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Tackling Obesity and Global Sustainability
If you want to find out the best ways of looking after your own health, as well as the overall health of our world, then the book to read is 'Fighting Globesity'.
This highly informative book is unique because it brilliantly ties together two major issues currently facing all of us, namely keeping ourselves fit and healthy, and secondly, ensuring that we properly manage our planet's resources not only for the current generation but for the ones to follow as well.
Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, has described this particular book as being a 'fascinating description of how exercising regularly and eating better can play a major role in global sustainability'.
But before venturing any further, it is important to know exactly what 'globesity' actually means that's because you wont find this newly coined word in any dictionary, at least not at present but maybe some time in the future.
The authors of 'Fighting Globesity', Dr Jackie Mills and Phillip Mills, define 'globesity' in their book as being 'a term we use to describe the relationship that currently operates between personal fitness, national health systems and global sustainability. We believe it's an important relationship, and that if you understand it you'll be empowered and motivated to take some simple actions, essential actions, that will dramatically improve your life and make a powerful contribution to the health of our planet'.
There are two reasons that I recommend that you read 'Fighting Globesity'.
The first reason is that it can help you and your loved ones from getting fat that results far too commonly these days from overeating and being inactive!
Consider the following sobering statistics that appear in the opening chapter of the book:
'We now work 30 per cent more hours than we did in the 1960s. We no longer have time for traditional sports and leisure activities. We dont exercise, we eat calorie-rich fast food and consequently we get fat really fat.
Over 30 per cent of Americans are now clinically obese and 70 per cent 70 per cent are either overweight or obese. Three hundred thousand people a year die from obesity-related diseases in the US alone.
And it's not just an American problem: the rest of the world is catching up fast. Obesity levels in most developed nations have doubled during the past two decades'.
The second reason for reading this particular book is to alert all of us to the fact too that over consumption and misuse of the earth's resources is causing significant global problems as well as individual ones.
The authors of 'Fighting Globesity' point out that 'like an overweight individual, as a race we are simply consuming far more than we can healthily maintain. And we have started to discover the 'inconvenient truth' (to use Al Gore's phrase) that some of the resulting illnesses atmospheric destruction, resource-based wars and economic disasters, for instance cannot be insulated against by class barriers or national borders.
In today's globalised world these things affect us all. We all, therefore, have a huge challenge ahead to create global sustainability'.
The content of 'Fighting Globesity' has been divided up into an introduction, three major sections and a couple of appendices.
The introduction to the book sets the scene by providing a comprehensive explanation of 'globesity' and what we need to think about in order to combat it effectively.
The first and second sections of the book are respectively devoted to the issues of adopting an exercised-based lifestyle and eating more healthily. Examples of just some of the wide variety of topics that are fully discussed there include the following:
Motivating yourself to exercise more.
Setting exercise goals (and most importantly, how to achieve those goals).
The use of training cycles.
Creating life long healthy habits.
Making fitness part of your social schedule.
Finding a favourite sport.
Turning exercise into fun.
Tried and trusted methods for controlling calorie intake.
Finding out how to eat more nutritious, less polluted foods.
An introduction to nutritional medicine.
Dealing with health problems such as depression, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome.
In the third section of 'Fighting Globesity', the focus turns away from individual health issues and instead looks at global health.
The half dozen chapters that comprise this part of the book challenge us to tackle the major global sustainability challenges that currently face all nations droughts and water shortages; global warming; pollution; toxic waste; over population; depletion of energy resources (how long will there be a ready supply of oil?); and the ever widening gap between the poor and the affluent of the world.
After reading so far, you might be wondering what you, as a sole individual can do, to stop, eliminate or reverse all of these global problems.
The short answer is that there is plenty that you can do. And 'Fighting Globesity' contains different lists of actions to help all of us to get started.
Dr Jackie Mills and Phillip Mills, the authors of 'Fighting Globesity', explain that, by consulting these lists, the 'aim should be to do the things that you are capable of, at the greatest speed you can afford'.
They add that 'there's a nice kind of serendipity at work here, as most of these actions have the double benefit of not only contributing to planetary health but also improving your personal life or that of your family or business'.
The book ends with a couple of handy appendices.
The first of these contains a weight-loss tips checklist while the second one covers desirable energy levels along with nutritional advice that can help people to balance energy intake with daily activity levels.
In summing up, I strongly recommend that you read this book, and take heed of its advice and insights, before it is too late.
Too late for you as an individual, and too late for all of us from a global perspective.
For more information about 'Fighting Globesity', or to purchase a copy of it, go to the relevant section of the 'Random House' site, the publisher of the book. To do so now, CLICK HERE