Biography
(May 2021)
Dr. Steven Jonas (“the other Dr. J.”) is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at the School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-8036; email: steven.jonas@stonybrookmedicine.edu; tel. (631) 473-7228. A graduate of Columbia College (BA), Harvard Medical School (MD), the Yale School of Medicine (MPH), and New York University (MS), among other things he has been publishing books in both the academic and trade press since the mid-70s.
Since the mid-1980s, one major focus of his work has been on the promotion of regular exercise and multi-sport racing, weight management, and the centrality of the mobilization of motivation to success in making personal behavior changes. His other major field of endeavour has been health policy analysis. He has authored 17 books of his own, and collaborated as either co-author or editor/co-editor on 19 others. He has written, co-written, and co-edited more than ten books on athletics, exercise and fitness, weight management, wellness, and health promotion/disease prevention for both the academic and the lay audiences.
His first book on exercise was Triathloning for Ordinary Mortals®: And Doing the Duathlon Too (New York: WW Norton, 2nd ed., 2006) originally published in 1986. He also wrote The Essential Triathlete (New York: Lyons and Burford, 1996, now Globe-Pequot/Lyons Press, Guilford, CT). Championship Triathlon Training, by George Dallam, Ph.D. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics) for which he was the co-writer, was published in May, 2008, and re-published in Italian translation in 2009. In 2011 101 Ideas and Insights for Triathletes and Duathletes (Monterey, CA: Coaches Choice) appeared, and in 2012, he published the first modern book devoted solely to the triathlon variant, duathlon, entitled Duathlon Training and Racing for Ordinary Mortals®: Getting Started and Staying with It (Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press/Globe Pequot Press, 2012)
On promoting regular exercise Dr. Jonas wrote PaceWalking: The Balanced Way to Aerobic Health, co-authored by Peter Radetsky (New York: Crown Publishers, 1988), Regular Exercise: A Handbook for Clinical Practice and its companion for patients/clients, A Guidebook for the Regular Exerciser (sole author, New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1995), and, with Edward M. Phillips, MD, ACSM’s Exercise is Medicine®: A Clinician’s Guide to Exercise Prescription (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2009), the original official textbook for the American College of Sports Medicine national program, “Exercise is Medicine®.” (This book was published in a Chinese translation in 2013.) He was Editor-in-Chief of the American Medical Athletic Association Journal (2002-15), a member of the editorial board of ACSM's Health & Fitness Journal (1999-2011), and an Associate Editor of Preventive Medicine (1983-2005). He was also a contributor to the ACSM Fitness Book, 3rd Ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2003).
On weight management he has written The "I-Don’t Eat (but-I-can't-lose)" Weight Loss Program, co-authored by Virginia Aronson (New York: Rawson/Macmillan, 1989); Take Control of Your Weight, co-written with the Editors of Consumers Reports Books (Yonkers, NY: CRB, 1993); Just the Weigh You Are, co-author to Linda Konner (Boston, MA: Chapters/Houghton Mifflin, 1997, trade paperback edition, 1998, reissued as Just as You Are: How to be Healthy Whatever Your Weight by Barnes & Noble Books, 2000); and 30 Secrets of the World's Healthiest Cuisines, co-author to Sandra Gordon (New York: John Wiley, 2000; reissued by Barnes & Noble Books, 2005).
He has also published on the academic side of the health promotion/wellness realm. He was Associate Editor of the textbook Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in Clinical Practice (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 1996; 2nd edition, 2008). His own academic book in the field, Talking About Health and Wellness with Patients, was published by Springer in 2000. In the 1990s he developed the "Four-Pathways Hypothesis" for improving the understanding of weight-gain/weight-loss. Take Control of Your Weight (see above) is based on that hypothesis. Dr. Jonas has also published extensively in the academic journal literature as well as the trade magazine press. He has given many presentations to both professional and lay audiences on health policy, and health, wellness, and regular exercise, and has been interviewed on these subjects numerous times for both the print and electronic media.
A triathlete for many years, 2018 marked his 36th, and last, season of multi-sport racing. As of the end of that year, he had done 256 duathlons and triathlons, from sprints to the ironman distance. He had qualified eleven times as an age-group member of USA-Triathlon’s Team USA for the International Triathlon Union’s Age-Group World Championships: at Madeira Island, Portugal (2004), Lausanne, Switzerland (2006), Hamburg, Germany (2007), Vancouver, BC, Canada (2008), Gold Coast, Australia (2009), Budapest, Hungary (2010), Beijing, China (2011), Auckland, New Zealand (2012), London, England, (2013), Penticton, Canada (2017) and Gold Coast, Australia (2018). For a variety of reasons (illness, family illness, weather), he did not race at any of the latter six. In 2018, he did one local race. By 2019, with some mild injuries he did not race at all. 2020 of course went by the board with the COVID-19 pandemic. When 2021 arrived, having been on the sidelines for so long, getting slower than ever and with a developing mild arthritis in both knees, he decided to call it a career in the sport, and he is now formally retired.
Since his primary goal in each race is to finish happily and healthily and he continues to do that, at age 82 he is having as much fun racing now as he ever has. He has been rather slow since he started racing and has been gradually getting slower. But, still using the training program he originally developed for his book Triathloning for Ordinary Mortals® back in the 1980s, he keeps on truckin’ and just loves doin’ it. He is also a retired certified professional ski instructor, an endeavour he engaged in part-time for about ten years (after the age of 60).
In the multi-sport periodical realm, “The other Dr. J.” has been a regular columnist with The Beast (of the East) (1985-86), The East Coast Triathlete (1987-89), the national monthly Triathlon Today! (1988-1993), the Triathlon Federation/USA's monthly Triathlon Times (1990-91), the American Medical Athletic Association Quarterly, then Journal (1999-, for which he was Editor-in-Chief (2002-15), americanTRI magazine (2002-04), and USA-Triathlon Life (2006-2012). Since 2013 he has written a regular feature for the USA-Triathlon Blog, under the title “Talking Tri-/Duathlon for Ordinary Mortals®.” Also with USA-Triathlon, he was a member of the National Coaching Commission (2000-02). Selected columns have been re-published on the GoRunBikeRun blog since 2017.
He is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences (elected), the American College of Preventive Medicine, the American Public Health Association (40-year member), the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Royal Society of Medicine (UK). He is the recipient (2006) of the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research’s Duncan Clark Award for Lifetime Achievement, and (2010) the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Association of Yale Alumni in Public Health.
In the field of health policy analysis, the book for which he was the founding editor, Health Care Delivery in the United States (New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1977, 1st ed.) was the first textbook of its kind in the field. That book (with which Dr. Jonas is no longer actively involved), now known as Jonas-Kovner's Health Care Delivery in the United States, is currently in its 11th edition (2011). Reflecting his broad range of interests, he was, for example, the Founding Editor of the Springer Publishing Co. Series on Medical Education; during the 1980s, he was one of the early developers of the "Public Health Approach to the Drug Problem" (his chapter on that subject appears in the textbook Substance Abuse, 4th ed. [Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, 2005]); and of the "Co-Factor Hypothesis to Explain the Natural History of AIDS." His most recent book, developed from his earlier work on this subject, is Ending the Drug War; Solving the Drug Problem: The Public Health Approach (2016).
His dear wife, Mrs. Chezna Newman of New York City, passed away in October, 2018. He has two adult children of his own, Jacob and Lillian, both elementary school teachers, a step-son Mark Newman, an architect and web designer (marknewmanstudio.com), and four grandchildren, Nathan Harold Wain and Adam Jonas Wain and Alyssa Jeanne and Madeline Linda Jonas.