I have to admit that as much as the nation’s top resolution to lose weight feeds my business and therefore my belly, I often find the big push troublesome.  It is not that I don’t like the idea of people wanting to live healthier lives or even feel better about their bodies.  I most certainly and obviously do.  My problem is when the focus is on the end and not the means.  Tag lines like BE A NEW YOU IN EIGHT WEEKS perpetuate the myth that enacting lasting change in our lives is as simple as doing the latest cleanse, going on a diet, and buying a gym membership.

But losing weight, quitting smoking or managing your debt aren’t things you simply do like painting the living room or getting life insurance.  They involve a complex process of changing habits.  And perhaps one habit we should endeavor to change this year is the habit of making New Year’s Resolutions.

I was having a conversation with a friend recently and they told me of how they write a list of what they have accomplished over the past year.  I had never thought of that.  As Allen Durgin constantly reminds me, I have this terrible tendency of not giving myself enough credit for my accomplishments but instead looking at my tremendous to-do list and fixating on how much I never got around to.

Last year I wrote a Wish List for 2008 and just came across it a few weeks ago.  I hadn’t done a single thing on that list.  It included things like spending a weekend working on an organic farm, camping solo in the mountains, buying a new winter overcoat in Berlin and limiting my work hours from 9am to 7pm.  I could feel bad about not doing any of these things, but I don’t because I so love the surprises that took their place.  The three that most dramatically changed the topography of my year where camping for the first time in a decade with Maribel (Mountains and Valleys, Highs and Lows), working with clients in Las Vegas for two months (Rough Ride On the River) and launching Blog Further.  These three things have brought me more reward than I ever could have imagined my entire wish list bringing me a year ago.

So instead of making a New Year’s Resolution, I’d like to ask our readers to make a New Year’s Reflection.  What are your most memorable moments and biggest surprises from 2008?  I’d like to know.

Jamie Dreyer is the President of Further Fitness NYC.

I spent this past Thanksgiving with Maribel and her family.  The twelve of us at the dinner table reminded me of the warm, loud holiday dinners of my childhood.  And just as in my childhood, I devoured dessert.  My only regret was that I left my second stomach at home and had to quit after the sixth slice of pie.  Yes, six!  I had three slices of the peanut butter cream cheese, two pumpkin and one pecan plus an extremely healthy serving of the best homemade whipped cream I have ever tasted (nice job Gaby!).

Every year we are inundated with articles and television segments about how to eat sensibly during the holiday season.  They tell us to snack on the carrots, not to drink on an empty stomach, to eat a healthy meal before going to that cocktail party and so on and so forth.

Now I may get my personal trainer card revoked for this but I say,

SCREW IT!  Eat Grandma’s coveted tapioca pudding.  Drink Uncle Bill’s Cadillac eggnog.  And how could anyone not try Tio Jose’s infamous chili-cheese nachos?

To my mind, this is the whole point of the holidays: feasting with family and friends.  It can be so emotionally rewarding to share in the communal traditions of the holidays.  And if you celebrate Christmas, how much more Christian can you get than the breaking of bread?

Of course, if you celebrate all twelve days of Christmas, feasting straight through to Three Kings’ Day, you will require a certain endurance.  Not to mention a touch more restraint than I will be exhibiting during the 36 hours of reckless abandon I will partake in this year.  My biggest splurge will be suspending my gluten-free diet and indulging in many a sorely missed Guinness with friends, oatmeal pancakes with family, and chocolate chip cookies with myself.  I rarely eat junk or drink beer but make an exception during the holidays when I gather with family and friends.  The pleasure of such commune greatly offsets the displeasure of my head and bellyache.

So as you celebrate this next week and a half, focus on what is really important: family, friends and feasting.  And if you see me this weekend looking a little swollen, just ask me how much I enjoyed getting that way.

Jamie Dreyer is the President of Further Fitness NYC.

Last month, when writing about steroids for my post “Cover Models Never Looked So Good”, I surprisingly found myself feeling nostalgic.

I moved to NYC in the fall of ’99.  In doing so, I left behind the suburban families at Sunrise Fitness and joined the hard-core bodybuilders at Steel Gym.  Overnight I went from being one of the big dudes to barely average sized.  Steel Gym was loaded with professional bodybuilders, one ex Mr. Olympia, several future contenders and at least a dozen amateurs weighing over 250 lbs. and ripped.  I had been lifting regularly for nearly seven years at that point and grown from a 145lb. fifteen-year-old to a 195lb. 22 yr old.  I had always prided myself on being all-natural but was curious about what my body would do with a little extra help.  Mostly though, I wanted the self-esteem booster of being one of the big, strong guys again and all of the attention that comes with it (although I wasn’t fully aware of this until years later).

When the local steroid dealer befriended me and offered me some gear at cost, I knew it was only a matter of time until I took the plunge with a syringe.  Six weeks later I began my first cycle: 10 ampoules of Duratest 250 and 16 ampoules of Winstrol V.

Huge beefy muscles were very much in fashion in ‘99 and I was doing my best to keep up with the Joneses.  When I went to my second job at night to bartend at the local gay bar, sterioded muscle was part of the uniform— no shirts, just slabs of beef.  I’ll never forget this one night after closing when we were cleaning up.  One of my co-workers came through the bar with a pen and paper announcing,

Who wants some juice? I’m seeing my dealer tomorrow.

It reminded me of my college days doing light construction when a co-worker would call out, “I am heading to the deli.  Anybody want anything?”

I experimented with steroids on and off for two and a half years.  My weight would fluctuate ten to fifteen pounds between cycles with 219lbs. being my heaviest.  My strength and recovery certainly improved and my mood was great, or at least, I thought so.  The testosterone made me very aggressive and there was an incident or two in which my dear friend Allen feared for his life during a disagreement with me.  And, of course, there was the time that I barreled over some little, old lady for trying to board the crowded 9 train before letting me off, which was just terrible subway etiquette on her part.  So I took it upon myself to remind her of proper traffic flow with a firm shoulder as I exited the subway car.  Some Eagle Scout I was.

