Sure, my city, San Diego, is tagged as “America’s Finest,” but I’m not talking about where the convention will be. I’m talking about what the convention will be—more specifically, what you’ll come away with that will turbo-charge your bottom line.

But why wait until next year to revolutionalize your business?

In the key relationships in our lives, trust influences whether we feel comfortable being our vulnerable, genuine selves or whether we feel defensive and guarded, anticipating harm. Trust is tricky and all-powerful, as it determines how we feel while making all kinds of decisions — accepting a dinner date, riding in a cab, heeding a doctor’s advice, hiring a babysitter, buying a certain product, or signing on with a personal trainer. We can perform these actions with ease and comfort, or with stress, fear, and anxiety — and trust makes all the difference.

The Media and Mass Shootings from Jim Patton on Vimeo.

Click here for CNN's Barbara Hall recent interview with Dr. Mantell.

Health coaches know how to help. But do you know how to reach those who aren’t among the 51.4 million who show up in gyms week after week?

It’s not entirely unlikely that you’d hear a physician say this, or something like it, to a patient these days. With an ever-increasing overweight/obese population and escalating lifestyle-based illnesses, the demand for evidence-based, fitness/health/wellness programming is growing. And it’s being offered in a wider array of settings—from small, independent, commercial gyms to medical exercise facilities that include post-bariatric surgery centers.

The visible signs of aging, including loss of skin elasticity, graying of hair, 10-20 lbs. accumulation of body fat, decrease in aerobic performance, maximal heart rate, strength, flexibility, and fertility, and of course, menopause, to name just a few of the common “ills” middle-age can bring, are seemingly universal. But the chronic health conditions associated with older age are more troubling.

Well, guess what? If you are somewhere in the middle-age range of life, you can not only foil these mid-life widespread conditions, but perhaps even more important, you can help reduce the risk of developing chronic illnesses up to twenty years later! Want to delay biological aging by more than a decade?

Click here for the full article.

“It builds the sense of power in the perpetrator of the hoax, but only temporarily. He/she must do it again to keep up their otherwise failing and false sense of power. They do it to build up their own sense of poor self-esteem that borders on self-loathing.

“There is also the “I want to be first to spread the news–makes me feel important–I’ll tell my friends before anyone else does.” This helps cement the erroneous belief we hold onto. We believe things more when we spread them to others,” said Dr. Mantell.

But now that we all know about the celebrity death hoax phenomenon, why aren’t we more skeptical? Why don’t we stop to check these reports out first since so many of them, especially on Twitter, turn out to be completely false?

“We have always been able to put our critical reasoning aside. We are physiologically built to focus on what’s alarming and dangerous, and the media knows this well,” explains Mantell. “Social media also allows us to see immediately a large number of others who “believe the hoax” by the sheer outpouring of grief, shock and wailing, which we instantly believe must be true if everyone else is believing it. We think, “If so many people are reacting, it must be true.”

Isn’t it just food?

Psychologically healthy eating means “eating without meaning.”

We operate from three basic emotions — all negative.  Without awareness, these fundamental emotions have the potential to derail us on our path to a happier, healthier life. Click here if you are ready to shift from a negative to positive state and achieve your fitness goals.

Dr. Tad Kostrubala, who was head of psychiatry at San Diego’s Mercy Hospital back in the ‘70s, became famous for creating the stir about “running therapy” by taking depressed patients out for one-hour walk/run therapy sessions. He found in his research at SDSU’s Rehabilitation Counseling Department that his subjects enjoyed both psychological and physiological benefits from walking and running in therapy sessions. He understood that people are built for walking.

Believe it or not, many laughed at his approach in those days.

Today it seems that only those who earn their living providing meds for depression are denouncing “running/walking therapists.”

Physically, walking reduces heart rate and resting blood pressure, lowers the LDL/HDL cholesterol ratio while increasing the “good” HDL cholesterol, increases insulin receptor sensitivity and glucose tolerance.

On the emotional side, walking clearly leads to changes in the same neurotransmitters that antidepressant medication targets for reducing depression and anxiety. Walking not only improves mood and feelings of well-being, but reduces stress and leaves walkers with a better self-image.

