Chris Crowley - Thinner This Year: A Younger Next Year Book

Bill Fabrocini, P.T., C.S.C.S., Strength Training

Riggs Klika, Ph.D., Aerobic Training

Workman Publishing New York

To Hilary Cooper, David Bliss, Ranie Pearce, S. Hazard Gillespie (19102011), and the committed readers of Younger Next Year

C. C.

To my husband, Chris Ward, and my spunky kids, Tess and Austin

J. S.

Jen and I are delighted to have Thinner This Year available in paperback. We are true believers, Im afraidtrue believers in the great Revolution in Aging (which is what Thinner is really all about) and the Revolution in Behavior, which so many of us need so desperately. We are true believers in this book, too (and the Younger Next Year books from which it sprang), as the best guide there is to these revolutions and to how you can join in: Get fit, get lean, lead a radically better life! There you go.

I live on the lecture circuit these days (weird sight: old gentleman tripping up on stage and ranting away, passionately, about how 70 percent of aging is rot and we dont have to go there, shouldnt go there! Which is true, by heaven. Im old, I should know.). So I meet a lot of readers and hear firsthand how profoundly Thinner This Year has changed their lives. It has changed em a lot.

Those who have read YoungerNext Year (not a requirement, by the way) love Thinner for going much deeper into the things Younger was about. A surprising number are most excited about the exercise, which we call the Flywheel of the Good Life: I thought I knew all about exercise... I didnt at all. Now I do. Wonderful. I thought I knew a fair amount about exercise, too, butworking on this book with Bill Fabrocini and Riggs KlikaI learned a ton of new, important, cutting-edge stuff. And I learned that some of what I was doing was wrong. And dangerous. Others, too, apparently. As I write this, I have just returned from one of our Aspen Total Immersion Weeks, where several people went on and on about how surprisingly important the exercise advice was.

One nice thing weve added to the paperback edition in response to your requests: There is an easy way to download a simple outline of the exercises... something you can carry with you to the gym. Such a good idea. At workman.com/thinnerthisyear, weve posted pdf cheat sheets of the warm-ups and exercises found in Chapters 21 and 23 that you can download, print, and stick in your pocket. I still carry a messy, handmade one but this will be much better. Take them with you everywhere, in case you feel the urge to throw yourself down on the floor at a cocktail party and do a quick set of Billys Warm-Ups.

Many readers talk about the nutrition. There wasnt much about nutrition in Younger... I love learning about that, they say. They certainly like losing the weight, as many of them have. And they like that it is so darned straight: Ive read a lot of diet books, and they havent amounted to much. Its nice to feel that I finally know whats going on. And what to do. That reader was right. There is a ton of nonsense out there: hyperbole, oversimplification, and downright quackery... quick fixes and easy rules that would be wonderful if they were true, but are not. Some are wild oversimplifications. Some are half right. Some are pure baloney. Eat a pot of blueberries a day and all will be well. Or was it kale? Or bacon? All meat and dairy today. No meat and no dairy tomorrow. No matter, theres a quick fix for every taste and theyre almost all nonsense (not the all-plantbased diet books; we dont entirely agree, but theyre not nonsense). Just like the five-minutes-a-week exercise books. This book is tougher and more complex but people seem to like that, seem to appreciate that it is deeply science based and therefore a little complicated. (Complicated is the price of true. Sorry.)

Jen and I hear that people like going inside and seeing what really happens when you eat nothing but crap. Or nothing but good stuff. Or exercise a lot. And, God bless them, they say Thinner is funny, too. Not bad for a book about diet and exercise.

Most important, they say it works. Which is my basic message, wherever I go: This stuff works! It really, really does. And I hear it back, all the time: Thanks, man. Thanks to you and Jen for writing that book; it changed my life. Or, I lost a bunch of weight, I feel so much better, and so on. Hearing that makes us even more passionate about getting the book in as many hands as possible.

Because, as I say, we are true believers. We know that we cannot go on living the way we have in this country... and our poor country cannot go on like this, either. No health care system can keep up with the consequences of our being so damn fat! Cannot bear the consequences of our being bone idle. We cannot afford to eat filth all day long, on what I call the Mountain of Slop and Despair, which has been carefully built in the last thirty years by the cynical corporate giants that manufacture the Dead Food that takes up the middle 80 percent of the supermarket. Dead food, is exactly right, by the way. Tons of calories and almost no nutrients. Think of this: 35 percent of the nations total caloric intake is added sugar and solid fat that is pumped into prepared food for no good reason. Except making us addicts. Us and our poor little kids who are particularly vulnerable to sugar and fat. That is a truly astounding statistic. And an appalling one. How dare they, you ask? I dont know, but they do. So, do you think all that is good for you? Uh... no. Gotta quit eating Dead Food, kids; Jen tells you why. We both tell you how. Gotta move, too. Big time.

This is not the kind of thing that nice people say out loud, but heres what Jen and I secretly think: This little book may be a book for the ages. Or for quite a while anyway. It will come into its own because the hole in our knowledge is so vast. And the need is so great.

So... heres the paperback version of Thinner. Hope you like it.

Chris Crowley

The biology of lifestyle is endlessly fascinating to me. Every day, science unveils more about the mechanisms driving the great biological choices in our bodiesbetween growth and decay, between health and illness, and between lives that are spiritually and emotionally enriched or impoverished.

When Chris and I wrote the Younger Next Year books we thought we had covered the waterfront on the subject, and in some very important ways we had. People who read the books wrote in with remarkable stories of success: dramatic leaps upward in fitness, joy, energy, and quality of life, and also dramatic reductions in weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and all the other medical markers of the toxic lifestyle we have somehow embraced as normal. As people shared their stories they also asked in-depth questions about specific road maps to better fitness, better nutrition, better health, and better lives.

I was reluctant to take on a book about diet and the deeper details of exercise for a couple of reasons: The first was my deep conviction that diets dont work, and that diet books that dont provide a comprehensive education in nutrition are not only useless but also border on fraudulent. The second was my keen awareness that, as an internist, my expertise in nutrition was more at the level of competence than mastery, and the same held true for my knowledge of the specific details of formal exercise programs. The job of an internist is to recognize patterns, make diagnoses, help people with the biological context of their lives, and, critically, refer them to the best possible experts when a situation needs deep and thorough investigation and treatment.