocket science.

;-)

Ah, the soya recommendation and the Japanese link. I knew it'd be there. Eating too much soya can result in cancer; Japanese people do not eat that much soya. It is purely a marketing campaign on behalf of soya companies. The reason why there is less incidence of cancer in Japanese people is because they eat more fish and eat less meat, not because they eat more soya and less meat.

In the words of net speak: article fail.

As for that Jack fella, good on him. I expect to be as fit as him when I am well into my 90s thanks to my current lifestyle. And I will wear a t-shirt which reads, "I ****ed your gran."

shadowninja said:

Actually, to a large extent ('scuse the pun), you're right. It is eat less, move more. I've studied various diets as I'm very interested in healthy eating and sports nutrition. There are some little tricks but mostly, in the long run, it is about input < output.

Click to expand...

I suggest you (and everyone with an interest in the subject) read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes (published as "The Diet Delusion" in the UK).

You may be surprised. See also Barry Groves.

shadowninja said:

Ah, the soya recommendation and the Japanese link. I knew it'd be there. Eating too much soya can result in cancer; Japanese people do not eat that much soya. It is purely a marketing campaign on behalf of soya companies. The reason why there is less incidence of cancer in Japanese people is because they eat more fish and eat less meat, not because they eat more soya and less meat.

In the words of net speak: article fail.

As for that Jack fella, good on him. I expect to be as fit as him when I am well into my 90s thanks to my current lifestyle. And I will wear a t-shirt which reads, "I ****ed your gran."

Click to expand...

There are lots of problems with Soya ... read Barry Groves, as mentioned in previous post. It's the unfermented variety that is the problem. The traditional way of eating it in the East was always in its fermented form, which should be unproblematic.

On death rates among Japanese, I would again refer you to Gary Taubes' book.

FWIW, I do not believe meat is any less healthy than fish, despite what we are often told.

Indeed that is right. What I am saying is the marketing companies have made people believe soya is the be all and end all.

Just reading reviews of that book. How do we know it's not just made up? On the one hand, we have someone saying everything scientists know to be true is wrong; on the other hand, scientists who are responsible for helping us to avoid an early grave say he's wrong.

Tell you what, though, when I eat less and exercise more, over time, I lose weight.

addition and subtraction

shadowninja said:

Just reading reviews of that book. How do we know it's not just made up? On the one hand, we have someone saying everything scientists know to be true is wrong; on the other hand, scientists who are responsible for helping us to avoid an early grave say he's wrong.

Tell you what, though, when I eat less and exercise more, over time, I lose weight.

Click to expand...

Good old mathematics

Yep. There are sooooo many theories on the best diet. It comes down to basic maths. If you starve in a famine, you won't be putting on weight.

live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse

Only if you eat lots of preservatives...