- LOS ANGELES (AFP) -- At 90, American fitness pioneer Jack LaLanne is still
preaching what he practices: a sensible diet and regular exercise.
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- LaLanne, who has spent his life urging Americans to eat
better and exercise more, can still lift weights, do abdominal crunches
and hoist his 78-year-old wife Elaine.
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- "I've got no aches and no pains," he said.
"If I get a sniffle, it's gone the next day. Everything's working.
Just look at my wife. She's smiling."
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- LaLanne turned 90 Sunday, an event marked by nine hours
straight of reruns of his 1960's fitness show by a cable sports channel,
and numerous appearances on television and radio talk shows.
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- "Most people work at dying. I work at living. It's
a pain in the ass," LaLanne said. "You have to eat right and
exercise.
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- "Most people, when they reach a certain age, let
down and talk about what they used to do. Well, who gives a damn about
what you used to do? It's what you're doing now."
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- What he does now: exercises two hours a day, seven days
a week, and steers clear of meat, caffeine, white sugar and refined flour.
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- He was a pioneer of American fitness trends that saw
membership gyms sprout up all over the United States and housewives following
televised aerobics classes in their living rooms.
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- Those trends continue to proliferate today, from specialty
yoga to extreme sports to diet books that scale the bestseller lists, snapped
up by politicians, Hollywood celebrities and others.
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- LaLanne hails from California, long known for its cult
of the body and focus on the good life. A skinny high school dropout, he
attended a lecture on nutrition with his mother at 15 and never looked
back: he swore off sugar, went back to school, and became captain of the
football team.
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- In 1936, he founded the first health club in Oakland,
east of San Francisco, and went on to invent the first generation of exercise
equipment that is ubiquitous today.
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- As more and more American households acquired television
sets, he jumped on the bandwagon of another emerging trend, exercising
on air from 1951 to 1984, before millions of viewers.
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- "He was ahead of his time when it comes to pushing
the idea of fitness and weight training," says Dr Ron Davis, an American
Medical Association board member.
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- "This guy had some of the same stuff that (television
talk show celebrity) Oprah (Winfrey) has and (retired talk show star) Johnny
Carson had: the ability to insinuate themselves in the domestic space of
people's lives," adds Robert Thompson of The Center of the Study of
Popular Television at Syracuse University.
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- More than half a century after he began, LaLanne's message
is taking on new credibility -- even as reruns of his now quaint-looking
show are giving him something of a comeback.
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- His prescription for a long life? It all comes down to
diet, exercise and common sense.
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- "All these diets are from crackpots. You've got
to have a combination of everything -- fats, sugars, carbohydrates, protein.
The only way to lose fat is to count calories. There's no shortcuts."
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- As for exercise, thirty minutes thrice a week will suffice.
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- "You don't have to work out seven days a week,"
he said. "That's stupid. But it's what I do. I'm a nut."
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- Copyright © 2004 Agence France Presse. All rights
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of Agence France Presse.
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