If you are like most people, you focus on your weaknesses. One of the best ways to learn to focus on your strengths is to challenge yourself. Only through challenge are people forced to use those strengths that they may forget about from time to time. If you train for a marathon, for example, and push yourself to go out in bad weather as well as good because you know you have to run each and every day if you’re going to be able to do twenty-six miles, you are not only enhancing your physical strength but honing your mental discipline and endurance. By challenging yourself in this way, you are building strengths you didn’t know you had.
The next time someone asks you what your strengths are, rather than drawing a blank, call to mind your response to your most recent challenge. Don’t be shy about your accomplishments—be proud of them, embrace them as a part of who you are, and incorporate them into your everyday life.
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If your husband has no interest in sports, if you can’t get him onto that stationary bike, if all your nagging, pleading, social scheduling, and clever ideas have not gotten him out of his arm chair in front of the television set, I have one last ace up my sleeve. Walking.
Most men do not consider walking a sport, so you can trick them into it. To develop and maintain a healthy body, the average person (man or woman) should walk a brisk 3V2 miles per hour. This is not browsing-around-the-mall pace, nor is it running the four-minute mile. You need to walk for at least half an hour; forty or fifty minutes is better. You will burn calories if you walk at a brisk pace (slower doesn’t count), and you will give your heart and lungs the aerobic exercise they need. Furthermore, it’s a good partner sport for a husband and wife (or the whole family) and gives you some time together. Even if you can’t talk while you’re walking that fast (you can, but it hurts), you can be together, commune with nature, and hold hands.
Some other ways to get a little walking in:
Park the car far from the market or the shopping center and walk to the stores. Yes, he’ll make a rude comment to you, but he’ll walk.
Go for an after-dinner stroll, be it around your neighborhood, around the high school track, or at a shopping mall. This need not be at 3V2 mph; slower will aid digestion and give you some peaceful time together. Remember, this is no longer an aerobic sport, but it’s nice nonetheless.
Encourage him to use the stairs rather than the elevator in his office building. When you go places together, challenge him to take the stairs.
Don’t push walking as a sport or health-enhancing maneuver. Merely put on your sensible shoes; then go out and do it. Set up errands that can be walked rather than driven to. Take the time to force yourself—and him with you—to walk a mile or two, hopefully at a nice brisk pace. A brisk walk will keep you from spending and help trim the hips. Be sure to breathe properly if you are planning on talking and walking, otherwise you’ll find yourself out of breath quickly or slowing your pace to a crawl. Without getting into race-walking, a popular new sport, use your feet to get you someplace. One mile of brisk walking five or six nights a week (preferably after dinner) will improve both your marriage and your life span.
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Any pressure (intrusion), even in a loving relationship, creates feelings of resentment. These do not necessarily affect the relationship significantly. Irritation, annoyance, and other resentments are inevitable. However, they are increasingly apt to become toxic when one person’s pattern of relating has a continually annoying effect on the other.
HUSBAND: Hurry up, honey—we’ll be late for dinner at Mother’s.
WIFE: I’m doing the best I can. The children are still dressing.
HUSBAND: Well, hurry them up. WIFE: They are hurrying. Janet just got home from her piano lesson.
H: Can’t she have her lesson earlier?
W: (Getting annoyed) She’s in school earlier—remember? Your daughter does go to school, you know I
H: Mother gets upset when we’re late. W: Your nagging every time we go to your mother’s spoils the whole evening for me. If she won’t set the time later, she’ll just have to wait. H: Okay, I agree. Let me know if there is anything
I can do to help the kids get ready. In this example, the husband becomes aware that he is relating to his wife in a toxic manner. He is pushing her on the basis of his own anxiety and ignoring the effect on her of his need to hurry. Toward the end of the dialogue, he becomes aware of her feelings and his attitude is less toxic and more nourishing.
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Irrespective of the arguments presented above, there are limitations to the prescription of intensive exercise for overfat people, which make high intensity exercise prescription for fat loss both impractical and irresponsible. Because of the inverse association between body fat and cardiovascular fitness, high intensity activity in people with low cardiovascular efficiency may be potentially dangerous, even fatal. Strenuous exercise is uncomfortable and it may result in overfat people becoming totally disenchanted with physical activity as a fat loss technique. It may also help explain the failure of the fitness industry to attract significant numbers of the almost 1 in 2 people requiring weight control services in Western countries.
A further argument given for high intensity activity is that, given a set period of available time, more vigorous activity provides more ‘bang for the buck’ in terms of body fat utilisation. If the time is extensive enough to allow for adequate fat utilisation, however, a fat unfit person is unlikely to be able to complete an exercise session at a high (e.g. 70-80 per cent V02) level of intensity. Even if it were possible, it is a diminishing effectiveness of response in relation to fat utilisation with longer duration which would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Because exercise at such a high intensity may also be uncomfortable for such a person, he or she is not likely to want to do it on a regular basis, as is necessary for optimal fat loss.
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The prevalence of overfatness in the modem world is related to Westernisation. With industrialisation comes ease of accessibility to foods, especially processed and fatty foods. Some industrialised countries have a higher level of overall fatness than others, with Eastern Europeans currently topping the charts. The United States is at the top of the fatness tree amongst Western nations, but Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom are not far behind.
Fatness is even more prevalent in certain ethnic groups such as Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders and American Indians. It has been suggested that these people may have a genetic makeup (‘thrifty genotype’) which enables them to store more fat during times of ‘feast’ and/or use less energy during times of famine’. It is proposed that the harsh conditions and inconsistent food supply would have preferentially selected those people with the ‘thrifty genotype’ by giving them a survival advantage. To date, no genes have been found which endower a major propensity for fat storage and it seems unlikely that the genetic predisposition to obesity will be pinpointed to one or a few genes. Nor have any genetic markers for obesity been found in ethnic groups with high rates of obesity.
What is well known is that ethnic groups like the Aboriginal people suffer from a high rate of obesity-related diseases such as adult onset diabetes. In Nauru, for example, where super phosphate has made the population rich and the island poor, Professor Paul Zimmett of the WHO has estimated that around 20-30 per cent of the adult population have diabetes. The Pima Indians of Arizona, who have been acculturated to the modem American diet, have extreme levels of obesity and the highest rate of diabetes in the world at 50 per cent of the adult population (compared to around 3 per cent in the White community).
This picture of an obese Western world might suggest that people are indifferent to their growing corpulence. Yet the figures show otherwise. Surveys carried out in the US suggest that at least 25 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women are trying to lose weight at any one time. Over the course of a year, the number of people who attempt to lose weight at least once rises to around 40 per cent for men and 80 per cent for women. The average man wants to lose 22kg to weigh 80kg and the average woman 22.5kg to weigh 60kg. Only 27 per cent of those who see themselves as overweight admit to not currently trying to slim. Perhaps as expected, the majority are using diet as the main method—76 per cent of men and 85 per cent of women. Around 60 per cent of both men and women use increased physical activity as a means of reducing weight.
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