"Forget about
what you used to do. This is the moment you've been waiting for."
When he was
41, he swam from Alcatraz Prison to Fisherman's Wharf while handcuffed, and he
wasn't an escaping convict. He was Jack LaLanne, the self-proclaimed Godfather
of Exercise. In fact, he repeated the feat when he was 60
while handcuffed and shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat. Known for
his incredible feats of strength and endurance, when LaLanne was 70, while
handcuffed and shackled he towed 70 rowboats, each carrying at least one
person, for a mile.
A
tireless evangelist for good health, LaLanne opened the nation's first health
club in 1936. Back then, people thought he was nuts or a con artist.
Most people thought lifting weights would cause heart attacks or impotence. LaLanne
also had the crazy notion that women and the elderly should work out to stay
strong, ideally through a combination of aerobic exercise and weight-lifting.
"Between your ears"
A national
celebrity for decades, his TV exercise show ran for 34 years. It consisted of
little more than the 5'6" LaLanne in a jumpsuit with a few props and
boundless enthusiasm. In later years when he was introduced to younger people
who didn't know who he was, LaLanne would joke "I spent a lot of time on the floor with your mother."
A
founding member of the President's Council on Physical Fitness in 1963, the
AMA, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association all honored him for
his leadership of the modern fitness movement.
He
rose every day at 4 or 5 a.m. to do a daily two-hour work out (an hour with
weights and an hour swimming), and he did this every day for 73 years.
"Fitness starts between your ears," he said.
"You have to figure out what you want and then go ahead and do it. Your
body is your slave."
No
kidding—LaLanne did 1,033 push-ups in 23 minutes on live TV in 1956. When
he was 54, he beat Arnold Schwarzenegger, then 21, in a chin-up contest on
Muscle Beach in Venice, Calif. Schwarzenegger called him "an apostle for
fitness....He was one of the greatest promoters of health and fitness and of exercising every day....He was the most energetic person I ever met."
"I'm
not afraid of anything," LaLanne said. "When you're in good shape,
mentally and physically, you know you can cope with life's problems. You do
your best with the equipment you have."
When he was
in his early teens, he was bulimic and suicidal. "I was a miserable
goddamn kid," he recalled. "I'd
eat a quart of ice cream in one sitting, shove my finger down my throat, heave
it up, and have another quart.
"There's nothing more addictive
on this earth than sugar. Not heroin, booze, whatever. It's much worse than
smoking. I had blinding headaches every day. I was mentally screwed up by
sugar. I was psychotic. I was malnourished. I was always getting sick. I got
kicked out of school. I wanted to die."
He was "a skinny kid
with pimples and boils" when his mother took him to a lecture by famous
nutritionist Paul Bragg, the first person to open a health-foods store. By the
time they arrived, his speech had begun, and no seats were left. The LaLannes
were about to leave when Bragg invited them onstage.
"The Most Humiliating Moment"
"It was
the most humiliating moment," LaLanne recalled. "I was so ashamed of
the way I looked. I didn't want people to see me. Little did I know they had
problems, too."
He heard
Bragg say: "It doesn't matter what you age is, what your physical
condition is. If you obey nature's laws, you can be born again."
LaLanne was
indeed reborn. He changed his diet and began to exercise. He became captain of
his school's football team. "I had to
take my lunch alone to the football field to eat, so no one would see me eat my
raw veggies, whole bread, raisins and nuts. You don't know the crap I went through,"
he recalled. And when he was 19, he won the national World's Best Built Man contest.
He
gleefully celebrated his 75th birthday saying, "No cake, no pie, no candy,
no ice cream! It makes me feel great not eating birthday cake. That's the gift
I give to myself." LaLanne never ate red meat, nor did he drink coffee. He
ate two meals a day. They typically included fresh fruit and vegetables, fish,
eggs, and a wine. "If
man made it, don't eat it," LaLanne said.
He
continued his two-hour daily exercise regimen until the day before he died at
96 from pneumonia. He had been sick for a week but had refused to see a doctor.
"I can't afford to die," LaLanne often joked. "It'll wreck my
image."
MORAL:
Get off lazy ass off the sofa.
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