 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
reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority
of Agence France Presse.
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