Kevin: Good evening, everyone. So Craig, you’ve been in the fitness industry for over 26 years and with that, I imagine comes a bit of wisdom. Why don’t you start with your story and how you’ve gotten to where you are now?Craig: Sure Kevin. Well, first of all, I started out in the fitness industry as a personal trainer making $3.50 an hour.Kevin: Wow.Craig: So I’ve been in it for awhile and I grew through the ranks in the fitness industry to the executive level. I was the president of two of the largest fitness organizations in the United States. I was the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the largest chain of fitness clubs in the world operating in 11 countries. I also successfully owned and operated my own fitness company. I’ve visited 30 countries and evaluated health and fitness trends all over Russia, Asia, Europe. I’ve been to dozens of fitness conventions, purchased millions of dollars worth of equipment, supplements and other health and fitness related products and I’ve also had the ability to train thousands of health and fitness professionals around the world and help them to help other people improve their lives. So this really kind of led me to where I am today, which is to where I just got to the point where I want to do something more and that’s why I wrote my book The Big Fat Healthy Fitness Lie and founded the Fit Advocate website so that I could create a platform to protect and enhance the lives and health and fitness consumers.Kevin: Now you just mentioned your book, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie which I absolutely love. What is the big fat fitness lie. Let’s just lay it on the table.Craig: Why mince words? Let’s dig right in. The lie is that there are these billion dollar industries out there getting richer while we get sicker and fatter and with all the so-called solutions available for losing weight and improving our health, we are literally in the worse shape in the history of modern civilization. There’s big profit in sickness and in fatness, and a lot of times people question that and they think, “Oh, well we live in the United States, we’re in great health and we have the best health care system” which is a complete fallacy. Here’s an interesting fact that people should be aware of, we’re approaching some 300 million people in the U.S. and we have every year 200 million diseases that are diagnosed for conditions that could be prevented with simple lifestyle changes.Kevin: Wow.Craig: And we spend in the United States, 270 billion dollars on 3.7 billion prescriptions written to, not to cure anything because there’s really very few cures in modern medicine, medicine is meant mostly to mask our symptoms. So taking into our bodies a lot of toxic chemicals and you know there’s so much confusion out there and misinformation about health and fitness. So there’s a huge opportunity, unfortunately, for people to make big money on the lack of knowledge that people have about how to lose weight, improve their health, get in shape and live better. So millions of people are out there paying thousands of dollars that have no chance of helping them achieve their goal and that’s really the big fat lie.Kevin: And let me just ask you this, you’ve been on the other side, you’ve been a part of the industry that is making a lot of money in the fitness clubs and the organizations and everything. When did you suddenly say, “Hey, you know, maybe I need to educate people about this.”Craig: Well, first of all I never felt that the club industry was a bad industry.Kevin: Okay.Craig: And in my book I still am a big proponent of joining a fitness center for the average person, there are, of course, some caveat of how to get a quality club. I have an article on the ten worst tricks for the fitness industry. So I try to expose the things that I think are bad but there’s also a lot of good too, but what I did notice while I was operating all of these clubs and trying to help people is that I would talk to thousands of consumers, face to face. For a big part of my career, my job was to get out there and help, work with people in the field, club operators, managers, sales people, fitness staff members, personal trainers, to talk to them about how to help people make decisions that are good for them and the guiding principle, of course was always don’t focus on making money, focus on helping people and you will make money as a natural result, as a natural bi-produce of helping people. That’s always been one of my guiding principles, but in speaking with all these consumers, you find that the average person spends thousands and thousands of dollars on products and services that have no chance of helping them. They spend hours and hours of wasted time on information that will never help them improve their health or change their lives. So I got tired, frustrated and really kind of outraged at all of the quick fix solutions that are out there that people jump from one to the other and without really understanding the true cause of why they’re in such poor health. So I wanted to try to educate them on all of the things, the lies the deceptions while also trying to give them simple solutions for how to improve their health, how to lose weight, how to get in shape, how to live better, how to feel better with no tricks and no gimmicks for the rest of their lives. That’s really what the big fat health and fitness lie is all about and that’s really what the Fit Advocate website is all about.Kevin: And you take a different approach in your book as opposed to a lot of the other books that I’ve read about health and fitness and it’s related to addiction. You say addiction feeds this whole lie. What do you mean by this?Craig: Well, many people live a self-inflicted toxic lifestyle that destroys their health and feeds this lie. So what do I mean by that? Well, the definition of toxic, first of all, is poison and in our society we are surrounded by poisons, in our air, it’s in our water, some of them we can’t avoid and many of them we can, however. A lot of these poisons, they’re not going to kill us today, but instead what they do is they slowly and quietly deteriorate and destroy our health.There’s two specific types of poisons or toxins that I talk about that create these health problems. The first, of course is chemical exposures. There are thousands of untested chemical combinations in our food supply to improve taste, texture, color or to extend shelf life. There are low calorie, low carb foods laced with toxic sweeteners that has contributed to obesity and diabetes. We’ve been conditioned to believe that sodium fluoride, for example is good for our teeth. Yet it’s a known chemical waste bi-product of the