Fitness Master

Run 10k in 35 minutes. Ride 100 miles in 5 hours. Bench press 200 pounds 10 times. All three are excellent examples of superior physical health that really don't matter nearly as much unless they produce something else.

Peace of mind.

Yet far more of us focus on achieving any of the former instead of the latter. That's because we falsely believe that peace of mind is the byproduct of other accomplishments rather than an accomplishment itself.

Sometimes you need to spend money to make money. In a similar vein, sometimes you need to gain weight to lose weight.

Last week's column explained how you benefit from adding muscle. This week's column will continue to do so after expounding upon the paradoxical introduction.

Which brings us back to the bonehead we all bump into mentioned in last week's column. The former high school classmate who sees you in the grocery store and boasts that he weighs the same today as when he graduated high school: 195 pounds.

Because my mother was working, it became a type of twisted tradition. For supper before my high school basketball games, I would pick up a double-cheese pizza and split it with my brother. In college, when I was first following a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet but not too intelligently I was eating double-cheese pizza at least twice a week.

In fact, I can remember many occasions when I sat in my in last afternoon class, not concentrating on the lecture but craving double-cheese pizza sprinkled with garlic salt.

Scurvy is a nasty disease. It causes collagen, the protein substance found in the fibers of connective tissue, bone, and cartilage, to form improperly, meaning wounds don't heal, gums bleed, and severe pain occurs.

If untreated, it leads to death.

But in 1747, James Lind, a Scottish naval surgeon, fed lemons and limes to sailors with scurvy, and soon the symptoms stopped. After a few years of stopping scurvy this way, Lind wrote a paper about it. The British Royal Navy was impressed and adopted the practice yet others kept searching for better treatments.