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“Once you choose hope, anything is possible.” - Christopher Reeve

“Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.” - President John F. Kennedy

After what seems like an eternity of a pre-primary season, Americans will finally cast the first votes of the 2016 presidential election next week. Our ranking of the fitness levels of each of the candidates’ supporters was published in Politico last month. Today, we’re going to look back at our nation’s 43 presidents and identify those who stand out for their outstanding fitness.

I’m sorry, William Howard Taft fans: This blog is not for you. President Taft’s 340 pound stature and 43.2 B.M.I. (Body Mass Index) are records that will likely stand for a long time. Laggards Grover Cleveland (who once said, “Bodily movement alone ... is among the dreary and unsatisfying things of life.") and Bill Clinton (whose wife famously said, “"The good news is, my husband loves to eat and enjoys it.”) didn’t make our list.

This article celebrates the presidents – regardless of political affiliation or competence in office – who we believe are the fittest of all time. These presidents belong on a Mount Rushmore of Presidential Fitness.

Theodore Roosevelt: Rough & Tough
Roosevelt suffered from severe asthma as a child. He was by all accounts sickly growing up. However, he pushed through his ailments and became an accomplished boxer and rower while at Harvard. He served as New York’s police commissioner and spent late nights on the streets supervising his officers. During the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt resigned his position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and created a cavalry of volunteers known as the “Rough Riders.” His legendary experience leading the Rough Riders helped catapult him to the presidency. As president, Roosevelt built a boxing ring in the White House and was blinded in one eye by a punch. For fun, he would swim across near-frozen rivers and took on judo (for which he earned a brown belt).

Gerald Ford: Not Chevy Chase
Despite Saturday Night Live’s portrayal of Ford (played by Chevy Chase) as a clumsy, weak man with bad knees, Ford was an exceptional athlete. In fact, it’s because of his early athletic pursuits that Ford’s body was beat up by the time he served as president. Ford was the starting center on two national championship football teams for the University of Michigan. He turned down contract offers to play pro football for the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions in order to attend Yale Law School. Although he won on the football field, Ford never won a presidential election. He became vice president when Spiro Agnew resigned, and, the following year, became president upon Richard Nixon’s resignation. Following his electoral loss to Jimmy Carter, Ford nailed a hole in one in a pro-am golf tournament.

George Washington: Overcoming 18th Century Medicine
We haven’t seen photos of George Washington, let alone his B.M.I., resting heart rate, or max bench press. However, we can rely on accounts of his fitness from those who served with him on the battlefield when he led the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War. Historian David McCullough described him as “a strapping man of commanding presence, he stood six feet two inches tall and weighed perhaps 190 pounds. There was not a King in Europe that would not look like a valet by his side.” Washington was tough. While leading his men during the French and Indian War, he was stricken with dysentery and severe hemorrhoids. In those days, doctors drew blood in an effort to eliminate “ill humors,” and Washington was severely depleted as a result. However, Washington overcame his pain and weakness, lifted himself upon his horse, and led his troops into battle.

Ronald Reagan: Staying Fit Late in Life
At nearly 70, Reagan was the oldest person sworn into the office of the presidency. Therefore, many of our memories of him are of an older man. In his youth, however, Reagan was extremely athletic. During his teen years, Reagan rescued 77 people as a lifeguard. He was captain of the swim team at Eureka College, where he was also a member of the football team. As an actor, he often played roles requiring a high level of fitness, such as cowboys and military men, and of course his famous role as Notre Dame footballer George Gipp in “Knute Rockne, All American.” While in office, Reagan had a rigorous workout routine. He penned an article titled “How to Stay Fit” in Parade magazine, in which he detailed his resistance training regimen involving bursts of high weight exercises.

We’d love to hear from you. What do you think about the presidents we listed? Comment below or on our Facebook page or tweet us at @flytefitness.

Be Flyte Fit,

Jeremy Greenberg
Co-Founder & CEO
Flyte Fitness

P.S. DON’T FORGET TO SIGN UP FOR FITNESS UPDATES! CLICK THE BOX AT THE TOP OF THIS PAGE!

“As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.” - Mr. T

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world: Will it rain next week? Who will win the big game on Sunday? How long will I have to wait in line at the store? It can be overwhelming when we think about it. So, let’s stop.

There are also many certainties in life, in addition to the certainty of death and taxes. We know what we need to survive. We know we need oxygen, we know we need sleep, we know we need water, we know we need food.

