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‘I Crowdfunded Money For Weight-Loss Surgery And It Totally Changed My Life’ – Women’s Health
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Women's Health | 'I Crowdfunded Money For Weight-Loss Surgery And It Totally Changed My Life' Women's Health She wanted me to lose the weight through diet and exercise, but I knew I needed more. Lap-band surgery seemed to be the least drastic surgical procedure, even though I wouldn't lose weight as quickly as with gastric bypass. But I didn't need to be thin ... |
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'I Crowdfunded Money For Weight-Loss Surgery And It Totally Changed My Life' - Women's Health
Eating Toward Immortality – The Atlantic
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Knowing a thing means you dont need to believe in it. Whatever can be known, or proven by logic or evidence, doesnt need to be taken on faith. Certain details of nutrition and the physiology of eating are known and knowable: the fact that humans require certain nutrients; the fact that our bodies convert food into energy and then into new flesh (and back to energy again when needed). But there are bigger questions that dont have definitive answers, like what is the best diet for all people? For me?
Nutrition is a young science that lies at the intersection of several complex disciplineschemistry, biochemistry, physiology, microbiology, psychologyand though we are far from having figured it all out, we still have to eat to survive. When there are no guarantees or easy answers, every act of eating is something like a leap of faith.
Eating is the first magic ritual, an act that transmits life energy from one object to another, according to cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker in his posthumously published book Escape from Evil. All animals must feed on other life to sustain themselves, whether in the form of breastmilk, plants, or the corpses of other animals. The act of incorporation, of taking a once-living thing into your own body, is necessary for all animals existence. It is also disturbing and unsavory to think about, since it draws a direct connection between eating and death.
Human self-awareness means that, from a relatively early age, we are also aware of death. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Becker hypothesized that the fear of deathand the need to suppress that fearis what drives much of human behavior. This idea went on, in social psychology, to the form the basis of Terror Management Theory.
Ancient humans must have decided, once their bellies were full, that there was more to life than mere survival and staring mortality in the face. They went on to build things in which they could find distraction, comfort, recreation, and meaning. They built cultures in which death became another rite of passage, not the end of everything. They made structures to live in, wrote songs to sing to each other, and added spices to their food, which they cooked in different styles. Humans are supported by a self-created system of meanings, symbols, rituals, and etiquette. Food and eating are part of this.
The act of ingestion is embroidered with so much cultural meaning that, for most people, its roots in spare, brutal survival are entirely hidden. Even for people in extreme poverty, for whom survival is a more immediate concern, the cultural meanings of food remain critical. Wealthy or poor, we eat to celebrate, we eat to mourn, we eat because its mealtime, we eat as a way to bond with others, we eat for entertainment and pleasure. It is not a coincidence that the survival function of food is buried beneath all of thiswho wants to think about staving off death each time they tuck into a bowl of cereal? Forgetting about death is the entire point of food culture.
When it comes to food, Becker said that humans quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment, and that the desire for more lifenot just delaying death today, but clearing the bar of mortality entirelygrew into an obsession with transforming the self into a perfected object that might achieve a sort of immorality. Diet culture and its variations, such as clean eating, are cultural structures we have built to attempt to transcend our animality.
By creating and following diets, humans not only eat to stay alive, but they fit themselves into a cultural edifice that is larger, and more permanent, than their bodies. It is a sort of immortality ritual, and rituals must be performed socially. Clean eating rarely, if ever, occurs in secret. If you havent evangelized about it, joined a movement around it, or been praised publicly for it, have you truly cleansed?
