Well, I'm not exactly that kid from The Sixth Sense, but I'm constantly amazed to see the vast numbers of unhealthy looking people who belong to my age group. If you go to Facebook and look at the pictures of people from your high school it's not unusual to see people 50, 60 pounds heavier than they were back in the day. Funny thing, they're not a foot taller, and as a rule they haven't become professional weight lifters, body builders or football players (or Sumo wrestlers). From the pictures you can tell that they are just dragging around what amounts to a third grader, packed around their middles, every step they take and everywhere they go.
About twelve years ago I was playing in a local tennis tournament and one of these barrel shaped guys was in the draw. Fifteen minutes into the tourney I heard the sharp crack of a tennis racquet hitting the ground and turned quickly enough to see him falling backwards, stiff legged like a tree being logged, and he hit the ground with full force on the back of his skull--a second hard crack that was the figurative second shoe to fall. He was dead of a heart attack
There is no animal on the planet who lives in such physical unhealth as homo sapiens sapiens. If a deer or elk were to get even 3 or 4 percent over optimum body fat (I'm not talking about fattening up to make it through the winter--I'm talking about mid summer watching TV reruns fat) it soon is no longer a forest ruminant, it becomes a cougar meal.
So, I have one good rule for people to adopt: you should look at your weight when you were a senior in high school, and if you were a normal weight, then THAT should be your target weight for life, plus or minus ten pounds. AND, you should generally look to the minus side since if you're like me, you're no longer carrying the nice looking youthful muscles of the late teen years.
How do you do this? Well, first, take back your mindshare from the food manufacturers and grocery stores. What they're selling, especially in the shelves dominated by big name processors and soft drink manufacturers, isn't really food, in the sense of being fuel. It's taste entertainment and, over time, toxic to a healthy manimalistic life. Shop and eat from the periphery of the grocery store: vegetables, fruits, dairy, meat.
Second, and I'll post more about this later, it is crucial to find an authentic and robust activity at which you wish to excel, and then pursue the kind of training that will get you there--to that level of fitness. Authentic means that it is something that YOU identify strongly with (and not just something that might be "good" for you, or that will impress other people). For an activity to be robust it must, well, be robust. There's nothing wrong with reading a book or going to a concert, or watching TV or surfing the net. But they are not robust activities. I guess for an activity to be robust it pretty much has to get your heart rate up to an elevated level and have you working out at at least an aerobic level.
This is what a manimal does, he looks to exist as a physical and mental creature at the same time. If it's volleyball, then it's volleyball; if it's tennis then it's tennis. Both should require cardio training (bicycling, running) and resistance training, as well as skill training. You don't have to run an ultramarathon, in fact, if you do so and it's not authentic to you, then no matter how robust it is (and it's pretty robust), then it's not manimalistic. It is almost worthless to have as a goal a waist size or a dress size--not only worthless but shallow and vain as well. You are a human being, you have the responsibility of achieving a goal, and as a manimal you have the obligation to become fit. Fit for a purpose.
What's more, choosing an active goal to pursue liberates you from the vanity of asking how one looks. A few years ago I decided that I would train myself so I could accomplish an Olympic triathlon, swim 1500 meters, bike 24 miles, run 6 miles in that sequence. It was tremendously liberating. No longer did I have to discipline myself to get to the gym twice a week, wonder whether or not I was doing the right workout. Everything actually fell into place. I did more biking, more running and more swimming and less of everything else. Everything I did engaged my cardiovascular system in a good way, and all three activities have elements of resistance training, particularly since I like to bike and run in fairly rugged hills. An added bonus is that I really didn't need to do much on the diet/calorie side--that more or less took care of itself.
But my goal was not to become a world class age group triathlete (no doubt beyond my swimming skills, and perhaps all my skills, and to me not much of a goal)--it was to be able to take a few hours on a Saturday morning and, starting at the pool, traverse 31 miles.
One added benefit to doing triathlon training is, working on 3 or 4 hour "events" I now think of a workout that lasts 3 or 4 hours (trail running 15 to 20 miles, or doing a bike-run combination, or doing a bike-swim-run-tennis-bike combination) as being anything other than normal, par for at least one weekend day.
