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Health & Fitness Redefined
Health and Fitness Redefined with Anthony Amen. Take a dive into the health world as we learn how to overcome adversity, depict fact vs fiction and see health & fitness in a whole new light.Fitness Is Medicine
Health & Fitness Redefined
Walking Away from Excuses: How Small Movement Changes Transform Lives
Could the solution to America's health crisis be simpler than we think? Jim Walter, cardiovascular exercise physiologist with 35 years of experience, believes so. In this eye-opening conversation, Jim challenges conventional wisdom about exercise by promoting a refreshingly accessible approach: just move more throughout your day.
The statistics are sobering—25% of Americans are completely sedentary, while 60% barely do more than basic daily activities. But rather than pushing the standard 150 minutes of weekly moderate-to-vigorous exercise that many find intimidating, Jim offers practical, bite-sized movement opportunities that anyone can incorporate without disrupting their schedule.
What makes Jim's approach so powerful is its simplicity. Take the stairs to a different floor for the bathroom. Stand while waiting for water to boil. Walk while talking on the phone. His "radius rule"—committing to walk rather than drive within certain distances—exemplifies how small changes compound over time. These aren't just theoretical benefits; research shows that simply replacing sitting with standing throughout the day significantly improves blood sugar and reduces body fat.
Beyond physical health, Jim addresses how movement enhances family dynamics and relationships. Evening walks with spouses create meaningful conversation time. Parents can move around sports fields during children's practices instead of sitting scrolling through phones. These practices not only model healthy behaviors for children but strengthen family bonds simultaneously.
As Jim eloquently rephrases JFK's famous words: "Ask not what your healthcare provider can do, ask what you can do for your health." Our bodies weren't designed for prolonged sitting—they were made to move. Start today by identifying one simple way to introduce more movement into your routine. Your future self will thank you.
Learn More at: www.Redefine-Fitness.com
Hello and welcome. To Help to Finish Redefined, I'm your host, anthony Amen, and today we've got another great episode for all of you, for those watching video. New studio, trying to chill it out, still figuring out all the technical audio sides of this because it's all brand new to me, but because of the listeners, for you guys, we decided to go a little more formal with the show. It's been, like we said, over five years, over 250 episodes. That's a lot of amity and I hope you all enjoyed last week's episode where we did a re-intro to who I am where, where the redefined fitness came from.
Speaker 1:And then some hard truths in that. But without further ado, we have a great guest on for you all today. We have jim walter. Jim, it's good to have you on today anthony, thank you.
Speaker 2:Uh, first of all love the green background. It looks great there. So good choice on doing that, and it's a pleasure to be here and I I look forward to talking to you a little bit more about what my mission is all about.
Speaker 1:I love it, man. I really can't wait. So let's talk a little bit about you, kind of how you got started in the fitness world and what made you go from where you were to wanting to be a motivational speaker and getting people to move.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. So I'm trained as a cardiovascular exercise physiologist and I spent the first 10 years of my career running preventive and rehabilitative cardiology programs. I've spent the last 25 years in the pharmaceutical industry, but what I've missed is really the ability to work directly with individuals. I've always been a big advocate of the fact that our health is our own responsibility and it's really incumbent upon us to take care of it. What drives me are really two factors, one of which is my father died very young. He was 45 years old. He died from his third heart attack at that time, and one of the contributing factors there were several, but one of the contributing factors was that he did not live a very active lifestyle.
Speaker 2:And the second thing that frustrates me as an exercise physiologist is that in exercise we've got arguably the most potent form of medicine known to mankind. If you look at all of our major chronic health issues, one thing that has an impact on almost all of them is regular physical activity. But if you were to go to the CDC the Centers for Disease Control website today, it tells us that most Americans don't exercise, 25% are completely sedentary, and then as much as 60% don't do a whole lot more than activities of daily living. So I am a big advocate of exercise, but if people aren't doing it, should we just leave them alone? So I don't think so, and perhaps what we need to do is change our message to something that everyone can do, and for me, my message is trying to promote people to simply move more. Move more throughout your day, and when I do public speaking, I give people a lot of ways that they can go through their day and re-engineer their day in order to introduce more movement into their day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you hit a very important point, which is people don't even do the bare minimum. And you see it more and more as time goes on and I've done a lot of shows on this right. We've talked a lot pretty in detail as far as what is the bare minimum. Why don't people do it? What's, what's the psychology behind of teaching someone just the simplest things is like you mentioned pre-show walk down a flight of stairs to go to the bathroom, just a little out of your way, just to get a couple extra steps in. And I don't know what that root cause is, but I have guesses and it's kind of what we talked about last week.