Whether we order in, get take out, cook from scratch, or warm-up leftovers, we have to decide what we will eat every day and for every meal and snack we consume. But how often have you felt like a deer in headlights when you open up your fridge after a long day trying to figure out what the hell you’re going to eat for dinner? If you’re like most Americans, this is a pretty common predicament. And, a very predictable one if we don’t do something very simple: meal prep.

Prepping is For Everyone
Meal prep is the process of planning and preparing the meals you will eat. Instead of waiting until it’s lunch time or you feel hunger pangs to decide what to grab and put in your mouth, meal prep is a deliberate and thoughtful approach to eating.

Fitness professionals, particularly bodybuilders and athletes, commonly prep the meals. They want to know exactly what they will eat, exactly how much they will eat, and exactly when they will eat it. They do so because they seek to optimize their nutrition to build and maintain their bodies. Some people diligently prepare their meals themselves and some – including our partner and Super Bowl champ Steve Weatherford – use meal prep services, such as Elite Lifestyle Cuisine that make the process very simple.

You don’t have to be a professional athlete to find enormous value in preparing your meals. Exercise plays a huge role in health. I write about the benefits nearly every week in this blog. In addition to exercise, nutrition is critical. Although my company is focused on offering Core Flytes (exercise products) and workout programs, I am comfortable saying that nutrition trumps exercise for good health. Eating well is fundamental to fitness. We all know the saying, “You can’t out-exercise a bad diet.”

Benefits of Meal Prep
Control: I started this article by writing about things we can’t predict. They are also the things that we cannot control. What we eat is something we most certainly can control. I can hear some readers say, “Easy for you to say! I struggle with self-control!” It is very hard to have complete control over what we put in our mouths, especially given all the high-sugar, high-fat temptations available. However, planning in advance gives us more control and a much higher probability that we will be able to use self-control when choosing what we eat.

Consistency: Having healthy meals prepared and ready to eat when you’re hungry or at meal time allows you to prevent your body from getting into a catabolic state. A catabolic state occurs (and we all know the feeling) when we haven’t eaten for a long time and our metabolic rate decreases, causing loss of lean body tissue. In addition, you remove the often stressful (yet predictable) “what will I eat?” quandary. You know what you’ll eat. You can focus on other things.

Cash: Not only are we likely to eat poorly when not planning meals in advance, we are likely to spend more. A homemade sandwich or salad or [insert your favorite dish] is much more affordable that that same dish from a takeout joint. When we are hangry (so hungry we get angry), we are willing to spend more to feel better. And we tend to spend it on quick fixes like chips and cookies that do not satisfy us or offer nutritious benefits.

One Way to Meal Prep
You don’t have to be a chef or use complex and lengthy recipes to eat well. There are many ways to plan and prep your meals.

I’m a fan of what I’ll call “lazy cooking:” creating meals with a small number of ingredients that require little time and effort. There are a ton of meals that work within these limitations: omelets and a Nutribullet juice for breakfast, pan-seared chicken and veggies for lunch, salmon with couscous and salad for dinner. Not fancy. Not pretty. But tasty and healthy. And most important of all: easy.

I prefer to go to the grocery store and do a large shopping trip about once a week. It’s important to know what key staples you need if you plan to cook meals yourself. Think in terms of meals as you write your grocery list and do your shopping. The more healthy staples you buy, such as lean meats, fiber-rich vegetables, and leafy greens, the easier it will be for you to create nutritious meals. It’s tough to find the time and energy to cook in real-time when we are hungry. So, don’t do it.

Cooking well in advance simplifies the process. Making a large batch of a few core centerpieces of your weekly meals ends up saving a lot of time, helps save money (less ordering in or wasted food), and makes it much more likely that you’ll eat healthy meals. It also makes it much more likely that you won’t wait until you’re super-hungry before you decide what you’ll eat. The main reason that late-night eating is so bad for us is because we make poor decisions when we are tired and starving. If we avoid that situation, we are doing ourselves a tremendous service.

Portion out your meals for the week and put them in the appropriate storage containers, such as Tupperware in the fridge or a Ziploc bag in the freezer. You don’t need to weigh the food or go overboard with precision. The act of prepping meals in and of itself will go a long way.

We’d love to hear from you. How do you prep your meals (or not) to stay healthy? Comment below or on our Facebook page at facebook.com/flytefitness or tweet us at @flytefitness.

Be Flyte Fit,

Jeremy Greenberg

P.S. DON’T FORGET TO SIGN UP FOR FITNESS UPDATES! CLICK THE BOX AT THE TOP OF THIS PAGE!

