uh well how is it appropriate to be talking about exercise attitudes
what um well um my my husband is right now teaching an aerobics class he's an aerobics instructor
uh-huh
and um is going to be uh entering North Texas for uh a kinesiology program there
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and um the the how i met him was through uh the aerobics class that he used to teach
um-hum you're a student
yeah so i'm i'm an avid aerobics uh person and just very very athletic enjoying a you know uh anything dealing with sports
uh-huh
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so and how do you feel about it
um i'm i am a person who wishes i had more time to exercise i
i don't feel like i
i don't very often do things for the sake of exercise i don't feel well unless i am exercising and i try to do things that involve exercise but i very rarely do things
like um i've never done aerobics or any sort of structured this is my exercise time
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but i do lots of outdoor sports and things bicycling uh
you know
mountaineering a little mountaineering this and that and i spend a lot of time and i probably get more exercise than your average person
but it's not a a structured sort of thing and i have to admit i have a certain resistance to the idea of exercising for exercising's sake and perhaps it's because somehow that implies to me it's not fun or something like that
um-hum
yeah well i i've my that's the way my mother stands on it she feels like if it's something that you have to do you know if you look at it as if you have to do it then it becomes it becomes a chore and and she doesn't enjoy it when it's a chore
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yes yes
so um and i feel that way too as far as
you you know just sitting and doing you know to the idea of doing fifty sit-ups or something you know to
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you know a a calculated you know calculated down and do your calisthenics you know three times a week or but but i do try and um
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i do try and regulate how much exercise i get a week
yeah yeah is that why you like aerobics classes because you're not sort of someone else is doing the counting for you so it makes it less of a chore
yeah
and it's got and i've always enjoyed dance
yeah
so it involves you know i i can't get out to dance all the time
yeah would that we could
and yeah and it's and it's more regulated i mean you're you're using different parts of the body so it it is like dance and and it's structured like
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that but you have the music and someone like you said someone else is counting so it makes it easier for me
yeah
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and someone else is telling me okay you know let's let's move this way let's move that way instead of me having to think about it so much
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right you can just trust someone else to give you full exercise and all you do is follow along and enjoy yourself
yeah yeah but i'm like you i also um
like to participate in uh things like well we just went to the uh Myerson Symphony Run this past weekend and and that was a lot of fun and you get to meet different people and um
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just get out you know out and about and it's it it's something you can all like our we did it as a family so it was it was quite a lot of fun and biking and i i i love to swim so i love it when you know it's
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swimming weather and uh
hm well you're talking to someone from California where it's often swimming weather
oh i didn't realize that i'm sorry well i'm in Texas i i just assumed that i had this is the first call i've done and i didn't realize that they had were gonna
uh
reach out to people from all over the country
so it's the it's it's the the active well it's actually it's interesting because there are real real regional differences um in California there's uh almost an assumption
you wouldn't know that oh i
um
unless you're sort of clearly of an
older generation or something you know in your sixties or something like that i'm i'm i'm
uh there's an assumption that you do something for your physical fitness and and at least in urban California and maybe not i don't know about rural California too well but in urban California it's just
you know for all i know aerobics started out here i don't know where they actually started but they you know the craze really picked up big here
and before that there was the running craze and they California gets you know tends to be a bit faddish but the remarkable thing is how well the fads catch on elsewhere so there must be something to some of them and uh
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well i think people are are more encouraged
people from California seem to be more health motivated all around i mean as far as the diet and everything uh the diet and uh just
your your your health consciousness and i mean it just seems like uh a lot of those ideas generate out of California not just exercise but health health related
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yeah
ideas and i it's curious i don't know why don't know if it's
do you does California have a
well there's a sense of it being a package i think there there is a sense of you know whole there's a lot of you know you'll get
organizations like institutes for the whole health or whatever and uh oh the University University University the University of California at Berkeley puts out The Wellness Letter
