I was a big and chubby baby. My mother knew I was her last and nursed me for a long time. At two years of age I would say to her, "Mama, sit down; I want to eat." Later in life I slimmed down, but I had periods when I was overweight and had to go on a diet to shape up. After age fifty I started adding five pounds every year, laying a large spare tire around my middle. I was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 250 pounds.

My brother, who was thin and a health enthusiast, kept scolding me. "You’re going to get diabetes; all this fat you carry will give you heart disease. I don’t want to lose my brother." Finally after I became sixty, I started fighting my compulsion to overeat and began losing some weight slowly, so slowly I thought I would never get into shape. In the meantime, my doctor diagnosed I had acquired Type II diabetes; also I developed high cholesterol and high blood pressure. My doctor told me, "Get your weight below two hundred pounds; your symptoms will disappear." I struggled for years to get that light, but I couldn’t do it.

Finally at age 68, after taking Pravacol for the cholesterol problem and Lotensin for high blood pressure for ten years, I began to experience severe pain and weakness in my muscles as well as dizziness. I felt as if I were in my nineties, approaching my end. My doctor took me off all medications for a year. I began going to the gymnasium every day, weak as I felt, starting with just a few minutes of painful effort. Gradually I worked up to hours of aerobics and weight training. At the same time I cut down on animal and sugary foods.

Five years later now my doctor tells me, "Your readings are fabulous" each time he tests my blood sugar, cholesterol, and blood pressure. My friends and family tell me I look "slim and muscular" at 73. And as an added bonus I have not been sick, not even with a cold or flue, these past five years. How did I do it? How did I motivate myself and maintained that motivation for many years?

Well, to be honest I have had many slip ups along the way. But I built up a safety net of good practices and habits that sustained me, even when I occasionally failed. Some people are tied up in a net of bad habits and customs--personal, familial, or societal--that keep them down, prisoners of ineffective thought and action. Here then is my saving net for whatever it is worth to you. Be patient. Apply one by one the strands of the life-saving net I lay down before you in what follows. When you exercise one of the good habits I lay out for you, you strengthen your healthful net through reinforcement. When you refuse to repeat a bad habit, gradually, through extinction, you tear down the net that traps you in fatness and weakness.

You will soon be moving to greater success in fitness, and other areas of your life to which these principles apply.