I have a neighbor who's struggled with his weight for decades.  A former high school wrestling champ, the usual adult pressures of career and family (he has five sons) drew his attention away from athletic endeavors, and from healthy living in general, and he found himself ballooning seventy pounds over his fighting weight.  

When I tell people I'm a personal trainer, I often find myself in sympathy with members of the clergy:  guilt comes pouring out of people I speak to, completely unprompted:

I used to work out.  But ever since our eleventh kid, I've been s'darn busy.

Back in the day I could bench press 280.  I looked like one of the guys in the muscle magazines.  

I wish I had TIME to work out!*

(*this one comes with a guilt-right-back-atcha, the implication being that if you DO have time to work out, you must be shirking other duties.  I'm inclined to wonder what other pressing duties people have at 5:30 AM.)

Anyway, for most of the time I've known him, Jay has been overweight, but disinclined to do much about it except lament his rapid slide into a Hitchcockian silhouette, the impossibility of eating healthfully or getting exercise.  As is my usual m.o. with such pre-contemplaters, I affirmed how tough it must be for him and said I'd be happy to help him with a workout program should he ever want to hit the gym (I don't evangelize in person--only in this space). 

But then Jay got gout.  Suddenly many of his joints were in agonizing pain.  Walking was excruciating.  His fingers hurt, so typing become almost impossible, and that sucked, because he's a writer.  He went to the doctor who told him to cut out red meat and alcohol, binge on veggies and health food, and generally live healthy.

Jay's been eating well for about five weeks now, and last time I saw him I barely recognized him.  The weight's been flying off, and he looks great:  better skin tone, more energy, laughing more.  The pain's gone.  He seems happier.  Times are tough for Jay, just like they are for the rest of us, but he seems more able to weather it now.  

I kidded Jay that maybe the gout was the best thing that happened to him, and he quite earnestly concurred.  

Now:  Jay hadn't been told anything that everyone reading this doesn't already know:  that eating clean will improve your health and body composition, make you feel better.  Your life will exponentially improve.  But who among us can commit to eating well without a health scare to cattle-prod us there?  

The fact is that eating clean WORKS.  It's the cure for a lot of what ails us.  The problem is, we just don't believe it.  We really, really want health to come from an infomercial, a pill, five minutes a day for two weeks.

Similar story:  in college I used to get styes in my eyes.  Happens a lot to college kids:  lots of reading, little sleep, lots of squinting at blackboards and computer screens.   When I was a senior, I came down with a doozy.  Classmates started calling me The Elephant Man.  I looked like a freak, even from twenty yards.  

Problem was, I had an audition coming up for grad school acting programs in one short week, and usually these things lasted a month or more.  Presumably the auditors could have looked past my grotesque appearance, but psychologically it would have been tough for me.  And I didn't want to change my audition piece to The Elephant Man.

I went to the campus doc and got his recommendation:  hot compresses.  Just soak a washcloth in hot water and hold it over the swollen eye several times a day.  I'd heard this old wives' tale before, and tried it, but it never seemed to do much, but now it was my only hope.  

So I became compress-boy for a week.  Between classes, I'd scurry to the bathroom, rig up a compress out of hot water and institutional brown paper towel, and hold that puppy on there for a good half of my next class.  Then I'd do the same thing at meals, when I woke up in the morning, before I crashed at night.  

In less than a week, my stye was gone, and I looked totally normal.  Like the healthy diet, the compress thing does work-but only when you actually commit to it and do it.   

Gray Cook often recommends the Turkish get-up and the yoga sun salutation for people who have movement issues.  "They say, I can't do that after just a few tries.  I say, well-do it until you can.  The movement itself will heal you.  Not talking about it.  Not watching videos of it.  Doing it.  Until you've done 300 Turkish get-ups on each side, I'm not really interested in your comments."

Whether it's weight loss or muscle gain, improved athletic performance or pain relief, most of us already have the information we need to meet our goals:  we know what a good diet is.  We know what focused and consistent exercise feels like.  We know the drills that will improve our back pain-all we have to do is implement them.

Ideally we move into the implementation phase before we're crippled by gout.   

Have a good weekend--Andrew