Speaker 1:With my own personal like, I think people always looking for the easy way out, they always think that someone is going to catch them and with that that would be modern medicine In our day and age. They say, oh, it doesn't matter if I get type 2 diabetes, I'm going to take insulin and then I'll be fine. Or it doesn't matter if I have a heart attack, I go to the hospital and they'll be able to fix me up and then whatever that doctor tells me, then that's what I'm just going to go for and it is what it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know. Going back to the one point you made, I think there's often two root causes of why people don't engage in exercise. One of them is it's too hard, they're not motivated, they just don't want to do it. And the second one too hard, they're not motivated, they just don't want to do it. And the second one is time. They say they don't have the time to do it.
Speaker 2:And so when I said earlier that I try to introduce ways that people can re-engineer their days, it's ways of just going about their day, doing things a little bit differently and replacing inactivity with mobility in very simple ways that don't take up time.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, as I mentioned to you before, I never use a restroom on the floor that I'm on and other, like a simple example would be you know, everybody's got to go out their front door, perhaps to get their newspaper in the morning or to get the mail midday, and so instead of going out your front door, re-engineer it maybe go out your side door or your back door, a way that's going to take a little bit more mobility to do it. And will that take extra time out of your day? Yes, it will Not significant amounts, but it doesn't change your day, because I've been doing this for years and I don't go to bed later at night because I go out the side door. You just absorb that time during your day and so if we can introduce ways that people can add simple ways of moving consistently throughout their whole day, that's what I'm trying to promote.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you mentioned two reasons, like one in motivation, and motivation is good for initial kickstart, but I don't think it's motivation that people need. I think it's discipline that people need. Motivation gets you going. Discipline keeps you going. A good example of that is kind of what you're saying is simple fixes like going to your back door, to your mailbox. Initially it's the motivation of, yes, I want to do something, but what if it rains? What if it starts snowing? What if it's a little too cold outside? What if you're more tired that day?
Speaker 2:motivation's out the window that now needs to shift to discipline.
Speaker 1:I need to do this for myself working out, using the gym, for an example. You get motivated to show up and it's the discipline like I work out, even when I don't want to work out the day is that I'm not motivated, I don't want to be, I don't want to work out. The day is that I'm not motivated, I don't want to be here, don't want to stay longer after my shift to hit the gym, but the discipline then kicks in. No, I need to. I need to do this for myself, I need to do this for my family, I need to do this for my community and even for myself. I take it to the next step. I need to do this for my community and even for myself. I take to the next step. I need to do this for my country, because I'm working out to show people that anything is possible through fitness, and fitness isn't truly medicine. It's something I full-heartedly believe in. But how do we create the discipline side of it into people, to teach them to do it even when they're not motivated?
Speaker 2:of it and to people to teach them to do it even when they're not motivated. Yeah, and discipline is a right word. Another word that you can use for that is his habit. Making it a habit and that's the part about keeping things simple and not making them time consuming is that it's easier to build that into a habit, and I don't even think about the things now that I do anymore, because I've just built them in and I continue to find new ways to continue to add more movement.
Speaker 2:That's part of what I try to teach people about. I will give you suggestions. That's part of what I try to teach people about. I will give you suggestions. I've given one. I'll try to give more throughout this conversation of things that people can do.
Speaker 2:But what I also want to do is encourage people to find their own ways to move more, because my suggestions pertain to me and my environment, which could be very different than everybody else's, and so I want them to put on their thinking caps and to be creative and, using mine example, say, well, I can't do that, but maybe this is what I can do. And going back to the responsibility part, I try to build motivation into my talks and you know, I use things that I've heard and one of the things I've done is taken the infamous, the iconic words that our president, john F Kennedy, used during his inaugural address, and I've reconstructed them a little bit because I love the way you said. You know, do stuff and do for our nation. And the way I've reconstructed those words is to say ask not what your healthcare provider can do, ask what you can do for your health. And that's a perfect example of what you just said.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. I think I want to talk about a little fun thing that I do here with clients that have all their packets and stuff, because I think you're going to love this. I talked about this way years and years ago back in the show, but I think it's so cool. In my personal life. You mentioned having different habits and adding different things. To make you move a little more, I created my own little thing.
