About Me

Richard Stooker

Hi, my name is Richard Stooker, and I've been interested in fitness, good health, nutrition and anti-aging issues for many years.

As a kid, I was very active running, jumping, climbing trees, playing football and baseball, and so on. Plus, in the summers I swam nearly every day at a swim club, and starting with age 7 belonged to the swim team through age 18. Plus through my teenaged years I swam during the winter season at the YMCA. In junior high I ran cross-country in the fall and track in the spring, but I was never a fast runner.

And about the age of 12, as part of my reading of strange and unusual subjects (I began with ESP and ghosts and kept working my way farther down the library shelves -- not long ones in my small town -- through various religions. I discovered Buddhism and Hinduism years before The Beatles went to India to learn transcendental meditation from the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi.) I discovered yoga.

As I said, this was years before Eastern religions were celebrated by hippies, and decades before yoga reached its current mainstream popularity and name recognition.

Anyway, all that's just a long way of season that I didn't think about my weight. As I recall, I was always a little pudgy around the middle, although I had broad shoulders and muscular chest and arms. Still, it wasn't anything I stressed about. It's just that my BMI was not as optimum as it was for some of my friends. Probably because I had a sweet tooth and eat too much sugar.

Later of course I read another pioneer, Nathan Pritikin. I read his book on losing weight because I'm a completist, but was primarily concerned about good health.

If you don't know, Pritikin was one of the primary mover and shakers to convince Americans to stop eating fatty foods high in chloresterol.

It's sad to say, because I'm sure that his intentions were good, but he deserves more blame than he gets for making Americans and people around the world paranoid about fat and cholesterol in food. In his recent book Toxic Fat: When Good Fat Turns Bad, Dr. Barry Sears lists the concern about cholesterol in foods as one factor for the current epidemic of obesity, but is kind enough not to name Nathan Pritikin.

I didn't realize there already was one, but some time later I attended an MLM seminar put on my Randy Gage, and most of the attendees belonged to an MLM company I'd never heard of, but which sold Zone diet products.

It had originally been started with Dr. Sears, but he and the owner had some kind of disagreement, and so Dr. Sears was selling Zone bars himself. And the owner hired Gage to oversee the company's marketing.

One thing Gage did was re-write the company's literature, eliminating the scientific explanations that Dr. Sears had included. He even made fun of them in the seminar.

I don't remember the name, and apparently it's now out of business. That was 1996, and Gage is now a distributor for another company.

Fortunately, I'd already determined to stop my downward spiral toward an inevitable diabetis, stroke, heart attack or cancer.

Plus I am taking large doses of Dr Sears' fish oil. I used to buy it from a nutrional company in New Zealand, Xtend Life, and I still buy my vitamin supplements from them. But now I decided to get the benefits of Dr Sear's technology.

That's when I went back on the Zone diet, and more diligently than before, though not perfectly.

And to be fair, I have to also say that I'm exercising better than I have since I stopped working out on the swim team. I do uphill wind sprints three times a week. And three days a week I alternate doing Hindu squats and Hindu pushups.

This is not an exercise site, so I won't go into detail, but I strongly advise you to stop/never start what is currently called "cardio" -- long, slow (and boring) distance exercise. Go for high intensity.

For strength, stay away from lifting weights. Your body has all the weight you need (and probably more :) ) to get plenty strong.

I've lost 26 pounds since then. I've taken 5 inches off my waist. My BMI is 24%.

And of course I still have a lot to do, because I'm certainly not at the weight or level of fitness I want to be. But there's no doubt that with my schedule, I need balance protein bars to help me.