One midwestern medical group, HealthPartners, is so convinced of these findings that their doctors prescribe pedometers to patients who appear with depression. Along with the pedometers, patients with depression are directed to walk for 30 minutes a day, three to five times a week. That’s not meant to replace necessary medication or cognitive behavioral therapy, but it’s a key driver in recognizing the value of walking away your problems.

Locally, we have some awesome walking/hiking trails for you to check out. Here are a few of my favorite mood-lifting paths:

1. Batiquitos Lagoon Trail. 2 miles of trails in Carlsbad

2. Iron Mountain. Get ready for a 7 mile hike up this mountain in Poway

3. Mission Trails Regional Park. This is the king of them all with more than 40 miles of scenic historical trails, lakes, and mountains

4. Torrey Pines State Reserve. If you love the ocean, this is for you.

5. Mission Bay Park. 12 miles of paths for you to enjoy around the Bay

Someone once said, “a pedestrian is someone who thought there were a couple of gallons left in the tank.” Current research tells us pedestrians are those who plan on many more miles left in life, with happiness and well-being.

Waistlines, mirrors, jeans and scales. At this time of the year, those are not among our favorite things. Parties, festive meals, late night drinking, office snacking, and lack of time to exercise soon will soon be upon us. It’s time – right NOW – to prepare.

We surely aren’t ready for a quiet at-home retirement.  Maybe our grandparents were.  Not, not us.  We’re too busy looking for ways to defer and compress those age-related disabilities into as few years as possible, as late in our lives as possible, while doing what we can to increase our healthy life-years.  Among the most often-cited solutions to this quest are being physically fit, exercising and staying active.  The amount of data demonstrating the effect of exercise on slowing the aging process is staggering.

We enjoy kinder, gentler workouts, low-impact exercise, and want to insure that whatever we do diminishes the risk of injury.  But gerokinesiologists tell us that we also ought to incorporate more moderate to vigorous posture, strength, endurance, flexibility, agility and balance training into our workouts in order to promote negligible senescence (preventing the normal biological changes caused by aging) – depending on our fitness level and ability to do so.

The American Council on Exercise, ACE, suggests that moderate-intensity endurance exercises at a minimum of 30 minutes five days each week such as low-impact aerobics, walking, cardio equipment, and swimming are primary exercise modes for most older adults. Weight training that initially incorporates low resistance and high reps is also essential at a minimum of at least twice each week to maintain or increase muscular strength and endurance.  Balance training such as walking backwards and sideways, heel and toe walking, standing from a sitting or squatting position, are also valuable.  Flexibility exercises at least twice each week are also recommended.

We lose 30% of their muscle strength between the ages of 50 and 70 years. Normally, adults who are sedentary beyond age 50 can expect muscle loss of up to 0.4 pounds a year. This reduction in muscle strength leads to impairment in carrying out daily activities, the ADLs, “activities of daily living.”  Using free weights, exercise machines, or elastic bands to strengthen muscles sure help, but only doing so in a way that makes sense for our fitness levels and what experts know about the “stability/mobility?movement?load?performance” sequence that applies to posture, strength, endurance, flexibility, and balance training.

In addition to the fitness boom among boomers, anti-aging supplements are becoming big business.  DHEA, HGH, melatonin, testosterone, estrogen, resveratrol, and the longevity cocktail (more stuff than I have room to include but B, C, D, E, K vitamins, magnesium, flax and fish oils, L-glutathione, coenzyme Q10, ALA are among the ingredients) are flying off the shelves of health and vitamin shops into the hands of the 55+ crowd.

Therapeutic levels of vitamin and mineral supplements, nootropic drugs for preserving and enhancing oxygen supply and neural functioning in the brain, clean living lifestyle (exercise, no smoking, moderate alcohol), avoiding toxins and radiation (good luck), healthy nutrition, intense physical activity, a sense of accomplishment, positive emotions, healthy relationships—these all go in the direction of adding life to our years and years to our lives.

The gym may well be the central address for increasing our healthy life-years before the doctor and the pharmacy.