Best wishes to you and your family for a Happy and Healthy Thanksgiving!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your support of Fitness Together this past year. As you are well aware, this was one of the most difficult years for the U.S. economy, and in particular for small businesses. While our numbers are down a bit from last year, we have been able to survive thanks to your commitment to your health and fitness.

We are starting to see a fairly strong increase in the number of phone calls, emails, walk-ins, and free consultations which has resulted in several new clients in the past few weeks. This is certainly an encouraging sign and enables us to look towards 2010 with a great deal of excitement and confidence.

I also want to thank our managers and trainers – Chris, Sam, Julie, Dan, Iszel, Mike, and Kera. You are the key to our success and I couldn’t ask for a more dedicated, caring, and knowledgeable group of fitness professionals. I appreciate all that you do for your clients and FT!

Finally, thanks to all of you who have taken the time to complete our survey. The results have been quite positive, and have offered many useful suggestions for improvements.

To your health and happiness…
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Videos of the week: A collection of peaceful images set to the song “Thanksgiving”, by George Winston, my favorite pianist. And I can’t resist linking to my favorite George Winston song, his version of Canon in D.

The statistics are certainly discouraging, particularly if you are male, but there is also a message of hope in the research.

In a story in this week’s Wall Street Journal, researchers found that men at age 40 in the U.S. have a one-in-eight chance of suffering sudden cardiac death over the rest of their lives, a stark indication of the toll cardiovascular disease exacts on society. For women, researchers said, the risk is 1 in 24.

“Sudden cardiac death is one of the most devastating manifestations” of coronary heart disease, said Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, a cardiologist at Northwestern University, Chicago, who led the effort to calculate the estimates. It is particularly problematic because “it strikes without warning” and can happen to young people as well as old, he said.

The condition may get less attention because of a belief that little can be done to prevent it, according to Muriel Jessup, a cardiologist at University of Pennsylvania. But she and other scientists said steps can be taken to prevent the problem.

Dr. Lloyd-Jones noted that causes for sudden cardiac death, as in the case of heart attack, are largely preventable and include eating healthfully, quitting smoking, and getting exercise as well as taking medicines when necessary to reduce blood pressure and cholesterol levels that are important risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

I urge you to share this message with your friends and loved ones and to encourage them, if they are not already doing so, to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Such a lifestyle can not only reduce the odds of sudden cardiac death or developing certain cancers, but also provide a wide variety of benefits such as having more energy, greater mental acuity, and a more positive outlook on life.

To your health and happiness,
___________________________

Video of the week: In honor of his recently being selected CEO of the decade by Fortune magazine, here is the video of Steve Job’s famous graduation speech at Stanford University.

I know that sometimes, some of my readers (really, it’s not all of you, all of the time…) get tired of hearing me talk about how exercise is the most powerful medicine available to us, sort of like taking a magic pill or a drink from the fountain of youth. So it’s nice when some prominent physicians and recent research comes out in support of this view as well.

Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease for Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association, states it quite clearly, “You have to exercise. It’s now becoming established fact, and if you don’t incorporate it, you’re going to see the effects. You will get sicker sooner.”

And if listening to me and Dr. Steinbaum isn’t enough, how about the results of a recent study that were published in the Oct. 26 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine? The study group included 3,429 women and 16,889 men aged 20 to 96 who had undergone two to 33 health exams with lifestyle counseling between 1974 and 2006.

While previous research had indicated that cardiorespiratory fitness declines with age, it was thought to be a steady decrease. However, this most recent study indicates that after age 45 this decline actually speeds up, accelerating even further with increases in BMI (body-mass index), smoking, and lower levels of activity.

Study author Andrew Jackson, professor emeritus of health and human performance at the University of Houston, feels the results make sense. “When things aren’t working right, we tend to go down at faster rates. This was true for both men and women [although the rate of decline was faster for men than for women].”

But people can slow the inevitable by staying lean, exercising and refraining from smoking. “If you were overweight, inactive and smoked, your aerobic capacity would be lower at a given age as compared to other people who were healthy weight, active and nonsmokers,” Jackson said. “The data showed that if people had that advantage when they were in their 30s and 40s and maintained that lifestyle, their aerobic capacity as they aged was, in fact, higher.”

“It could delay the age when these health problems start to spring up,” he continued. “If people are very overweight, inactive and smoke, they might see … health problems in their 50s and 60s, whereas people who maintain a healthy lifestyle, it’s going to be more like their 70s, 80s and possibly even their 90s.”

In other words, taking care of yourself could make you, in a sense, younger than your years, or stated another way, 90 could be the new 50.

To your health and happiness…

Videos of the week: Video 1 – Here’s a 2-minute video that summarizes a Stanford University School of Medicine study on the benefits of exercise for older people. Not surprisingly, the results are consistent with the study discussed above. Video 2 – “Here’s to the crazy ones… Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” If you can’t recall what company made those lines famous, perhaps watching the commercial will help. It’s one of my all time favorites; in fact I just showed it to my students this week as part of a discussion on groupthink.