As much as I loved my newfound strength, size and respect for elders, there were a few cons to my steroid use.  I had some very unattractive acne, and at times, the water retention in my forearms produced an unbearable pressure on my ulna nerve.

To make things interesting, my new testosterone use dovetailed with a new sex addiction (a topic deserving of its own future post) making for some seriously late nights.  Being a very sexual person to begin with, the testosterone put me into overdrive.  It was difficult to focus on anything other than sex and quite often getting a good night sleep was not my top priority.  Eventually I realized that being too tired for my workout defeated the purpose of me taking steroids in the first place.

As the cons grew and the pros diminished, I gradually began to step back and reevaluate my fitness path.  I wanted my body to last another century without having orthopedic surgery or joint replacement.  So I began making some major changes in my lifestyle and steroids became a thing of the past.

Steroids served a purpose at that point in my life.  They were a band-aid of sorts, giving me confidence and protection.  And they got me through until I could develop the self-esteem and courage to face my life without them.  I am grateful for this time in my life and have no regrets about it. OK, that’s not totally true.  If I could go back, I would probably settle for simply saying, “Excuse me” and rolling my eyes at the elderly woman on the subway.

During the course of writing this post, I’ve wondered why I felt so nostalgic about steroids last month, and it just dawned on me now.  I was depressed.  This fall was a rough season for me, and I was feeling pretty shitty about myself.  Steroids and sex were two things I’d used in the past to band-aid my hurt and the memory of them came flooding back.  It was strange: as far as I have come and as long as it has been, remembering the steroid use and the sex brought an uneasy comfort during a time of pain.

Jamie Dreyer is the President of Further Fitness NYC.

I was a shy kid in elementary school and junior high.  I hated confrontation, wasn’t competitive in sports and received little attention from my classmates outside of being made fun of and called faggot.  My experience was not unlike that of our own Allen Durgin as he relates it in “Playing for the Other Team”.

But then, at age fifteen, I discovered weight training and fell in love immediately.  My body responded swiftly and after only six months of lifting weights in my parents’ basement I had packed on twenty pounds of muscle.  It made me feel more masculine and attractive.  The attacks, both physical and verbal, diminished as my size grew, and it felt empowering to be able to wield some control in my intimidating world.  I also needed something to calm my anxieties and provide a lift during my times of depression.  I very well could have settled on pot or alcohol but instead choose endorphins as my drug of choice, quickly developing a nasty addiction.

The first realization I was becoming obsessive came at the age of nineteen.  Everything revolved around my workout.  Some days I would even skip class to take a nap in my car before lifting.  One particularly crisp December day I was driving to the gym for what was to be a perfect chest workout— I was well rested, had timed my last meal perfectly and was on course to arrive at the gym just as my blood sugar was peaking— when I noticed my temperature gauge.  The small leak I had in my radiator just blew out the last of the coolant and my engine was overheating.  I needed to pull over, wait for it to cool down and refill it with fluid, but all this would throw off the perfect timing of my chest workout.  So I ignored the needle, driving it deeper into the warning zone, praying to make it just a few more miles.  That’s when I heard the awful knock.  I had just willingly blown my engine; the block was cracked, a rod was thrown and my workout would never be.  The latter being the most painful part.

Back then I joked about how my only addiction was exercise, but in hindsight it was no joke.

I have since made great progress in my relationship with fitness.  I no longer judge the value of myself by the size or appearance of my body, and working out is one enjoyable part of my day instead of the center of it.  I now know that even seemingly healthy and socially approved habits can affect my life in unhealthy ways.  I used to focus solely on getting to the gym and not on the engine that was going to me there.  But today, I focus on the engines of health: nurturing relationships, participating in a variety of physical activities, even attending a lecture or two.

Jamie Dreyer is the President of Further Fitness NYC.

By now you’ve probably at least heard of corrective exercise, but you still may not be quite sure what it actually means or what makes an exercise corrective or not.

Any exercise that helps to address structural or mechanical imbalances in your body is corrective.  Which means that it is specific to the imbalances of the person doing the exercise.

Because an imbalance in one part of the body is often symptomatic of issues from another, the body needs to be addressed as a whole.  Your trainer can address this with a thorough assessment that is both objective and subjective.  Here at Further Fitness, we take notes on our clients’ static posture as well as dynamic movement patterns, core strength and balance.  We measure hip tilt, spinal curvature and head placement.  This information is then used to design our clients’ programs.  We give them specific mobilizations to free up stiff joints, stretches to lengthen tight muscles, and exercises to strengthen weak ones and retrain the body for more efficient movement patterns.

A very common posture seen in our culture is head and shoulders forward and a slouching of the spine, your typical state of readiness for an intense bout of e-mail checking or doing “a Google.”  In this posture, you will find your chest muscles short and tight and the upper back muscles weak and long, resulting in your shoulders being hunched forward.  You will find the back of your neck short and tight, and the front weak and long, resulting in your head jutting forward.  Stretching your pecs and the back of your neck, while strengthening your upper back and front of the neck will help to bring you back into proper alignment.

It can take awhile to correct imbalances and coax the body out of its old habits.  And as long as you continue to spend a significant amount of time in repeating the same movement pattern or remaining in the same position due to work, sports or lack of awareness, you will need to continue with corrective exercise to maintain a healthy and pain-free body.

Be sure to keep an eye out for future posts where I demonstrate a few corrective exercises you can do on your own.

Jamie Dreyer is the President of Further Fitness NYC and specializes in corrective exercise.