Darren’s SOS

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Live More: Active

Brenton Stacey
Public relations officer
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

A new book may save you from what its author calls the inactivity crisis.

Darren Morton dedicated Live More: Active to his father, Peter, who continues to be “a great role model.” Credit: Ben Cunningham.

Darren Morton dedicated Live More: Active to his father, Peter, who continues to be “a great role model.”
Credit: Ben Cunningham.

“We’re 60 to 70 per cent less active than we were 30 years ago—that’s like walking 15 kilometres less every day,” says Dr Darren Morton, whose Live More: Active launched in the Chan Shun Auditorium on Avondale College of Higher Education’s Lake Macquarie campus this past Friday (November 29).

The book opens with a section on how to sit less, move more, oxygenate and strengthen and stretch. It closes with a 21-day challenge that gives readers the principles and the strategies to enact behaviour change.

“The world is full of people who know what to do but just don’t do what they know,” says Darren, a senior lecturer in health and exercise science at Avondale and the president of the Avondale Lake Macquarie Multi-Sport Club. “So, Live More: Active provides the will and the way.”

And it presents its message in a positive way. “I am cheering you on,” writes Darren in his introduction.

The book has benefitted from the support of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Complete Health Improvement Program (CHIP) and Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing, “as well as what Darren and I learnt in collaborating on the CHIP relaunch,” says Signs Publishing Company book editor Nathan Brown.

It is also endorsed by the author of Australia’s National Physical Activity Guidelines. “[Darren] knows how to get his message across, while being a good example of practising what he preaches,” writes Professor Garry Egger in the foreword.

Darren and Signs plan to re-release their first collaboration, Seven Secrets for Feeling Fantastic, as Live More: Happy next year. “We appreciate the opportunity to work with Darren,” says Nathan. “His books represent the best of Adventist health and wellbeing, presented in ways that are both credible and attractive.”