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On the weekend while I was camping, I meet Chris who started riding to work 20 odd years ago.

When he started cycling, Chris’s workmates would laugh at him, “why on earth would you want to ride when you have a car” This was a common reaction amongst the other printers who had difficulty comprehending the concept of regular exercise.

Well 20 years later after bumping into one of the guys who laughed at him has changed hi view from ignorance to envy after seeing what awesome shape he is in.

Regular exercise has helped keep Chris’s energy balance in check, rather than sitting in traffic for 55 minutes, his commute to work only takes 5 minutes more while he watches people in their cars getting frustrated and angry as they grind to a halt.

The great thing about exercising regularly is the cravings for junk food and unhealthy meal options disappearing. The body is quite a complex biological system, but when you’re more sedentary in your lifestyle, unhealthy food seems to be more attractive and desirable.

A lot of the printers at his current workplace are overweight and look extremely unhealthy. While abusing your body may seem ok when you’re younger, eventually it does catch up with you.

Quite often there may be a few of us that plan on riding to work but we often don’t place our health as a priority in our life.

So hope on the bike today, with new bike friendly facilities now available for city commuters, what are you waiting for?

This new video from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) highlights the relationship between the consumption of fast foods and high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart attacks. Look at films like supersize me that are still being referenced about the effects of sustained burger, fries and coke consumption on the body.

While any discussion about McDonalds good or bad does reinforce their brands position as a takeaway food delivery system, it does slowly bring some consciousness to the effects about eating a diet high in fats, sugar and salt.

While McDonalds does have healthy meal options (whether this is healthy is another discussion), most of their in store menu real estate is devoted to fries, burgers, chicken and coke.

I know in Australia that the freeway overpasses have billboards about getting $1.95 burger, I’m still yet to see a billboard that says by an apple for breakfast and get one free.

Whether this has any effect is debatable given Jamie Oliver’s recent documentary into the diets of American children. The carcass of a chicken including bones and other parts of the chicken (apart from the flesh) were blended up and shown to kids, they quickly forgot about the blended chicken bones once it was pressed into a nugget, deep fried and served on a plate.

Like any diet it’s about moderation and the occasional consumption of fast food is ok but this has to be tempered with some guidance, substituting a cooked home meal with burgers, chicken and pizza will not be great in controlling the risk factors for cardiovascular disease and stroke.

This all occurred within a short time period so given the short attention span of the children in Jamie’s doco, it will be interesting to see the effect the campaign has.

I came across an inspirational person on 2 counts, firstly she had lost a massive amount of weight and secondly hiked up the face of Cradle Mountain in ballet type shoes.

Over a 12 month period this person through commitment and dedication went from a size 22 to size 16 in 12 months, a result of controlling her energy intake and walking regularly. An awesome achievement that demonstrates with the right mind set, anything is possible with the belief system in place.

The second part of the story is the not giving up and making do with what is available. The day before, this person went on a 6 hour hike and got blisters from her runners so not wanting to miss out on the walk to the summit of Cradle Mountain, she used her ballet style shoes to make the hike to the top. The section of track she climbed was marked “Extreme” meaning appropriate foot wear is recommended. With a top temperature of 15º and misty conditions, climbing over wet rocks is difficult at the best of times.

You can see from the photo the track follows the front of the face of the mountains in the background.

So it just goes to show that anything is truly possible is you really want to make it happen.

A recent Nielsen poll found that Austtralians are on average spending 17.6 hours per week on the internet with 75% of those users using social networking sites. More concerning is children spending up to 22 hours in front of the computer screen surfing the net rather than being involved in physical exercise.

With Australia’s obesity rate going out of control there needs to be a change in our technilogical behavior. More alarming is that this phenomenon is starting to lead to obsessive compulsive type behavior and stress.

Part of leading a healthy lifestyle is having downtime to switch off and disconnect. I find it concerning that people cannot resist the temptation to check emails after work hours on there new smart phones even if there is a high probability it’s work related.

As technological advances in the area of instant communication and connecting with information, we are slowly eroding any down time.

It’s interesting that people often site the lack of time or tiredness for not exercising or adopting a healthier eating regime but as a society we are prioritising gluing our eyeballs to the computer or mobile phone screen, be it looking at/sending emails, SMS messaging, instant chat and surfing the internet.

I often wonder whether life back in the 1950′s may have been better for your health without all the latest technological gadgets.

We are moving towards a fatter, more fatigue society and unfortunately the internet and social networking responsibilities aren’t helping.

Is the corporatisation of exercise a good thing? Is having fun and exercise associated with a soft drink creating or maintaining a future client base and developing brand loyalty?

I road past this Coca Cola inflatable castle on the weekend and was surprised at the expense that a corporation had gone to create awareness of there products and the association of happiness with a Coke product.
Right up there is the word happiness for all to see.

It is a sad day when we leave providing fun exercise activities to major corporations. The government seems to be very good at collecting alcohol and tabacco taxes but seems to short fall in proving health services to children and young adults.

More and more we are seeing the corporates looking at new marketing initiatives and the latest battleground is people’s health and wellness.