which is uh turned into a fairly well subscribed to uh newsletter
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monthly or biweekly newsletter or something like that and
and it doesn't deal with just exercise or just stress management or just diet or anything it it's
on fairly solid solid scientific ground uh it's just dispensed with these distinctions it says every all sorts of factors go into health and there's no reason to talk about one rather than another so that they they combined them all together
and uh so it's had that orientation for quite sometime um there's been some progressive medical schools out here
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that have taken that approach and um
now do you think that's because they've realized that
for whole health that the you know you have to have that combination or that people are motivated that way so that they've incorporated that into their program
do you think the program came first or the
boy yeah that there's a i i can say there's a correlation but i couldn't say which which caused the other they sort of developed you know each developed a little bit and then would feed off one another and develop a little bit more and a little bit more
yeah the more money they put into it i can see that because i knowing from institutes of learning like that i know that they've got to get their money somewhere and somebody's got to be willing to pay for it and believe in it so
yeah and some
yeah yeah exactly
and part of it is California you know in back in the sixties had a lot of alternative movements and some of them fizzled out and some of them were disastrous and others of them um had an impact on the society around here and one of the ones that had an impact was
um people becoming interested in alternate
practices i don't know if it was a meditation practice or sure it was you know
which is similar to a stress management practice or alternates to uh AMA approved medicine um you have you know major um acupuncture schools and things out here and
and you could have them around long enough and more and more people start believing them or wondering how to combine them with other things and before long
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you you get this this whole kind of Gestalt this whole package of of health of health care and options
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and uh and exercise is is strongly considered one of them
the irony is is it's people in the cities in my experience that are most oriented
towards
doing the exercises and i guess because they spend all day in back of their desks the average person out on the farm at least traditionally now they drive fancy tractors as much as anything but at least traditionally the laborers last thing pardon me
yeah
or they're older well don't you think they tend to be older in the rural area i i i sometimes think that it's almost frantic effort on the part of the people in the city i live in a rural area so you know i see the
oh like everything else yeah yeah the rat race to exercise
it's it's yeah it's it's like it's frantic to you know to uh achieve something that that a person in a rural area um almost doesn't worry about it to such a degree but
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stays you know more healthier you know as a fit person
yeah well i i think so i mean you you've if you look at certain if you look at other cultures like i know a little bit about
people who were considered very healthy in China and they don't do very much vigorous exercise at all but they do a lot of low keyed low impact low stress exercise and they combine it with a you know meditation or whatever some sort of relaxation and
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they seem pretty you know they don't have the hard body they don't have that perfect look and an awful lot of exercises is sort of image conscious but they you know they live to a hundred and ten some day you know and that that's
yeah well don't you think a lot of that is diet too yeah
and a lot of that is diet that's true yeah i mean they eat they eat a lot of carbohydrates and not much fat um for economical reasons not for preference um
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yeah and as we can see well i'm a i'm a practicing vegetarian so uh i've read a lot of information knowing that to be true what's that
yes as am i actually i as am i
oh are you also well that's that's good as far as the calisthenics is that is that um pretty predominant as far as California do do
yes
it is in the urban areas yes most for example most restaurants in an urban area will have a little vegetarian section now
in the urban areas
um-hum oh that's wonderful
well most most modern sort of modern looking restaurants will
yeah that's great i mean we uh it's such a trouble it's such a trouble here i mean you just have to eat at home basically
you can
i was wondering that because i was actually applying for a job in Texas and and and uh it occurred to me
well of course in the cities yeah well in the cities we live close to Dallas so um which
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you you know you get uh an influx of a lot of people from all over the country so
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you're gonna have a lot of more choices but in urban areas it's you know steak places an and it's not a you know it's uh it's definitely it it's it's changing to a degree but
yeah
yeah yeah
um it's very frustrating and even even with health food stores and stores where you can buy natural products or uh
yeah
organic you know materials and foods and things you don't really have that i mean you would think
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