Building Better Bodies, Better Health

Robert E. Dickson (BS ’69) has always been active. He won his first medal in a diving competition on the Queen Mary cruise ship as a four year old.

But he grew up to be a self-described “skinny, not-too-healthy, bullied kid” who wasn’t always strong enough to fully participate in his chosen sports. Through trial and error, he developed an exercise and nutrition program to help him get and stay healthy. And it worked: he grew up to be an All-American, NCAA champion, Olympic athlete, and professional acrobat.

Over the years, his program has expanded from a personal project to something he can share with countless others. Throughout his career, which has taken him all over the world as a professional entertainer, he has spoken about his nutrition and exercise ideas with everyone from trapeze artists to SWAT teams.

“After having repeatedly answered the same questions about exercise, nutrition, and losing excess body fat for dozens of years, I finally decided to put my knowledge into a book,” he said.

He published Cut Thru the Crap of Exercise and Fat-Loss Nutrition in 2007.

“This book is the culmination of my more than four decades of studying exercise, nutrition, and health combined with almost as many years of personal training experience,” he said.

Dickson said his ideas are different from mainstream concepts about weight loss.

“The majority of people live in denial and spend their time and money searching for ‘miracle solutions’ to their problems,” he said. “My book would be the absolute last thing they would buy because I tell people what they need to know, not what they want to hear.”
Dickson said his book doesn’t actually talk about “losing weight” at all.

“Losing excess body fat is what we actually mean,” he said.

Aliya Kahn, who wrote about Dickson’s book in the Indiana Statesman, describes the book as dispelling myths.

“It is instructional, cohesive, and brutally honest,” she wrote. “Do not pick up this book if you want sugar-coated advice. Dickson gives blunt, intelligent, and humorous advice that can help change the way you see food and exercise, but only if you decide to let it.”

Dickson said the book unites ideas about exercise, nutrition, and health with common sense. He hopes parents and teachers will find his message to help combat the growing childhood obesity problem in the United States. He reports that obesity in 6-19 year olds increased nearly 300 percent between 1973 and 2003 and the adults didn’t do any better.

“It has to start with the parents and schools. Adults need to learn about good quality food and exercise so they can bring these to their kids,” he said. “I owe just about everything good that has happened in my life to good health and being physically fit. I would like every child to have that same opportunity in their lives.”

Dickson believes his ideas can also have implications in the current national debate over health care costs and reform. He reports that weight issues cost nearly $150 billion each year in the United States.

“No change in the health care system can be effective until our ‘disease maintenance’ attitudes change,” he said. “The curing of disease has to be combined with the restoration of health before any worthwhile change can take place.”
Dickson’s work as a personal trainer, and now through his book, are an extension of his schooling in the College of Education.

“I have teaching in my blood,” he said. “Although I have spent little time in the ‘official’ teaching profession, I have never stopped teaching. Without the skills that the College of Education taught me, I would have been much less successful at everything I have done in life.”

To learn more about the book, visit www.cttchealthpublishing.com.