Biography
Dr. Steven Jonas (“the other Dr. J.”) is a Professor of Preventive Medicine and of the Graduate Program in Public Health at the School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-8036; email: steven.jonas@stonybrook.edu; tel. (631) 444 2147. A graduate of Columbia College (BA), Harvard Medical School (MD), the Yale School of Medicine (MPH), and New York University (MS), he has been publishing books in both the academic and trade press since the mid-70s.
Since the mid-1980s, a major focus of his work has been on sport, the promotion of regular exercise, weight management, and how to mobilize one's motivation for making changes in personal health-related behaviors. Beginning in the 1960s, his first major field of endeavor, in which he is now only occasionally active, was health policy analysis. He has authored 14 books of his own, with a 15th in preparation, and collaborated as either co-author or editor/co-editor on 19 others. Of these are more than ten books on sport, exercise and fitness, weight management, wellness, and health promotion/disease prevention for both academic and lay audiences that he has written, co-written, and co-edited.
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. This book has sold over 46,000 copies. On triathloning he also wrote The Essential Triathlete (New York: Lyons and Burford, 1996, now Globe-Pequot/Lyons Press, Guilford, CT), which has sold over 8500 copies.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 had passed the 5000 figure by the end of 2010. 101 Tips for Triathlon/Duathlon Training and Racing; Starting Out and Staying With It, (Monterey, CA: Healthy Learning/Coaches Choice) was published in June, 2011. Duathlon Training and Racing for Ordinary Mortals®: Getting Started and Staying with It will be published by Lyons Press/Globe Pequot Press of Guilford, CT in 2012.
On regular exercise Dr. Jonas also 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). With Edward M. Phillips, MD, he was the first author of ACSM’s Exercise is Medicine®: A Clinician’s Guide to Exercise Prescription (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2009), the official textbook for the American College of Sports Medicine national program, “Exercise is Medicine®.” With ACSM, he has also been a member of the Editorial Board of the ACSM's Health and Fitness Journal (1999-2011), and 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, 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 in the health promotion/wellness realm. He is 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 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 both health policy and health, wellness, sport, and regular exercise, and has been interviewed on these subjects numerous times for both the print and electronic media.
A triathlete for many years, 2012 will mark his 30th season of multi-sport racing. As of the end of the 2011 season, he had done over 85 duathlons and 130 triathlons, from sprints to the ironman distance. He has qualified seven times as a member of 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, did not race), and Beijing, China (2011, did not attend).
He has been rather slow since he started racing and has been gradually getting slower. Since his primary goal in each race is to finish happily and healthily and he continues to do that, he is having as much fun racing now as he ever has. (Too, he claims to hold the world’s record for total time spent in transition, career, a record to which he comfortably adds in every race. At the 2008 and 2010 USA-Triathlon National Championships he received the official post-race award for Most Time Spent in Transition, Male.) 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 certified professional ski instructor, an endeavour he engaged in part-time, (1995-2009).
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), theAmerican Medical Athletic Association Quarterly, then Journal (1999-, for which he has been Editor-in-Chief since 2002), and americanTRI magazine (2002-04). Presently he writes a regular feature for USA-Triathlon Magazine under the title “Ordinary Mortals®: Talking Triathlon with Steve Jonas.” Also with USA-Triathlon, he was a member of the National Coaching Commission (2000-02).
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 received the Founders’ Medal awarded by the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, University of North Texas (Ft. Worth) in 1982, the Duncan Clark Award for lifetime achievement from the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research (2006), the Faculty Recognition Award of the Graduate Program in Public Health, Stony Brook University (2008), the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Yale School of Public Health (2010), and also in 2010, he was named one of the "Top 10 Most Influential Public Health Professors," by the education-in-public-health website, The Health Hawk.
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, appeared in its 10th edition in 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, 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 also in the 1980s he was one of early developers of the "Co-Factor Hypothesis to Explain the Natural History of AIDS."
He is married to Mrs. Chezna Newman of New York City, has two adult children of his own, Jacob and Lillian, both elementary school teachers, a step-son Mark Newman, an architect and web designer/master (at marknewmanstudio.com), and two grandchildren, Nathan Harold Wain and Adam Jonas Wain.