Speaker 1:It's called a radius rule, so the idea behind it is I have a set radius from where I am of. Let's say I'm going to the restaurant and then the shopping center. That's within my radius. Let's say it's a 10th of a mile I have to walk. It doesn't matter, I am not allowed to get in my car and drive there. If it's under a tenth of a mile I'm walking. You can take this little radius rule and you can slowly start expanding it.
Speaker 1:So you take the tenth of a mile to a quarter mile, a quarter mile to half a mile. Before you know it, you're adding so many more steps in your day because you're just disciplining yourself. Like I cannot break this rule, I have to go do this extra walk. I always want to add a caveat borrowing like going across the crazy federal highway, you're going to die like. There's always, of course, these extreme examples, but just in general, if there's a coffee shop within 20 minutes and I want a cup of coffee, I'm not driving, I'm walking. Like that's I'm, I'm not allowed to get. Yeah, I have to walk there. In other words, I break my own radius. With who am I?
Speaker 1:to preach this and not practice it, yeah.
Speaker 2:Hey, listen, I love that, that's great. I'm smiling because I think that's great. And then there's another side of that. That's sometimes frustrating for me is in trying to always pick these opportunities to move more. And I do a fair amount of traveling and one of my biggest pet peeves are the hotels where the the steps, the emergency exit steps, only have doors that say only use this in the case of an emergency, so you can't use the steps. You might be on the second an emergency, so you can't use the steps. You might be on the second floor or the third floor easy to use the steps, right, no problem, but you can't because of those things. And that just really, really frustrates me and would clearly abolish your radius rule, because, hey, this is simple, and then you run into those obstacles. So, but yeah, thank you, I love that and, if you don't mind, I'll probably promote that as well, because it is a way that you said yeah, you can make gradual changes, and that's what my suggestions are all about. Are these gradual changes? Just look for a way to move. So I'll add another one that I just came up with the other day.
Speaker 2:So I went downstairs as I said, I work on the second floor and it wasn't like today where it's 101 degrees. This was a few weeks ago when it was still quite cool outside and I was working here and it just got a little bit of a chill. So I thought you know what, let me go down and I'll make a cup of tea real quick. And it was about late morning, close to midday, and I went down and I took the water and I put it in the microwave and for me it takes three minutes to heat it up. Now what most people are going to do is stand there and wait for the water to heat up.
Speaker 2:But I thought, applying my own principles is what can I do instead of standing here to move? And I'm thinking mail. It's time to get the mail. I could go get the mail and I came back in and there was still a minute and a half left on the timer, so I could have waited, made my tea and gone upstairs. But I decided no, let me walk and take my mail. I left my wife's downstairs, took my mail upstairs, put it on my desk and then came back down and then my tea was ready. So again, just looking for an opportunity to introduce movement, subtle, simple movement where you otherwise might be sedentary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. I always use the example of nighttime activities. A lot of people. What do they do when they get home from work? They eat dinner, they turn TV on? Bond with their family? Jim, if you ever watched a movie or TV show, obviously it happens to be a joke. But do you do much talking with your wife or significant other when you're watching TV? Do you get to bond with each other? Yeah, absolutely not. So. My wife and I, I mean, we're more morning people, but when I get home from work it's pass out. So we do it in the morning, but most people it's night for them.
Speaker 2:Go for a walk.
Speaker 1:Take your wife out for a walk just casually, a little slow pace. Use that as bonding bonding experience. My wife and I go on walks every day almost without fail, and we go for about an hour and it's our opportunity to like talk about our days, uh get to know each other a little more I mean, we've been together 11 years but we still want to make sure we continue that strong relationship bond.
