Health, Wellness & Fitness
ACSM's Exercise is Medicine®: A Clinician's Guide to Exercise Prescription
The American College of Sports Medicine has been engaged in a national campaign called "Exercise is Medicine ®." It was originally designed to educate and train health care professionals on how to most effectively prescribe regular exercise for their patients, and to make doing so a regular part of their practices. I and my colleague Edward Phillips, MD, Director of the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Harvard Medical School, are the authors of this official ACSM textbook in support of the program. It is based in part on my 1995 book Regular Exercise: A Handbook for Clinical Practice (New York: Springer Publishing). It was published in March, 2009 by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins.
The program and the book cover the range of knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for successfully prescribing regular exercise, with a special emphasis on the element that is missing in much of both the professional and lay literature on the subject: how to successfully mobilize ones motivation for making personal health promotional behavior change. About one third of the book is devoted to this subject. The book also covers such essential matters as: how to organize one’s practice for effectively prescribing regular exercise; the two patterns of regular exercise --- “lifestyle” and “scheduled leisure-time;” exercise programs designed to meet the Oct. 2008 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services “Physical Activity Guidelines;” writing the exercise prescription; choosing among the various sports and activities; technique and equipment for various sports and activities; promoting regular exercise for children; and how to have fun as a regular exerciser.
Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in Clinical Practice
For this book I was the Associate Editor to Stephen Woolf, MD, MPH, Editor, with Evonne Kaplan-Liss, MD, MPH, Managing Editor. It is the 2nd edition of the first text in preventive medicine which is organized around the health-risk factors with which patients actually present to health care practitioners. Written by clinicians for clinicians, with a number of new expert authors for the 2nd edition, the book lays out the details on gathering information from the patient, designing a personalized health maintenance plan, facilitating behavior change, and the work-up of abnormal results from screening tests. It also explains how to organize the practice and clinic to deliver quality preventive care and to obtain reimbursement. Chapters, for example, provide practical guidance on how to counsel patients about exercise, nutrition, tobacco use, substance use, sexually transmitted infections, and dealing with depression. As well, it includes chapters on evidence-based screening tests and immunization, practice redesign, the use of electronic medical records, reimbursement, and on health promotion and disease prevention for children and adolescents. With this second edition there is a companion Website, www.healthpromodisprev.com, that features fully searchable text online, providing a fast, flexible multimedia library that is being updated continually.
Talking About Health and Wellness with Patients:
Integrating Health Promotion and Disease Prevention into Your Practice
(New York: Springer Publishing Co., 2000)
This is a very readable (my publisher called it "tradey") book on the subject of the title.
From the back cover: Steven Woolf, MD, MPH, Senior Editor of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in Clinical Practice, said: "Most of the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S. are due to health behaviors such as smoking, physically inactivity, and diet. The secret to helping [people] to change [their] health behaviors lies in this book . . . Jonas' 'Ten Central Commandments' are more likely to lengthen and enhance the lives of [people] than most of the tests and treatments administered daily in offices and hospitals."
Michael McGinniss, MD, who founded the office of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in the Dept. of Health and Human Service s in the 1980s, said: “Continuing his career-long leadership in health promotion and disease prevention, Dr. Jonas offers a useful and insightful primer on the range of issues and approaches important to clinicians interested in putting prevention into their practices.”
30 Secrets of the World’s Healthiest Cuisines, by Steven Jonas and Sandra Gordon
2005 edition published by Barnes & Noble Publishing Co., original edition published by John Wiley, 2000.
As the back cover copy says: “30 Secrets is a delicious departure from the nutrition-through-sacrifice school of cooking. It invites us to take a look at how people around the globe are living long, healthy lives while eating very tasty food.” The focus is on six cuisines: those of China, France, Japan, the Mediterranean region, West Africa, and Scandinavia. With basic nutrition information about and for the six cuisines, a variety of dieting plan suggestions, and 86 tasty recipes from around the world, 30 Secrets is a sourcebook of strategies for happy, healthy eating on the one hand, and the prevention of major diet-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis on the other. As of 2014, I was still getting occasional calls about this book from nutrition journalists.
Just the Weigh You Are
Get off the dieting roller coaster today. Look great! Feel great! Live longer! And never again deprive yourself of the things you like. Follow Dr. Steven Jonas’s revolutionary “Big Picture Plan for Health” for total fitness — whatever your weight.
Yes, use this book, co-authored by Linda Konner, to end the frustration of dieting forever. Stop forcing yourself to be someone you were not meant to be. Feel better, live longer, and never once feel like you are depriving yourself, all by using this foolproof, natural approach to living.
As Marion Nestle, Ph.D., MPH. Professor and Chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University and author of Food Politics, says: “This refreshing book shifts the entire basis of the discussion about overweight from ‘must diet' to 'maintain a weight that is healthy for you.' It focuses on the really important issue — health — and explains how to achieve it with or without weight loss."