As humans, we are possibly the most promiscuous omnivores ever to wander the earth. We dine on animals, insects, plants, marine life, and occasionally non-food: dirt, clay, chalk, even once, famously, bicycles and airplanes
We are not pandas, chastely satisfied with munching through a square mile of bamboo. We seek variety and novelty, and at the same time, we carry an innate fear of food. This is described by the famous omnivores paradox, which (Michael Pollan notwithstanding) is not mere confusion about choosing what to eat in a cluttered food marketplace. The omnivores paradox was originally defined by psychological researcher Paul Rozin as the anxiety that arises from our desire to try new foods (neophilia) paired with our inherited fear of unknown foods (neophobia) that could turn out to be toxic. All omnivores feel these twin pressures, but none more acutely than humans. If it werent for the small chance of death lurking behind every food choice and every dietary ideology, choosing what to eat from a crowded marketplace wouldnt be considered a dilemma. Instead, we would call it the omnivores fun time at the supermarket, and people wouldnt repost so many Facebook memes about the necessity of drinking a gallon of water daily, or the magical properties of apple cider vinegar and coconut oil. Everyone would be just a little bit calmer about food.
Humans do not have a single, definitive rulebook to direct our eating, despite the many attempts nutrition scientists, dietitians, chefs, and celebrities have made to write one. Each of us has to negotiate the desire for food and fear of the unknown when we are still too young to read, calculate calories, or understand abstract ideas about nutrition. Almost all children go through a phase of pickiness with eating. It seems to be an evolved survival mechanism that prevents usonce we are mobile enough to put things in our mouths, but not experienced enough to know the difference between safe and dangerous foodsfrom eating something toxic. We have all been children trying to shove the world in our mouths, even while we spit out our strained peas.
Our omnivorousness gives us an exhilarating and terrifying amount of freedom. As social creatures, we seek safety from that freedom in our culture, and in a certain amount of conformity. We prefer to follow leaders weve invested with authority to blaze a path to safety.
The heroes of contemporary diet culture are wellness gurus who claim to have cured themselves of fatness, disease, and meaninglessness through the unimpeachable purity of cold-pressed vegetable juice. Many traditional heroes earn their status by confronting and defeating death, like Hercules, who was granted immortality after a lifetime of capturing or killing a menagerie of dangerous beasts, including the three-headed dog of Hades himself. Wellness gurus are the glamorously clean eaters whose triumph over sad, dirty animality is evidenced by fresh, thoughtfully-lit photographs of green smoothies in wholesome Mason jars, and by their own bodies, beautifully rendered.
There are no such heroes to be found in a peer-reviewed paper with a large, anonymous sample, and small effect sizes, written in impenetrable statistician-ese, and hedged with disclosures about limitations. But the image of a person you can relate to on a human level, smiling out at you from the screen, standing in a before-and-after, shoulder-to-shoulder with their former, lesser, processed-food-eating self, is something else altogether. Their creation myth and redemptionhow they were lost but now are foundis undeniably compelling.
There are twin motives underlying human behavior, according to Beckerthe urge for heroism and the desire for atonement. At a fundamental level, people may feel a twinge of guilty for having a body, taking up space, and having appetites that devour the living things around us. They may crave expiation of this guilt, and culture provides not only the means to achieve plentiful material comfort, but also ways to sacrifice part of that comfort to achieve redemption. It is not enough for wellness gurus to simply amass the riches of health, beauty, and statusthey must also deny themselves sugar, grains, and flesh. They must pay.
Only those with status and resources to spare can afford the most impressive gestures of renunciation. Look at all they have! The steel-and-granite kitchen! The Le Creuset collection! The Vitamix! The otherworldly glow! They could afford to eat cake, should the bread run out, but they quit sugar. Theyre only eating twigs and moss now. What more glamorous way to triumph over dirt and animality and death? And you can, too. That is, if you have the time and money to spend juicing all that moss and boiling the twigs until theyre soft enough to eat.
This is how the omnivores paradox breeds diet culture: Overwhelmed by choice, by the dim threat of mortality that lurks beneath any wrong choice, people crave rules from outside themselves, and successful heroes to guide them to safety. People willingly, happily, hand over their freedom in exchange for the bondage of a diet that forbids their most cherished foods, that forces them to rely on the unfamiliar, unpalatable, or inaccessible, all for the promise of relief from choice and the attendant responsibility. If you are free to choose, you can be blamed for anything that happens to you: weight gain, illness, agingin short, your share in the human condition, including the random whims of luck and your own inescapable mortality.
