Saturday Morning Work-Out Inspiration: Our Killer

~ Live & Learn

exercise, fitness, diet,fit

I share exercise inspirations on Saturday mornings to get me off the couch and out the door. This share by Steve Layman may be the most powerful story and research that I’ve read on this topic.  A few excerpts…

The story starts with a Phil Bruno “super-sizing again…He was only a mile from his house, where his wife, Susan, was cooking the usual big Italian dinner for their family of five, but he was hungry now. The urge was automatic…Ten minutes later, with a bag of burgers steaming on the seat beside him, he pulled into a McDonald’s and ordered a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, an apple pie, and a chocolate shake to wash it all down…Phil had always loved food, which was part of the fabric of his tight-knit Sicilian-American family: Grandma and her lasagna were right down the street. But he’d been athletic in his youth, playing high school football and carrying a robust but reasonable 215 pounds on a six-foot-three-inch frame. Then, in his mid-twenties, he’d stopped working out, as many of us do when life starts to chew up our time. Over the years, his regular meals and high-calorie bingeing had turned him into a physical and emotional wreck. His joints ached whenever he used the stairs, his heart hammered, and he was possessed by a strange, burning thirst that no amount of ice water could quench. “I was 47 years old,” he says, “but I felt like I was 80.”

Prodded by a friend, Bruno finally went to see his long-time family physician, Don Livingston, in early 2004. The results were harrowing: his blood pressure was at a firehose-like 230 over 150, his blood sugar was off the charts, and his A1C—an important blood marker for diabetes—was 16. (It should have been under six.)…And he never forgot Dr. Livingston’s ominous words at the end of the visit. “Bruno,” he had said, “you should be dropping dead any second.”

To read the rest of the article, here is Steve Layman’s link to Outside Magazine’s: “Your Fat Has a Brain. Seriously. And It’s Trying to Kill You“.  It is a “longish” article but you’ll find this one will stick in your consciousness.  It hasn’t left mine since I read it a week ago.

Source: Thank you Steve Layman – This Can’t Be Good News.  Image Source: Next Best Runner.  (And the photo has nothing to do with the story.  I just liked it, it inspired me and so up it goes.)

22 thoughts on “Saturday Morning Work-Out Inspiration: Our Killer”

  1. Very interesting article, and an incredibly powerful example of what one can do if he sts his mind to it. It bothered me, though, that the article left ya hanging about what had happened with his legs and the problems…. I’ve seen a couple of very large folks at my gym make amazing transformations over a series of months. Hard work, but life changing in so many ways….

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  2. I am going to hope for the happy ending, the alarms so loud that they continue to echo long after they’re sounded. This is such a dramatic example of food as comfort, substitute, addiction in some ways..needing to the point of such over-indulgence that one can in fact die of longing that is never sated.

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      1. Laughing – you will. And you’ll run through your neighborhood and past the water and see fascinating things and think even more fascinating thoughts and share them with all of us before you indulge in a well-deserved nap.

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  6. I’ve reminded my children many times that this body that we live in…it’s the only body we get to live in for our entire life, and it should be treated with utmost care. It really is about making lifelong changes that will take us through all the years of our life in the best way possible. It’s not worth it to beat up our bodies and then live with the consequences at some point. Thanks for sharing this story, David. 🙂

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  10. Very interesting & eye opening. I would take his extra 50 pounds (good fat) in heart beat.
    On a side note read the other day that there is a reason why Girl Scouts start selling in February and sell so many cookies cause people’s diet plans have ended already for the year.

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