Speaker 1:People talk about the divorce epidemic. I think a big fix is just go for walks with your wife. So, therefore, you're both bonding, right. You're creating that special relationship you have with your spouse. You're both moving, so you're feeling better, right, you're adorbitant by eating more tea because you're outside. So now you're getting a little happier and you're boosting your immune system. You're hopefully, if you do this over a long time, you're compounding interest and helping yourself lose weight. Um, and then I'm going to throw a fifth little bonus one. You get to have more sex, which is also physical activity. So you walk physical activity. Get the bottom with your wife, your wife loves you more, and you start having more sex with your wife. It's physical activity. Get the bottom with your wife, your wife loves you more, and you start having more sex with your wife.
Speaker 1:It's more physical activity and now you have a closer relationship with your wife. So now you have like that positive feedback loop. Yeah, with you and your spouse because you just decided, instead of watching a movie and going to bed, to go for a walk. And another point which I totally forgot to mention watching the sunset or going for a walk, like at dawn time, helps your body relax and increase your melatonin increase, so therefore helps you sleep better at night sleep better, yeah not staring at your phones and your the tv is going to drain your sleep and we all know the issues of sleep.
Speaker 1:It's going to spike the cortisol. It's going to make you hungrier so you need more food the next day. You're going to drain your sleep and we all know the issues of sleep. It's going to spike the cortisol. It's going to make you hungrier so you can eat more food the next day. You're going to retain more. You're not going to build much muscle mass. So many negative side effects to not getting enough sleep. So there's so many wins just for one little simple opportunity, like you mentioned just yeah and I had.
Speaker 1:I had someone that I mentioned this too and and they did it for like a couple days and the motivation was great and then just kicked it and it didn't follow through. Besides having these people, I don't know how to get through the majority of people, the people that come here and walk into the gym. They've been made that mental like I need help. And those people that come to us that break that like I need help, I can help and same with you. If they're booking you to be a speaker and they're showing up, they're already checked in their brains that they need help and they're looking for someone to help them. So you speaking to them or them walking into my gym is going to help them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But how do you address the 80, 85% of people that haven't had that mental clarity? Like I need to get help. Like how do you talk to those people that don't want to hear it?
Speaker 2:want to hear it. Well, see, I'll go back to the words that I used, that I reconstructed from JFK's speech and you know this is hard and I know it's a difficult thing to get across. But to try to really impress upon people that it is your responsibility to take care of your own health and what can, and then we're both talking about ways that they can do that. And what I reinforce in that message is to say let's take, for example, somebody who has diabetes, just as an example. And what I might do is I'll ask them I'll say so, you've got diabetes. Okay, this may be able to be managed, but I'll be. Who's really responsible for helping to manage or to take care of your diabetes? And most of the time you'll get the answer well, it's my physician, my primary care physician or the endocrinologist. And I say, okay, that's good. Yeah, and I said and then I would say and this would be the way of trying to make the point I would say and how many days of the year do you have diabetes? And they always look at me like I'm nuts, right? But obviously the answer is every day. So then I say, and I try to put the two things together. So then I'll say to them okay, so you have diabetes every day, and how many days in the course of the year do you see your physician? If they're well managed, it might be two or three times during the course of the year. So I bring it back to them then. So then, who is really responsible for managing your diabetes? Who's responsible for managing your diabetes? Who's responsible for managing your high blood pressure? Who's responsible for managing your high cholesterol? It's you.