Humans are the only animals aware of our mortality, and we all want to be the person whose death comes as a surprise rather than a pathetic inevitability. We want to be the one of whom people say, But she did everything right. If we cannot escape death, maybe we can find a way to be declared innocent and undeserving of it.
But diet culture is constantly shifting. Todays token foods of health may seem tainted or pass tomorrow, and within diet culture, there are contradictory ideologies: what is safe and clean to one is filth and decadence to another. Legumes and grains are wholesome, life-giving staples to many vegan eaters, while they represent the corrupting influences of agriculture on the state of nature to those who prefer a meat-heavy, grain-free Paleo diet.
Nutrition science itself is a self-correcting series of refutations. There is no certain path to purity and blamelessness through food. The only common thread between competing dietary ideologies is the belief that by adhering to them, one can escape the human condition, and become a purer, less animal, kind of being.
This is why arguments about diet get so vicious, so quickly. You are not merely disputing facts, you are pitting your wild gamble to avoid death against someone elses. You are poking at their life raft. But if their diet proves to be the One True Diet, yours must not be. If they are right, you are wrong. This is why diet culture seems so religious. People adhere to a dietary faith in the hopes they will be saved. That if theyre good enough, pure enough in their eating, they can keep illness and mortality at bay. And the pursuit of life everlasting always requires a leap of faith.
To eat without restriction, on the other hand, is to risk being unclean, and to beat your own uncertain path. It is admitting your mortality, your limitations and messiness as a biological creature, while accepting the freedoms and pleasures of eating, and taking responsibility for choosing them.
Unclean, agnostic eating means taking your best stab in the dark, accepting that there is much we dont know. But we do know that there is no One True Diet. There may be as many right ways to eat as there are peoplenone of whom can live forever, all of whom must make of eating and their lives some personal, temporary meaning.
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Eating Toward Immortality - The Atlantic
Walt Whitman’s super trendy diet tips – New York Post
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When he wasnt singing the song of himself, strolling across Brooklyn Bridge or writing beautiful poetry, Leaves of Grass writer Walt Whitman had sex, diet and health advice to share.
Written on a freelance basis under the pen name Mose Velsor, Whitmans 13-part Manly Health and Training tips for eating, sleeping and exercise originally appeared in the New York Atlas in the fall of 1858. The columns were buried on microfilm in library archives and were only discovered in 2015 by Zachary Turpin, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Houston. Whitmans compiled advice now appears in a new book, Manly Health and Training (Regan Arts, out now).
While Whitmans guidance can be a bit eccentric, some of his tips are right on the money (and others sound like precursors to the paleo and Whole30 diet trends). Heres a sampling of Walts wisdom:./K
Be a carnivore: Let the main part of the diet be meat, to the exclusion of all else.
Dont eat late at night: Portions of heavy food, or large quantities of any kind, taken at evening, attract an undue amount of the nervous energy to the stomach, and give an overaction to the feelings and powers, which is sure to be followed the next day by more or less bad reactionary consequences.
Go to bed by 10 p.m.: ... with a plentiful supply of good air during the six, seven or eight hours that are spent in sleep.
Engage in vigorous exercise: Habituate yourself to the brisk walk in the fresh air to the exercise of pulling the oar and to the loud declamation upon the hills, or along the shore.
But dont overdo it: Excessive toil, whether of the body or the mind, is just as hurtful to health and longevity as the stagnant condition of the organs.
And while youre at it, grow a beard: The beard is a great sanitary protection to the throat, Whitman writes news that will no doubt excite male hipsters. For purposes of health it should always be worn, just as much as the hair of the head should be.
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Walt Whitman's super trendy diet tips - New York Post
What kind of diet do they keep in ‘Santa Clarita’? – USA TODAY
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Joel Hammond (Timothy Olyphant) finds another use for a garden shovel in Netflix's 'Santa Clarita Diet.'(Photo: Saeed Adyani, Netflix)
Spoiler alert:This story contains details about Netflix's undead comedy Santa Clarita Diet.
TV isn't known for gory comedies, especially not centered on a tame married couple of Realtors. But when Sheila Hammond (Drew Barrymore) becomes undead in the premiere of Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet (now streaming), all hell breaks loose, even as her loving husband Joel (Timothy Olyphant) tries to help.
