Walking A Complete Guide to the Complete Exercise

ONE Do You Have a Healthy Lifestyle? You may be wondering why a walking book is starting out talking about "lifestyle" instead of walking. As a 79-year-old with years of hindsight to draw from, I am certain that this chapter on lifestyle is the most important chapter in the book. If I can't thoroughly convince you that you don't have any other viable option than to start exercising consistently to preserve your health, maintain your quality of life, and (I hope) increase your longevity, then I have failed, and you have wasted your money on this book. Please read this chapter carefully. The large conference room at Missouri Western State University was packed for an April 2005 breakfast meeting, provocatively titled "Our Lifestyles Are Killing Us." The speaker, Lowell Kruse, CEO of Heartland Regional Medical Center, delivered a slide presentation that included a number of charts, graphs, and grim statistics about the current status of our population's health at the regional, state, and national levels. It wasn't a pretty picture. The three leading causes of death in the United States continue to be heart disease, cancer, and stroke, in that order. A chart compiled by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Heartland Regional Medical Center, titled "1990 & 2004 Leading Actual Causes of Death in the U.S. Human Behaviors," caught my eye (Figure 1.1). Tobacco use is still the number one cause of preventable death related to lifestyle, but, fortunately, the number of deaths has not increased from 1990 to 2004. Even so, cigarette smoking still accounts for about 400,000 needless deaths annually. The alarming category in second place was "Poor Diet/Inactivity/ Obesity." It shows a significant increase from 1990 to 2004 and is only about 2 percent behind tobacco. If its rate of acceleration in the last ten years continues, it will surpass tobacco before this decade is out as the primary cause of preventable death in the United States. As a nation, we are literally sitting and eating ourselves to death. Our self-indulgence and inactive lifestyle are a deadly duo (Figure 1.2). Our daily lives are dominated by numerous reasons not to exercise. For baby boomers and all those born later, especially children born in the last ten years, what constitutes "normal" daily physical activity is vastly different from those of us born much earlier. I was a child in the thirties and a teenager in the forties, during World War II. In the thirties, obese people were uncommon in the general population, especially young obese people. Old films of World War II draftees in the early forties reveal lean groups of men. I was drafted in 1946, and there wasn't one fat soldier in my basic training company. It is quite the opposite today and has been so for several decadesespecially the last twenty years. Let's look at some of today's reasons our daily energy expenditure has been greatly reduced. In the early 1900s the marriage between the wheel and the internal combustion engine brought us the automobile. Amid cries of "It will never replace the horse," the automobile has become a dominant force in the American lifestyle. It has spawned drive-through banks, dry cleaners, pharmacies, and of course fast- food restaurants, just to name a few. We even have a drive-through Starbucks in my town. Other human energy savers include elevators, escalators, automatic washers and dryers, riding mowers, golf carts, power tools, automated assembly lines, moving walkways in airports, garage door openers, TV remote controls, and thermostats. With a furnace or stove, we used to carry in the coal and carry out the ashes, and in between we had to get up several times to stoke the fire. With today's heating andMeyers, Casey is the author of 'Walking A Complete Guide to the Complete Exercise', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345491046 and ISBN 0345491041.