Speaker 2:And so then, what can you do to get to the point you made, besides taking pills that can help with that? And then we say exercise oh, that's too much for me, I can't do that. You know, the CDC again tells us that's 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity. I can't do that. So that's when I'll come back to them. But what can you move more? Can you just move more and then start to give them examples of something that they can do, to just begin to add that gradual movement? And then my hope is, you do that. For some people it might be a couple of months, some people it might be six months, some people it might take a whole year, and maybe their confidence increases and I've seen this happen, and then maybe, maybe they then would be willing to come to your gym and really get involved and do the exercise that we would want them to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I get it if you get in front of them, right, if you have the opportunity to have that conversation with a person, kind of like if I had the opportunity to sit down with someone at the time to hear them listen to me talk. But there's hundreds of millions of people in the US, yeah, right, so how do you talk to everybody? I mean, maybe the next question is and for listeners, let's say I'm a listener to this show what would you tell the listeners to tell the people in their lives, or is it even their place to tell them? Like the example I always use, let's say, your loved one smokes, right, a pack of that and you know it's killing them, right, we all know that. Do you let them smoke? Or do you sit them down and have that hard conversation like, hey, can you stop smoking, I want you around?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like society or obesity has put this norm on it to make it okay and people think it's okay to be morbidly beast and you're not allowed to tell somebody that they might need help, because then you're going to look down upon and then they're going to sit there and ridicule you and you're not accepted and you're you don't understand. But all you're trying to do, like me and you, is save their life. Yeah, but they don't. Society doesn't even let you have that conversation. So what can we do to combat that? Or what can we tell people that are listening to the show, like, is it even okay to have that conversation with a loved one?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it is. I think it is. So I'm going to answer that question with a lesson that I learned. So in my younger years I was a basketball player. I played basketball up and through college and then I stopped and I got involved with helping others through basketball camps and clinics and stuff. And when we would go to the sleepaway basketball camp, the director, my mentor, an amazing individual, he was a teacher and he always taught us things and we'd have 110 kids at camp and stuff like that, and he'd sit us down all the counselors before the camp began and he says look, your job is to go out here and help all of these kids, but in the end, some are going to listen and some are not. And if you can walk away from this camp having had, I'll just say, a significant impact on just one kid, you've done your job. The more, the better, but the one kid. So I agree, and my message applies to every single American. Right Exercise might not apply to every single American, but mine does move more.
Speaker 2:Look, I just took a step backwards and forward. I just moved more and then doing that more and more consistently, and so for me it's just trying to simplify the message to something that everybody can do? Will you reach everybody? No, no, and that's frustrating, and I could see the way you were emotional about that, and it's been that way for me too. I've had people in my family I come from a family of people who were smokers Not all of them, but a lot of them and then also people that weren't necessarily physically active and all I can do is share the message and try to simplify it as much as I can, but I have to accept the fact that I might not touch everybody. I just hope to be able to touch more, and since the message is simple, then they can share that with others and then they can touch more, and hopefully that six degrees of separation will have an impact. But yeah, unfortunately, as much as we'd like to, we can't save the whole world.
Speaker 2:But we can certainly try, we can try, and that's what you're doing, and that's what I'm trying to do.
Speaker 1:Can I go back?
Speaker 2:for a second. I want to go back to your, because I want to share two more examples of your walking with your wife in the evening and stuff like that. So yes, that's great, that's one way of doing it, but sometimes when I'm giving these talks, I talk about the person that comes home from work and they had to take their kids to their sporting events. And then they get home after that and they're in a position they're fortunate, they still have parents around and they want to check in with their parents. Nobody is using a landline anymore. Everybody's got a cell phone. So you know again, there's another way. There's no reason, no reason whatsoever, for you to sit while you're talking to your parents and checking in.
Speaker 2:Now, I'm not saying go out and exercise, but can you just meander around your house. If it's a nice evening, can you go and walk around the block or something like that. And sometimes these are things just people just don't think of, and it's quite simple. And then here's the frustrating one, because my kids were very involved in sports. I took them to their soccer practice, their baseball, their softball practice, and part of the group of people I'm trying to reach are the ones that say look, I work all day. I come home, I make dinner, I help the kids with their homework, I take them to soccer practice. Come home, I've got a little work to do. When am I supposed to exercise or even be more physically active?
Speaker 2:To the soccer field or the baseball or softball field, drop their child, let them out of the car, pull their lawn chair out of the backseat and sit and watch that practice. There's 60 to 90 minutes where you can just get up and meander around the field, but they don't, and I think sometimes the reasons is we got to give them permission, tell them get up, walk around. I used to do that all the time. I wouldn't sit still at the practices and sometimes I'd throw my bicycle into the back of the SUV so I could do something different. But I think that's the part of the point that I'm trying to make. Anthony is, sometimes people just don't see these opportunities to move that are right there in front of them, and so we need to tell them.
Speaker 1:I mean you mentioned the phone thing. I'm laughing. I fast walk. When I'm on the phone, like get 15 000 steps in. Sometimes I don't have a 45 minute conversation because I'm just like my add kicks in. I'm up down, left, right. Oh, my wife's like oh my god, stop running. Yeah, that's just what it was built in to get myself up moving, get my brain thinking working. I feel sluggish. Sitting like Like sitting doing this right now is tough for me. You notice I'm using a lot of hand motions to kind of like compensate for the sitting, but I'm used to just bouncing, so I love that.