Victor Fresco, who created the series, describes it as a mashup of Desperate Housewives and The Walking Dead."I liked the lightness and the perfect organization of those planned suburbs, vs. the chaos that happensbehind closed doors," he says of the series, shot on location in the Los Angeles-area suburb.
USA TODAY
Drew Barrymore reveals the secret to the 'Santa Clarita Diet'
When he readthe script, Olyphant thought, "This is most outrageous thing I've ever read, and yet at the same time it's sort of oddly familiar and to some degree refreshingly old-fashioned," he says. And the fact that the unexpected circumstance awakens their vaguely discontented lives. "It's one of the best things that's happened in Joel's life in some time. It's definitely not the way he saw his day going. What's fun about the show is it's like any long-term relationship where someone decides to explore a side of themselves they've been afraid to explore in the past. It's the most thrilling thing that's happened, and also the scariest. Yougottadecide whether to step up and stay with her or cut bait and walk away." (Spoiler: He stays).
At first, Sheila seeks sustenance from raw hamburger meat, but quickly craves the human kind. Her first victim: Gary (Nathan Fillion), a creepy rival agentwhose intestines she snacks on in the yard of their split-level.
Nathan Fillion plays Gary, an ill-fated rival real-estate agent, on Netflix's 'Santa Clarita Diet.'(Photo: Saeed Adyani, Netflix)
"We wanted a big name in that role, where you'd be surprised that they die ... and get eaten," Fresco says. But "it was100 degrees in Santa Clarita," and Fillion was"outdoors all day, lying in the dirt. It was a lot to ask of him."
And for Barrymore, who takes to freezing body parts for later consumption. "I was literally in the shower at the end of every work day on the sound stages;I was covered in it," she says of the fake blood. (She didn't much care for the smell of the transformative, copious vomit in the series opener). "I invested in a lot of shaving cream because that was the only way to get that stuff off."
Dinner can be messy for Sheila Hammond (Drew Barrymore) in Netflix comedy 'Santa Clarita Diet.'(Photo: Erica Parise, Netflix)
Fresco says the realistic limbs and innards were made from red-beet paste, raw fishor a gummy-bear material that was sweet and elastic. (The beet paste was the most disgusting).
As the series progresses, Joel becomes an accomplice, providing new meals ofa Porsche-driving jerk and their cop neighbor (Ricardo Chavira), whom he dispatches with a shovel. The Hammonds' daughter (Liv Hewson) and her pal, a nerdy neighbor (Skyler Gisondo) also are drawn in.
USA TODAY
Review: Netflix's 'Santa Clarita' is a diet that's definitely worth keeping
And in the season's final episode, Portia de Rossi, who co-starred in Fresco's short-lived ABC comedy Better Off Ted, plays a woman similarly "steely, smart as hell, and completely disconnected emotionally," who might help Sheila find a cure to what ails her, after inevitable decay sets in.
But the end of the first 10-episode season brings an arrest and more trouble,"They're in very different places physically, and they're both in trouble in their own way," Fresco says. So what would a potential Season 2 look like? "What's strong from beginning to end is they love each other and they'll always love each other. So they're going to work together and they're going to figure this out and get through it."
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What kind of diet do they keep in 'Santa Clarita'? - USA TODAY
Is the Paleo Diet for You? – Men’s Journal – Men’s Journal
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Credit: Charlie Schuck / Getty Images
The paleo diet, which you might've heard about from your CrossFitter friend or a disciple of barefoot running, has a shaky reputation. While its advocates praise its whole-food simplicity, its dissenters are (correctly) skeptical that Paleolithic men weren't eating heaping bison burgers and that the diet is more of a tough-guy trend than something positive for your body. But when you trim away the hype, paleo can be a good way to increase energy, improve gut health, and even lose a few pounds if you're doing it right.
Paleo maximizes the amount of nutrition youre intaking from your diet, says Kim Jordan, a nutritionist at Kettlebell Kitchen, the Brooklyn-based meal-delivery system that specializes in paleo. You end up feeling more sustained and satiated, which translates to better energy levels and fewer cravings.
