Jack LaLanne
Jack LaLanne
Francois Henri "Jack" LaLannewas an American fitness, exercise, and nutritional expert and motivational speaker who is sometimes called "the godfather of fitness" and the "first fitness superhero." He described himself as being a "sugarholic" and a "junk food junkie" until he was age 15. He also had behavioral problems, but "turned his life around" after listening to a public lecture about the benefits of good nutrition by health food pioneer Paul Bragg. During his career, he came to believe that...
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth26 September 1914
CitySan Francisco, CA
athlete men doctors
When I first started out, I was considered a crackpot. The doctors used to say, "Don't go to that Jack LaLanne, you'll get hemorrhoids, you won't get an erection, you women will look like men, you athletes will get muscle-bound -- this is what I had to go through.
men ifs
If man makes it, I don't eat it!
mind body impossible
You can't separate the mind and body. It's impossible.
sports ice-cream cake
If it tastes good, spit it out. All those cakes and pies and candy and ice cream -- all that terrible fast food stuff! I just bought a new corvette sports car ... would I put oil in the gas tank? Would I?
basketball lying cutting
I tell people that the scales lie. You may have played basketball and weighed 175 pounds, with a 30-inch waist, back when you were in college. And you may still weigh 175 at 55. But you probably have a 35-inch waist and you've probably lost 30 or 40 pounds of muscle -- and gained 30 or 40 pounds of fat. The tape measure doesn't lie. Get that tape measure out and put it on your hips and your waist. Keep checking it. And keep exercising and cutting those calories down until that tape measure gets close to where you were in your prime.
beach hands years
The first thing I did when I was forty years old, I put handcuffs on and I jumped off Alcatraz prison and swam to San Francisco handcuffed. That made national publicity. Then, there were three or four years where I would do more difficult feats. Another birthday I towed a thousand pound boat across the Golden Gate. On my 65th Birthday I towed 65 boats a mile and a half in Tokyo. On my 70th Birthday I towed 70 boats with 70 people in it with my feet and hands tied a mile and a half in Long Beach.... My next Birthday I will be 93. I'm gonna tow my wife across the bathtub.
kids thank-god records
I was going to be a singer. If I hadn't been in my profession, I was going to be an Opera singer. That's from a young kid. I had all these records from all those famous Opera singers. I wanted to be an Opera singer -- that was my whole thing and physical fitness got in the way, thank God.
zero exercise elderly
What the hell do doctors know about exercise? Most of them know zero. You gotta push elderly people to failure like anybody else. Then the body responds.
exercise talking athletic
Sitting around on your big fat gluteus maximus talking about the good old days. The good old days are right this second. You've got to exercise VIG-OR-OUSLY! Life is tough. Life is a challenge. Life is a battlefield... . Life is an athletic event, and you must train for it.
fitness exercise
Exercise to live. Never live to exercise.
stupid sick half
If you can't afford a half hour three or four times a week taking care of the most priceless possession, your body, you've got to be sick. You're stupid.
ice-cream average blood
Look at the average American diet: ice cream, butter, cheese, whole milk, all this fat. People don't realize how much of this stuff you get by the end of the day. High blood pressure is from all this high-fat eating.
athlete years able
They thought that athletes that worked out with my system wouldn't be able to throw a ball because they'd be too muscle bound. Those are the misconceptions I had to go through for about 40 years.
air perfect sick
It's survival of the fittest. You can't have everything perfect, that's impossible, but the fit survive. The fit can handle the impurities in the air and in the water, but the poor people who are sick, it really affects them more.