Speaker 1:And then the sports practices. I mean, yeah, you see parents and it's this and it's scrolling, and they want 20 minutes to go by and I try to get a dopamine hit just by scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. I want to take the phone and throw it away out of their hands and just be like you'd be way more involved in this practice, like if you're in a baseball practice, for example, get up to the cage, walk around, cheer your kid on, cheer the other kids on. Let's go like walk out to the outfield at the sideline and you can watch and walk back, and it's a great way to be like involved yeah, make sure everyone's like they're moving, etc. Or if you bring your kids with you because you have a bunch of them, have the other kids kick a ball around, throw a frisbee around. Like, get up and just do it with them. Like, hey guys, let's put the frisbee around. We're trying to kill time. One parent's distracting the other kids doing that, the other one's watching everyone's outside it's. You're still kind of all mostly together. I just I'm a really big component of. We lose family values along with making this obesity epidemic worse. I think both are really the same bucket and I don't think they're different. I think they're exactly the same.
Speaker 1:Everything that comes with depression and anxiety has been linked to not moving. So you have movement. You fix anxiety and depression. You have movement with your doing, with your family. You build strong family bonds. You start fixing kids as like as they're programming, getting older and teaching them values, different values of like. No, we need to move. We're not sitting in front of the screen today.
Speaker 1:Your, your kid, imitates you like I have a seven month old at home. He, home, he just watches me. It's whatever dad-dad's doing. He wants to know and wants to do If I'm eating something, he wants that he doesn't care if it's what it is and what it tastes like, he just wants what dad eats.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you might think that, as a parent, oh, I'm only hurting myself. No, you're hurting your kids Like. Your kids are going to learn every lesson from you. There's a reason that parents that are overweight, their kids are even more overweight, and then your child with obesity, your affected diabetes is more likely to be a kid affected diabetes and, what's worse, the kid, because now they're going to have an even longer period of time. So, even if and this is yet again discipline comes into play, you don't want to do it for yourself because you feel like you know, oh, I don't care about myself and I know people feel that it's fine. Do it for your spouse and especially, do it for your kids. Yeah, teach your kids a valuable lesson how to live longer lives.
Speaker 1:The average lifespan of a human being is going not like it was for thousands of years. We're going this way, yeah, because people aren't moving. There's no movement inside people's life. People aren't eating healthy, and it's this frustrating build up inside of me because I just want to fix it. Yeah, and that's why it's like controlling. Personally, I just want to fix it and, like you were saying, there's so many little tiny things that people can do. You don't have to work out seven days a week, two hours a day to be healthy. There's little little things. I see so many people who go from, like, the place next to us to three stores down and they drive their car.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pull into like 10 spots later drive the car to go into the next place. Yeah, You're teaching your kids the wrong values. I just know how to fix it.
Speaker 2:I just know how to fix it and we go through the day with blinders or barriers on. And what I mean by that is so let's say, you know, I'm going to suggest to someone, you know, use the steps instead of the elevators. And then this is a thing that I've gotten feedback on. They say well, jim, I work on the 22nd floor. Do you really expect me to take 22 flights of stairs to my office? And this is where the blinders are on? No, I don't expect you to take 22 flights of stairs. Can you take the elevator to the 19th floor and then get off and walk up three flights of stairs? Do that for a few weeks, then get off on the 18th floor. But that's part of what my message is all about is trying to get people to see beyond these barriers that are self-imposed and look for a way, you know, to add more movement.
Speaker 2:Again, here's another one I just did the other day. You know, my son was downstairs and I needed to tell him something. And I'm upstairs and he was downstairs. What are most people going to do? They're going to walk to the banister, yell down. Hey, son, can you take the trash out? Or whatever it is that you needed to do. You know what I did. I went over, I walked down the steps, I walked into the kitchen, I told him what I needed to tell him and then I walked back upstairs. It doesn't take a lot of time and it doesn't take a lot of physical effort, but again you used the important word there effort. But again you use the important word there.