Those overall health benefits make paleo an easy sell, but with so many versions out there, it can be tough to tell if youre following the real deal. Jordan and fellow Kettlebell dietician Joanne Mumbey have some insider tips to share.
Origin Story
First: Get out of your head that the diet is supposed to mimic the gram-for-gram diet of some regionally ambiguous caveman. If you look at research, there were hundreds of different ancient diets, says Mumbey. Where your ancestors came from might look a little bit different than where mine came from in terms of diet.
Think about it: Early hunter-gatherers living in Mesopotamia wouldve had access to much different plants and animals than people living in, say, Siberia. Instead, the Kettlebell Kitchen staff advocates for avoiding processed foods above all else. So instead of dairy, legumes, grains, soy, and processed sugars, think grass-fed meats, eggs, fish, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and fruits, plus olive oil, honey, maple syrup, and flours made from paleo-friendly foods.
The Benefits
Paleo is actually a two-pronged approach to eating. First, it rids your grocery cart of sugars, dairy, and grains in an effort to soothe intestinal inflammation. Then, in lieu of all the fillers, you double down on protein and fats from meat, nuts, and seeds to keep you feeling full, and plenty of fruits and vegetables to get your carbs with a monster side of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.
Added bonus: A paleo diet can help you beat cravings. A person may think they need ice cream every night, but once their body starts to regulate, their tastes change a little bit, Jordan says. They find that they dont want it that often. I think thats why people stick with it long term. Its a lifestyle, not a short-term diet.
Smart Substitutions
The cost of paleo gets a little daunting when your grocery list is all grass-fed beef. But a little creativity can transform paleo from diet to feast without tripling your weekly costs. Spaghetti squash and zucchini noodles replace pasta, and a box grater turns cauliflower into the perfect rice substitute. Slice a sweet potato into quarter-inch-thick planks and toast them in a 375-degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes, then top with almond butter or a fried egg. On the sweet side, try blending a frozen banana with some coconut milk, honey, and cacao nibs for ice cream minus the guilt. If you can find it, the Kettlebell Kitchen staff swears by Ottos yucca flour, which can be used in pizza crusts, cookies, and pasta.
At the end of the day, you're looking for a diet that makes you feel good physically and mentally. Make dietary changes that will actually make you look forward to your food. It'll make you stay on track without burning out. Weve worked with people of all different ages and with all different lifestyles, Jordan says. Its adaptable to anybody. You cant really go wrong with eating whole, nutrient-dense foods and you can have a real life.
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Is the Paleo Diet for You? - Men's Journal - Men's Journal
The Ketogenic Diet: Separating Fact from Fiction with VitalityPro’s Dr. Frank Merritt – TheInertia.com
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Photo: Dr. Frank Merritt, working with The King.
A couple of years ago it was the Paleo Diet that was the biggest nutrition trend. But while Paleo is still popular, a new variation is taking up more and more column inches and space on bookstore shelves: the ketogenic diet. Its easy to over-simplify the keto approach and reduce it to just another high fat, low carb approach to eating. But as it turns out, theres some sound physiology behind it and all those keto recipe books dont just exist to make some authors a quick buck. We caught up with Dr. Frank Merritt, a co-founder of VitalityPro who also collaborates with Power Speed Endurances Brian Mackenzie, to find out more.
How does ketogenesis work?
We used to think that the heart was the engine of the human body, and thats why so much training is focused on developing its capacity. But as we looked into the research, we found that while the heart is of course still important, in performance training its actually the myocytes [cells found in muscle tissue] that are the bodys main engine. Like a car engine, these cells require two things oxygen and fuel. At VitalityPro, we help athletes develop their lungs to improve their oxygen supply and their liver to improve their fuel supply. The fuel comes from the liver, which is designed for both gluconeogenesis [producing glucose] and ketogenesis. When were fueling ketogenically, the liver is breaking down certain amino acids and fatty acids into ketones, which can provide long-lasting energy.
Why do many people have limited ketogensis?