aluminum and phosphate fertilizer industry. This chemical has been pumped into our water supply and put into our dental hygiene products for years but fluoridation has been flatly rejected by many developed countries because of the dangers and the lack of really any scientific evidence of any health benefit. Beyond that, we have toxic chemicals in our household products, our cleaning products, personal hygiene products. Fruits and vegetables have been treated with herbicides and pesticides. Chickens and cows are fed ground chicken and beef. Then pumped full of antibiotics to stave off disease from the horrific conditions in which they live and where they’re slaughtered. So we have all of those, you know, all of this chemical toxicity. That’s the first concern.The second is the biggest toxic exposure which is related to stress, and people don’t realize this but as much as 80% of all disease is the result of stress and having had the ability to travel all over the world and visit, you know, I believe I’ve been to over 40 countries now, you find that we in America are the most stressed out country on the planet. We work more than any other activity other than sleep. Just think about our normal lives, we wake up every day and we’re running on empty from morning to night. We’ve got the pressures at work, at home, the challenges sustaining some sort of happy relationship with our significant others. We’ve got the demands of the kids, trying to pay the bills. We have all of the negativity in the news. We’re all trying to live the American dream which is predicated on financial freedom, but the truth is only a fraction of people out there actually ever realize the American dream and the rest of us are simply trying to get by, and, you know, we’re buried in a mountain of debt. All of these things add up to a lot of worry and stress and to cope with this stress, what do we do? We drink, we smoke, we take drugs, we over eat, we eat the wrong foods and we spend hours in front of the television or surfing the internet. All of these activities, unfortunately make us fat, lazy and out of shape, and what happens is this poor health that’s created from this self addictive lifestyle creates, and opens the door for these big fat health and fitness lies. One of them is companies that market, manufacture and market and sale products that have no chance of helping us and then, of course, the worse thing is when we look to synthetic chemical compounds, prescription drugs, as the first line of defense to handle our self inflicted health problems. So we really have a lot of issues that we have to deal with in order to be healthy, but people need to understand the basis of where it starts, the cause.Kevin: Yes. How does someone take that sort of addiction or quote unquote addictive personality and turn that into fitness success?Craig: Well the first thing they have to do is identify it.Kevin: Yes.Craig: You have to realize it. Here’s, here’s a fact that’s pretty important that people should know about, the number one reason that people give for not exercising regularly is that they don’t have enough time, okay. Yet the average American watches four and a half hours of television a day. So there’s an issue there with priority and people have to understand that time is the most important and the most valuable thing that we have because once it’s gone you can’t get it back. If you want to improve your health, you have to make time to do all of the things that are necessary to improve and enhance your health and your life and it’s not just exercise but it is one of the key components. So they have to first understand the issues and then have the right motivation and set the right priorities to get them to where they need to be.
Health Insurance is Not Health Assurance
It is unfortunate that we have come to such a time as this. As of July 1, 2007, Massachusetts is the first and only state to require, by force of law, health insurance of every resident. Not only is it legally mandated but penalties will be visited upon the pockets of those who fail to comply with the law. It is likely that Massachusetts is the state that is piloting this new health care approach and that it will ultimately be coming soon to a medical institution near you.Ironically, it is the people who are at present trying to live according to principles of physical, mental and moral excellence that will suffer. These are people who are making lifestyle choices that are like deposits in a quality of life bank. Although, it probably has not entered into the thinking of most of us, there are people who are living and have lived their entire lives without a health care crisis. Paying for something they don’t need or may never need is not so much the problem as paying for something that is within their power to prevent.Neither home owner’s insurance nor automobile insurance can protect you from loss of or damage to your asset. These products simply mimimize or completely cover the cost of expenses to repair or replace it. This is especially helpful in unexpected, undesirable circumstances beyond your control. Loss of or damage to your health may be undesirable but it is not entirely unpredictable or beyond one’s power of control.Some people, who have insurance policies to cover their tangible assets, invest additional money and even time and effort to increase or maintain the value of these assets long before any unwelcome events. Physical health is one of the most grossly undervalued assets and it receives such investments many times only AFTER loss or damage. Health insurance seems to stifle the conviction to make any investment beyond a monthly premium.So what about the people who cherish and protect their health as sacredly as their characters. Being in the minority, they are probably considered insignificant complainers. With everyone else, they too will be “persuaded” by the tip of a financial blade to purchase this product (health insurance) whether they need it or like it or not. But decisions for the sake of the majority does not prove that this is anything more than a big bandaid.Of very little mention in the discussion about health care are the benefits to be awarded the healthy. Maybe most of us are assuming that everyone is unhealthy. Is it the national consensus and presumption that everyone needs health care or at some later point in time will be needing health care ? Is everyone bound to get sick and need drug medication, surgery or radiation ?Perhaps many in our nation need to know that there are people who do not believe that disease just randomly shoots into a crowd and kills people. Yes, there are those who believe that for the most part, many diseases are self-inflicted wounds