Get a Life, America! greets the millenium with a simple, yet powerful message: By your choice you can expect, pursue, and achieve health. While no one can achieve health for you, Get a Life, America! empowers you on your journey to that goal.
Always honest, tirelessly providing legitimate health education, Get a Life, America! teaches you the whats, whys, and hows of making healthy lifestyle changes. Your companion during and after the obligatory two-year stewardship of behavior modification, Get a Life, America! motivates, educates, facilitates, and empowers you to life-long health. Yes, you'll find no sweeter success than that of your own choice and effort.
Armed with the knowledge of how to change, you will learn how to eat healthfully, home or away. You'll learn about exercise and how to write your own exercise prescription. Stress? Huge! You'll learn how to cope with daily and crisis stress. Depressed? One in five of us suffers from this malady. You'll learn how to befriend "the Black Dog" of depression. As you earn familiarity with the principles of fat management, you'll become expert at managing your weight and body composition. Vitamins will be beriberi good to you as you find all of the essential vitamins in the food you eat. In the end, you'll integrate all the Major League Players of Health to achieve health, happiness, and love.
Why stop with healthy individuals? Get a Life, America! pioneers methods to improve our society's health. The last chapter details innovative practices to bring health to our nation. A notre sante!
Leonard R. Mees, MD, a physician with twenty years experience slogging through the muck, mire, and muddy trenches of medicine thinks he has a better contribution for society than dealing out pills for your ailments. He believes legitimate, positive, preventive health education empowers individuals to their achieveing life-long health.
A 1972 graduate of The University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in Rochester, New York, a medical school that championed the inexorable connection between the mind, body, and spirit; Lennie, as he prefers to be called, took those teachings to heart. He made house calls in a era of medical isolotionism. He worked hand-in-hand with the police and fire departments at accident scenes. He listened at length to patients with terminal illnesses, and stayed up nights with them as they died.
Apart from his land-based activities, he accompanies the Coast Guard on the "44-footer" to an off-shore rescue of a sick deck-hand on a fishing trawler, and learned first-hand what it meant to be sea-sick. A volunteer pilot for the Coast Guard Auxiliary, he has two independent rescues of disabled vessels to his credit (don't ask him about this, he'll bo too glad to tell you).
Now a teacher by choice, he writes, speaks, "begs, pleads, and grovels" in his attempt to teach a nation at risk how to achieve health. As James Brown is to show business, Lennie's one of the hardest working people in the business of health promotion.
Formerly a resident of Cape Cod, he then lived with his two daughters, four cats, and a Siberian Husky under the sunny skies of Phoenix, Arizona. Spare time found him climbing Camelback Mountain, roller-blading, or tubing down the Salt River. Oh, yes, if you couldn't find him at any of those locales, you might check at the local Einstein's bagel shop. He's go a penchant for cinnamon-raisin bagels - no cream cheese, of course.
As time moves on, so does Lennie. He's now in Portland, Oregon. Who knows where his pilgrimage will take him next? He says, "There are no geographic limits on the message of health".