Speaker 2:The cumulative benefits of doing all these things throughout your day will make a difference. I cite a study that shows. That was from the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, which is a very reputable journal, and it says that simply replacing sitting with standing, not once, but throughout the day, replacing sitting with standing resulted in small but statistically significant differences in fasting blood sugar and body fat mass. Just something that simple. Fasting blood sugar and body fat mass just something that simple. So then you make that simple thing and you add a little bit more and those benefits become a little bit more. And so that's what I'm trying to do, is simplify it for everybody, make it easier. As I told you before, do I want everybody to exercise, absolutely, but if we can't get there right from the start, at least start by moving more yeah, uh, movement is key, man.
Speaker 1:Start small, start gradual, build that. Compound interest, exactly right. If you compound interest one percent on a thousand bucks, in like 30 years it's gonna be worth a hell of a lot more and you're starting to benefit way later in life. But it's just a matter of doing it. It's a matter of pushing yourself through. And if you don't want to do it, and those days that you go do the work that you just really don't feel like moving or walking down the stairs, talk to your family, are the most important days and those are what truly define you as a human being. You're really set your own personal standards and how you view yourself and if we can set higher standards for ourselves, that other people will try to live up to those standards and try to be to better people. Because we are humans. Help work. That's a community for each other.
Speaker 1:Of interesting point which a lot of people always use is you become the average of the five people that hang out the most with and I know I said this a lot it's. People use that for financial standpoints or whatever, but even regardless of that, you want to get in shape. Just hang out with five people that are in shape. That's it. You want to talk about a simple, easy thing spend more time with five people that are in better shape. You know why?
Speaker 1:because all those people have all those habits jim's talking about right now already built in yeah, so you're going to start doing it, second nature, because they're doing it because you want to follow along, and they're like, oh guys, let's go get ice cream, let's go walk on the block. You're not going to be like you guys walk, I'm going to drive, you're going to go walk with them, right? So even the simplest thing of all is just starting out. People are more in shape and then if you want to help your family and they hang out with you the most, you become the one that's more in shape and then they're going to start picking up your habits because now they're. Oh, you were going to go do that.
Speaker 1:And if I tell my wife, honey, let's go welcome to block, and we'll go get a cup of coffee or whatever, and she's like, say, one of james, and then that's beautiful dates, go hang out with each other. She's going to follow me and walk with me, right? So either become that person for your family or go hang out with those people that already had those happen stills, and I think that's the simplest fix yeah and anthony, you used you used a word a few minutes ago that I want to come back to.
Speaker 2:you were talking about us, us as humans. Right, and I want us to think about and this is another message that I would share with people, either in talking with them in a group or on individually is our human biology, and I'll ask you a very simple question Structurally, what are we designed for? Sitting or moving?
Speaker 1:It's moving. It's moving from trees actually.
Speaker 2:It's moving right. And in fact, do you know what the most common pain complaint is for people in the United States?
Speaker 1:Lower back.
Speaker 2:Lower back problem. You know why? We are not designed to be sitting. We are not. We're designed to be moving. So we create lower back problems because we sit, and if we could just adapt this idea of trying to replace sedentariness with movement, we can have an impact on a lot of things, not just the chronic health conditions, but even the pain issues that we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 1:Simple little fixes make all the difference in the world.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:The really big talk point here, Jim, I'm going to ask you the final two questions. I ask everyone as we wrap this up. The first question is if you were to summarize this episode in one or two sentences, what would be your take-home message?
Speaker 2:My take-home message would be to look to create ways to re-engineer your day, simple ways where you can replace not moving with an opportunity to move, and when you do that, you will gain health benefits from it.
Speaker 1:I love that. And then, jim, second question how can people find you get ahold of you, learn more about your speaking?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you can go. My website, Jim Walter Speaks. So just as my name is spelled jimwalterspeakscom and then I can be reached on email via jim at jimwalterspeakscom. And then, if people still use a phone to call somebody, I can be reached at area code 609-273-3118.
Speaker 1:Jim, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, guys, for listening to this week's episode of Public Opinions Redefined. Don't forget to subscribe to the show, share this with someone that needs to hear this and we'll see you next time at Fitness and Medicine. Thank you, outro Music.