Our culture encourages us to eat meals at set times and then snack continually throughout the day. When we succumb to this habitual hunger all the time, were biasing gluconeogenesis, particularly when we consume a lot of carbohydrates and simple sugars. Among athletes, we see people reaching for an energy drink or gel every 30 minutes. This gives them a high, but as soon as the crash kicks in they need another hit. As a result of this constant topping up, theyre just feeding the gluconeogenesis mechanism. If theyre suddenly cut off from this very limited supply of sugar they bonk. This is because their body has become inefficient at fueling through ketogenesis. Constantly taking in simple sugars doesnt just affect the liver, but the entire system, including the pancreas, which governs the liver through glucagon and insulin also becomes inefficient through modern eating habits. This pattern cascades throughout the bodys many organs and systems causing havoc.
How can we improve our ability to fuel through ketogenesis?
The antidote to habituated hunger is fasting. The Bible and just about every other sacred text encourages people to fast regularly as its a beneficial practice. The word breakfast means to literally break your fast. But because it requires discipline and feels uncomfortable at first, most of us dont want to do it. We tend to overlook that everything in life, including our minds and bodies, is trainable. This includes liver function. So if we end our dependence on sugars, fast more often and only eat when were truly hungry instead of heading to the refrigerator every time we feel a twinge of hunger, we can recondition the ability to provide energy with ketones.
What are the performance benefits of ketogenesis?
We have elite Division I football players who come to our VitalityPro camps. These guys are incredibly fast, strong and powerful. But after a few minutes of high output, our training staff and I can outperform them. How is this possible? Its certainly not sheer athleticism or genetics because they have us beat on both of those. Its because weve trained our liver, adrenal system, and lungs, which most coaches dont even think about. If you take two athletes who are exactly the same in every category and one of them has a liver thats equally trained at producing glucose and ketones for energy, theyre going to outperform the other person each and every time.
So do you advocate a high fat, high protein diet?
I have a friend who refers to our country as The Excited States of America. When it comes to health and performance, he has a point. One week were telling people to eat a lot of carbs, the next its a lot of fat and the next its a lot of protein. We get caught up in these fads, but everyones physiology is different. I suggest self-experimenting and finding your ideal balance between high-quality fat, protein, and carbs. But one things for sure relying on a lot of simple sugars to give you energy is not a long-term path to success.
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The Ketogenic Diet: Separating Fact from Fiction with VitalityPro's Dr. Frank Merritt - TheInertia.com
Diet quality improves fitness among the fittest – Science Daily
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Diet quality improves fitness among the fittest Science Daily "Whether your goal is to improve fitness or heart health, the quality of your diet and a multi-dimensional exercise training regimen (PRISE) can make all the difference," said Skidmore College exercise scientist Paul Arciero. "It's not about simply ... |
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Diet quality improves fitness among the fittest - Science Daily
One gym is taking the workout world by storm (PLNT) – Business Insider
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AP/Richard Drew
Planet Fitness, the low-cost fitness center known for its motivational mottos, is taking the nation by storm.
In 2006, Planet Fitness was the most popular gym search on Google in 7 states, mostly in the Northeast. Now, Planet Fitness is #1 in 40 states and #1 nationally, according to a note by Macquarie Capital released on Monday.
Ateam led by Matthew Brookes analyzed Google Trends data for search traffic in the USA over the past decade. The team compared search resultsfor Planet Fitness, LA Fitness (the largest gym chain by 2015 revenue), 24 hour fitness (the second largest gym by revenue), Gold's Gym (the largest chain back in 2006), and Anytime Fitness, the largest competing gym franchiser to Planet Fitness.
And Planet Fitness came out on top.
AP/Richard Drew
The fitness chainis showing a strong start to the year. Searches in January and February 2017 are up 28%, faster than the 9% growth this time last year, according to Macquarie.
Macquarie analysts rate Planet Fitness an "outperform" and "believe it is Planet Fitness that is 'bringing it' to the competition and not the other way around."
At only $10 a month, it's easy to understand the popularity of the franchise, which maintains a"100% judgment free" motto and whose gyms display messages of "You Belong." On December 30, the gym unveiled a new brand campaign:The World Judges, We Don't. At Planet Fitness, Be Free.
