About This Website
This website/blog is dedicated to all those folks out there who have found it difficult to get or stay fit. My plan is to describe and discuss ideas and approaches to improving health and fitness on this website that I have found through experience to be useful to me, or which appear to have merit. As always, it is up to the reader to test these ideas and approaches for themselves to see if they find them useful as well. I hope the reader will feel free to post tactful comments where I have allowed regarding their experiences, and will bring additional ideas to the attention of others as well.
The focus on Be Fit Now is working smart, rather than just working hard all the time; making good nutrition and exercise a part of a healthy lifestyle. To stay dedicated and reap maximum benefits, fitness really needs to become a “practice,” rather than a chore, so exercise can become a sort of moving meditation that provides a respite from other things in your life while you focus on doing just one thing. With sound nutrition and exercise, you change your body, your brain, and your mind. Exercise approached in this way relieves depression, anxiety, and improves general motivation.
This kind of commitment to fitness is simple in principle, however, it does require effort. It’s easy to be discouraged by overuse injuries that are common when couch potatoes start exercising, or when you begin to push your training load up to reach performance goals. It’s easy to give up. Signals our body gives us to slow down or decrease our itensity, like pains, aches, soreness, and injuries, are used by our mind as excuses to quit exercising altogether. If an injury knocks us off our training schedule, it may be difficult to get back on track. It’s like starting all over again.
That’s why I developed this site. It’s as much for me as for anyone who might read it. It’s to record my thoughts and experiences, and what I learn from them, as a means of maintaining the motivation and discipline to maintain a fitness practice.
Before and After
My Story (part of it, anyway)
My name is Mark Coleman. Among other things, I am a trained physiologist, but most of all I am a human being (like you), and like many other humans today, I let my quality of life fade by largely ignoring my health and fitness for many years. The result was that I gradually gained weight and lost strength and endurance. I began to have aches and pains and told myself that I was just getting older. I didn’t realize just how much my condition was influencing my experience of life; that I had become accustomed to a baseline level of discomfort due to the poor habits I’d developed. Even with my training and background, I failed to see how my daily choices were robbing me of a full life right now, and possibly robbing me of years of quality time I might otherwise enjoy later in life before it comes to an end. I didn’t realize how much of the depression and anxiety I felt at the time was due to all of this.
When I took some time to slow down a bit in late 2008, I began to realize that I had not really been taking care of myself. I had been in denial. So, I committed myself to being fit. I made dramatic changes to my diet and nutrition, and lost 45 lbs., bicycled 1000 miles in 3 months during the summer 2009 alone (and many more since), and placed in the top 20% in my division in my first two 5K races. My regular training includes cycling, running, and a variety of strength training for core, upper, and lower body strength. I am now in the best shape of my life at 39 years old. I believe that anyone can benefit from better nutrition and more physical activity. Further, it doesn’t have to occupy a prohibitive amount of your time. You need to spend some time, but if you work smart, you can be more efficient about it and integrate healthy habits more easily into your life, which might already seem overwhelmingly busy. With the extra energy you derived from healthy habits, I’d even bet that after awhile, other aspects of you life become less overwhelming.