“Perhaps the world's second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore.” - English photographer Cecil Beaton

I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Boredom sucks.” Most of us are getting bored quicker and more easily these days. With attention spans shortening, if we don’t have our smartphone fix, our coffee, our TV, or our fantasy football scores, we feel fidgety. We fall into the trap of multitasking and we get caught up in acting for the sake of doing… often to avoid boredom.

Electric Shocks Preferred to Boredom
A collaboration of the University of Virginia and Harvard University found that people despise boredom so much they are even willing to cause themselves physical pain in order to avoid it. A series of 11 studies, led by UVA psychologist Timothy Wilson, began with groups of participants who were asked to be alone for short periods of time (up to 15 minutes) without any material to stimulate their minds. Most of the subjects reported not enjoying the experience.

Wilson and his team wanted to see if people would chose to take part in an objectively unpleasant activity rather than no activity at all. So, as psychologists like to do, they added a button to the barren room that when pressed administered a mild electric shock to the participant. Participants were given a sample shock and all agreed that they would pay not to receive the shock. However, while sitting alone for 15 minutes, 67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women in this study voluntarily shocked themselves.

Wilson said, “Simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid."

Best-selling author and Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert partnered with Wilson’s team on the shock study. Gilbert shared in a Freakonomics podcast last month that one of the male participants shocked himself an astonishing 190 times in the 15 minute period.

Boredom is Dangerous
Okay, so we clearly hate being bored. In addition, it turns out, boredom is also bad for our health. U.K. researchers collected data from 7,500 participants over a three-year period in the 1980s to gauge their level of boredom at work. 20 years after the collection period, the researchers analyzed the data for participants who had died. They found that those who had reported being “very bored” were two and a half times more likely to die from a heart-related problem than those who did not report being bored.

Psychologist Stephen Vodanovich of the University of West Florida states that research indicates that boredom increases the risk of anxiety, depression, drug and alcohol dependency, smoking, eating junk food, and work and school performance.

Exercise Combats Boredom
WebMD contends that boredom is common reason that people give for not exercising. People often find exercising monotonous. So, I’m going to argue that we should do something that many of us find boring to fight boredom. I’m a big fan of experimenting to find what works best for you… for your schedule, for your meal plan, for you workout routine. People often ask me, “What kind of exercise should I do to get me motivated?” The answer I give is, “Start with something that you will enjoy.” If we don’t like something the chances are slim that we’ll do it consistently.

Being active, however, isn’t sufficient to prevent boredom from creeping in. I’ve run the same route in Central Park dozens and dozens of times. And, yes it can get a bit boring. We need to find new ways to vary our routines so that they don’t become too… uh… routine.

Fight Boredom Your Way
There are some tips for combatting boredom while we work out so that we will stay motivated enough to keep exercising and enjoy it more. Again, everyone is different and not every suggestion will work for all of us. Reducing boredom is tantamount to making our workouts more fun. Making exercise a social activity can work for many of us. A running partner, workout buddy, or trainer can make exercises more competitive, supportive, or interactive. We wrote about how a great workout pal can be your dog in a blog last summer. Combining exercise with something else you enjoy can help a lot. Most people running on the treadmill or lifting weights in the gym have their headphones or earbuds glued to their heads. If music isn’t your bag, watching television, listening to podcasts, playing video games, or reading books may work for you.

One of the best ways to ensure that boredom doesn’t creep into our workouts is to create variety. With the many options of new and exciting classes available for us to try at gyms, apps and YouTube workouts available to enjoy at home, and new products to incorporate into my exercise regimen, I keep things interesting and fresh. My preference is to try at least one new exercise every week. My Core Flytes certainly make this easier for me to do as I am constantly challenged by what others are posting on social media. Fortunately, people are regularly telling me what they’re doing with their Core Flytes and it helps inspire me to try something new. This week a customer shared a “zombie press,” which I’m still working on!

We’d love to hear from you. What do you do to keep your workouts fun and make sure you’re never bored when you exercise? Comment below or on our Facebook page at facebook.com/flytefitness or tweet us at @flytefitness.

Be Flyte Fit,

Jeremy Greenberg

P.S. DON’T FORGET TO SIGN UP FOR FITNESS UPDATES! CLICK THE BOX AT THE TOP OF THIS PAGE!

We know eating fruits and veggies is a part of a balanced diet. There's a ton of misinformation about fad diets and magical quick-fix health tips out there... on television, across the internet, and in books. It's often hard to distinguish between reality and fiction. Here are five facts about fruits and vegetables that I didn't know and I'm betting you don't either... yet.