Eddie Furth with a client at the Stamford JCC

By Cindy Mindell ~

When Eddie Furth’s parents moved to Stamford from Manhattan in the mid-‘80s, one of the first things they did was join the JCC. That’s where Furth learned swimming and karate as a kid. As a young adult with Crohn’s disease, that’s where he coaxed his body into remission through basketball, fitness classes, and personal training. Five years ago, at age 22, Furth was hired as director of fitness at the Stamford JCC, where he is also a personal trainer.
“Some of my greatest joys have come from my clients,” he says. “There’s really no way to properly explain the feeling of knowing you’ve helped someone change their life. I constantly get thanked, but I’ve done nothing but give people a program and guide them through it, and they’re the ones who have done the work.”

These are the 10 steps Furth offers to anyone seeking a healthier lifestyle.

1. The best workout routine is one you will stick with. Find an activity you love and do it.
Physical activity is something we crave, something our body wants, that initiates chemical responses in the body – but not every activity is appropriate for everybody.

2.  You can’t out-run a poor diet. If you’re eating poorly, no amount of exercise can cancel it
out. Diet goes much further in attaining health and fitness goals than working out alone. If you can only go for either a healthy diet or working out, eat healthy.

3.  Set specific, reasonable, and measurable goals. If you say, “I want to lose weight, look
good, and feel good,” that’s not specific. Give yourself 90 days to see a change, and spell out your goals.  A specific goal might be something like: “Lose three percent body fat, 10 lbs., and increase my endurance so that I can run a 5K race in 30 minutes.” You’re much more likely to succeed.

4.  Use compound, multi-joint, multi-muscle moves to get more “bang for your buck” with each
move. Bicep curls do the least; squats, push-ups, dead lifts, and chin-ups use more muscle and are more efficient.

5.  Grab a partner to stay motivated. You are 80 percent more likely to stick to a routine if you
work with a partner, because it keeps you motivated and accountable, and makes it more fun.

6.  Write down your workouts and log your food intake to track progress and identify areas for
improvement. If you’re writing everything down, you’ll think twice about grabbing a handful of M&Ms.

7.  Whatever your goal, do one thing every day to achieve it. You can do more than one, of
course, but choose at least one specific wellness, fitness, or healthy eating behavior.

8.  Run, lift, and stretch. Include cardio, weights, and flexibility in your workouts; none of the
three is valuable without the other.

9.  Cook your own food. This is the only way to know exactly what’s going into your body. Use
whole and healthy food and cook it properly. Our food choices, as a country, are not what they should be; we rely too much on processed and packaged foods and don’t cook enough for ourselves.

10.  Invest in yourself. If you don’t have time to take care of yourself, what is it you have time
to invest in? When I had Crohn’s disease, I had to ask myself whether it was worth eating the burger and feeling sick the next day? Was it worth putting in the 45 minutes on the elliptical machine and feeling better? There’s nothing in this world that feels better than feeling good.