and those who believe this are choosing lifestyles which do not lay the foundation for disease.There are people in America who choose not to use the flesh of animals as food and therefore do not have the diseased blood of these creatures circulating throughout their bodies. There are many who do not eat between meals. Even more interesting is the fact that there are people who limit themselves to 2 meals per day and have their heaviest meal in the morning instead of just before bed. They use only fruits, grains, nuts and vegetables as part of their dietary regimen while excluding refined or processed foods.These people even exercise everyday and drink plenty of water. Some choose not to drink fluids with their meals because they know fluid with food will interrupt digestion as the stomach must absorb the liquid before it can continue with digestion. They drink only water or occasionally fruit or vegetable juices either sometime before a meal or at least 2 hours afterward.There are people who take advantage of the sunlight because they know that it raises or lowers blood pressure, blood sugar and blood cholesterol according to the body’s need and has many other beneficial effects. They are not afraid of skin cancer because they have not been consuming hydrogenated oils which promote the development of free radical cells that become cancerous when exposed to the radiation of the sun’s rays.Some people in our nation are temperate and choose to dispense entirely with everything hurtful and use in moderation even the good things. They make a point of getting fresh air and as much rest as possible.I don’t think these people are going to live very long in this country without ultimately facing persecution because they are even going around sharing vital health information with other people so that their lives can be improved as well. They promote a higher quality of life for everyone. The last person who did this consistently and showed how it could be done got Himself nailed to a cross.There really are people in America who live healthy, disease free lives and who are choosing to leave the treasures of health as an inheritance to their children. Instead of diseases that “run in the family”, they are passing on lifestyle habits that exempt their children from the responsibility-assassinating, death sentence of genetic predisposition. Many of them trust in God and not Gov. to help them. They pay for any unforeseen medical expenses (accidents) out of their own pockets.Now that health insurance is required by law in Massachusetts and the caring disposition of our legislators is so evidently manifest, how will the decision-makers reward those who have no need and may never have need of drug medication, surgery or radiation ? Will they grant them unlimited, free, no-clause accident insurance in recognition of their faithfulness to the laws of health ? It is highly unlikely. It is not current lawmaker “policy”.The health care crisis in this country has nourished many industries. While it tantalizes some with the promise of omnipotent health insurance it establishes for others perpetual wealth assurance based upon the near certain unwillingness of many to take charge of their health. Through medical vocabulary intimidation and willful ignorance with some, many are convinced that only doctors (not themselves) are qualified to address their health issues.300 million people having responsibility for their health, making health-complementary lifestyle choices and living healthier lives is HEALTH ASSURANCE and REAL HEALTH INSURANCE. With health assurance a person becomes eligible for wealth assurance benefits. He or she can save tons of money that might otherwise evaporate at the command of chronic or acute illness. It is no longer necessary for anyone to look for their finances in the obituary column each day because of medical expenses. Health Assurance minimizes your risk of owning a graveyard plot in the ultimate wealth cemetery – A NURSING HOME.
Automotive Industry News Provides Service Staff With Informative Articles
Automotive industry news publications are directed at individuals within the industry. These publications are an informative and authoritative circular that provides a variety of information about the auto industry to its readers. The largest demographic of readers of these publications tend to be individuals who work in the auto industry.Automotive service specialists tend to read this publication so they may be able to be kept up to date on industry related information. It is popular for car dealers to read this industry publication and require their service managers and other staff members to read it as well. They may also post articles that pertain to their manufacturer in the employee conference area so all staff sees the pertinent information.These publications tend to hire writers who have a background in the auto industry and who are also proficient writers. There are some authors of these publications who have backgrounds as service department managers. Their involvement in the industry provides them with an ability to relate to their readers and provide information in a manner that provides the material the service staff is looking for.While the tradition has been for printed versions of these trade publications, many have turned to the Internet in order to circulate the information they are providing for the industry specialists. The publication that is on the web may be the same that is published in printed form or it may contain unique information that is not available otherwise. This version of the publication may require an Internet membership on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.In many cases these publications will feature articles on current trends. The information may be about different manufacturers or their lines of cars. Automotive industry news documents also aim to provide the employees of service departments with material that is directed at the vehicles they may work on.Automotive news circulars can be connected to a specific automaker and may be created to provide their employees with new information about specific models. In many cases the publications that are published by specific carmakers may be directed at providing customers with information and these documents might be provided in waiting areas of service departments.Many times the feature articles will be about suggestions for improved customer relations and may also provide insightful information about attracting new customers. This type of article may be beneficial to the employees that are in charge of marketing. Car shows and expositions are often listed, along with reviews of these events and highlights of new models.