Are you conning yourself when you swear you really would run more if you bought those spiffy new orange Asics Sky Speeds or that you would log 10,000 miles this year if only you had the carbon Specialized S-Works Venge road bike?
Maybe not. If 1,850 older Taiwanese are any indication, you could be improving your odds of a long life.
If you live in the Triangle, you have discovered the fountain of youth.
A study of the 50 largest metro areas in the U.S. finds the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area is among the 10 “youngest” places in the country. The study, released today, looked at 52 factors and ranked the Triangle No. 8 nationally, just below No. 7 San Diego and just above No. 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul, in terms of how old we really are.
Late last September I was backpacking a particularly rugged, remote section of the Nantahala National Forest when I entered a clearing and my legs went electric. I knew immediately why: bees, lots of ’em, all digging into my apparently tasty ankles. And I knew immediately that my trip was over and it would behoove me to skedaddle as quickly as possible. Over the years I have developed an allergic reaction to bee stings, and as is the case with bee stings each successive one tends to be worse than its predecessor. The last time I’d been stung, the previous summer, a bee flew into my nose while I was mountain biking. Within minutes my face had swollen to the size of a basketball.
When I go to the gym and get my vitals checked, the first two things I look at — before my weight, before my percentage of body fat, before my BMI — are my blood pressure and pulse. I figure if my resting heart rate is low (typically in the low 50s, though I long for the day when I dip into the upper 40s and achieve “athlete” status) and my blood pressure is good (I shoot for 110/70). Not bad numbers for a 54-year-old guy.
Something to be aware of as we enter the holiday season: You may not be the person you think you are. Or more to the point, you may be more of a person than you think you are.
A study in the December issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology reports that of 2,224 women taking part in an assessment of “perceptions of body weight and weight-related behaviors,” just one in four considered themselves overweight. In fact, when the 2,224 women had their BMI calculated, 1,162 — that’s over half — surpassed the BMI’s overweight barrier of 25. (Curiously, of the 1,062 women who were normal weight, 16 percent perceived themselves as being overweight.)