Forcomparison, a membership at popular fitness chain Equinox, although not a direct competitor to lower cost gyms, runs at $215 a month with a $300 initiation fee and $290 a month for locations worldwide with a $500 initiation fee.
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One gym is taking the workout world by storm (PLNT) - Business Insider
Jawbone Bails Out of Consumer Fitness Tracker Market – The Mac Observer (blog)
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Apple and Fitbit are about to lose a competitor because Jawbone is ready to shut down its consumer fitness tracker business. The company is shifting to devices for health care providers.
Jawbone throws in the towel on the consumer fitness wearables market
The business change, which was confirmed by TechCrunch, comes in the wake of reports that Jawbone has run out of money. Currently, the company is lining up new investors as it shifts to what it hopes will be a higher margin market.
For Jawbone, the hope is that the fourth time is a charm. The company started as a headset maker, shifted to speakers, and then on to its wearable fitness trackers. Jawbones fitness trackers faced mixed reviews, but its hoping to have better luck with its devices for health care providers.
Jawbone is also planning to develop its own software-based services to go along with the health devices. Assuming both are successful, Jawbone will transform into a hardware company with higher margin products, and a software company with a recurring revenue model.
The move out of the consumer market isnt much of a surprise considering the limited success Jawbone has had. The company never could catch up with Fitbit, or Apple once the Apple Watch hit store shelves.
What Jawbone has going for it is tenacity. The company has reinvented itself three times already, so making a change again is reasonable. The big question now is whether or not Jawbone can find enough money to transform itself into a health care provider product company before it has to close its doors.
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Jawbone Bails Out of Consumer Fitness Tracker Market - The Mac Observer (blog)
Putting the fun in fitness is app’s goal – Albuquerque Journal
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Thats a phrase Steve Holden is often asked.
Yet the only thing the 58-year-old is serious about is getting healthy.
Which is why he took on the role of Old School Coach, a new app launching later this month in Apples App Store.
My entire life has been filled with fitness, he says. I look for ways to change peoples frame of mind when it comes to being healthy. Its about being proactive and changing beliefs.
As Old School Coach, Holden keys in on his old-fashioned brand of comedy.
The Old School Coach app will launch later this month.
Its loud, in your face and funny.
He will instantly remind you of your high school football coach or gym class back in middle or high school. You know, the type that said, Walk it off, after being injured.
Holden is a real-life fitness trainer and motivational coach with 40 years of experience.
The app has daily messages from coach that will make you laugh and think about fitness in a different light. It will also help set daily goals as well as offer a tip of the day from the coach himself.
Im never trying to be mean, he says of the approach. I do want to help people get fit and take on a new lifestyle. Its about retraining the way we think about fitness. Its not only about working out, but about eating healthy and thinking healthy.
Holden comes with decades of experience.
He began his karate training in 1973 with Michael Campos.
A 13-year career as the undefeated heavyweight full contact kickboxer.
Not to mention a fifth-degree black belt in Zen-Do Kai and a sixth-degree black belt in Kenpo.
He can often be found around the Duke City teaching classes with the SilverSneakers, which is a workout group for seniors.
Working on the app and getting it running are Cliff and Lori Lewis.
Cliff Lewis, a theoretical physicist, developed the app in Albuquerque.
Lori Lewis has been the force in getting the word out about Old School Coach.
The idea for the app came when I was taking classes with Steve, Lori Lewis says. Eventually, we had him move into our house and become our personal trainer. Then the idea hit us, we should do an app because what Steve has to say about fitness is amazing.
Holden often films his fitness videos in various locations in Albuquerque.
He says getting up and out of the house is one of the first steps into changing how you think about fitness.
Finding a way to work out another step, he says. Too many times, people will get injured and then stop working out entirely. You dont need to do that. You have to stay consistent with everything you do in your life. The app will help get people started on the right track.
We welcome suggestions for the daily Bright Spot. Send to newsroom@abqjournal.com.
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Putting the fun in fitness is app's goal - Albuquerque Journal