HEY SAM: My doctor recently told me that I’m at risk for high blood pressure and placed me on blood pressure medication. What’s the best way to augment my workout routine in this situation?

A: People who participated in a regular yoga program experienced a natural drop in blood pressure, according to new research from the Washington University School of Medicine. The study, published in HIV Medicine, followed 60 HIV-positive adults over the course of a supervised, 20 week yoga program. Resting systolic and diastolic blood pressures were reduced more in the yoga group than in the control group, despite no greater reduction in body weight, fat, or overall quality of life.The best part? T4 levels were not adversely affected.

Practicing yoga is an intelligent idea for other reasons, too. (more…)

I was recently diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy. I still have feeling in my fingers, but I’ve lost most of the feeling in my toes. Do you have any advice on ways I can manage this condition through exercise or supplementation?
—Lee, Cheyenne, WY

Peripheral neuropathy causes pain (sometimes described as tingling or burning) and numbness in the hands and feet. While HIV is one cause of the condition, it’s certainly not the only one. Diabetes and cancer treatments (such as radiation or chemotherapy) are also common causes. Sometimes the condition improves with treatment of the underlying cause, sometimes it doesn’t. (more…)

Courtesy of LA Times

Modern evangelist Marianne Williamson was one of the presenters at  LA Times Magazine’s “Conversations on Health & Wellness” at Terranea Resort. The conference was a nice break from my mind, which has been mired in thoughts about mom’s cancer. I was glad to see that Marianne was one of the speakers, since her book, A Return to Love, influenced our coming back together. Whether you’re well or ill, her remarks are worth a listen:

“Botox Parties” may put people at risk of contracting HIV or hepatitis because the single use vials of Botox are often used multiple times on different patients, alleges a federal lawsuit filed in California.

A new HIV vaccine is safe and 31% effective in the more than 16,000 participants in the phase 3 trial, according to the U.S. Army Surgeon General.

If you’re on Facebook, you’ve likely been “tagged” with this Internet meme, in which you’re supposed to share 25 things, facts, habits or goals that your friends don’t know about you. Like a chain letter, you choose 25 people to be tagged, (tagging the person who tagged you). If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

Here’s my list:

1. I moved to Los Angeles 12 years ago, and while I’ve found so much success and happiness here, I miss living in a smaller town.
2. I’m trying on the idea of a life without shame.
3. A quote that’s really stuck with me:
   “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” (Eleanor Roosevelt).
4. I’m planning to enter a bodybuilding competition this year to uncover what’s physically possible if I honestly cleaned up my nutrition. I’m using a great website to track my nutrition (thanks, Eric).
5. At 6-foot-3-inches and 230 pounds, I’m somewhat clumsy and struggle with spatial awareness. Like, this week while training a client, I nearly tipped over backwards when I tripped over my own foot. Luckily, I caught myself.
6. After eight years bleaching my hair, I’m making a conscious choice to embrace the gray, a la Anderson Cooper.
7. Sex, sunsets, Bronson, and licorice. What more does a guy need?
8. I love film scores, and they’ve formed the soundtracks to many periods of my life. A few of my favorites: Brokeback Mountain, Moulin Rouge, and Run Lola Run.
9. I eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich pretty much every day.
10. My favorite food used to be chicken fajitas, but it’s been replaced by my mother-in-law’s slum gullion, which is sublime.
11. I consider myself a Zen Christian, a term coined by my college journalism professor Michael Kirkhorn (R.I.P.) On that note, I believe that a historical person named Jesus existed, but I don’t believe he was the only manifestation of the divine. I believe there are many names for what we call “God” and that no one religious sect has a corner on the truth.
12. Speaking of college, I attended Gonzaga University in Spokane, known for its basketball team. After graduating with a double major in speech and journalism, I made ends meet working as a funeral singer.
13. I’ve performed in the following operas:  Die Fledermaus, the Ballad of Baby Doe, and La Boheme.  I’ve auditioned for both the Metropolitan and Los Angeles Opera companies.
14. The habit I’d most like to break is biting my cuticles.
15. I found a copy of Playgirl when I was 5, and shoplifted a red Speedo at age 13. Seven years later, at age 22, I came out as a gay man. I was diagnosed HIV+ at 29, after a year of performing in adult films. I’m not implying any kind of cause and effect—that’s just the timeline.  I have no regrets.
16. For the last five years, I’ve been working full time as a personal trainer. My decision to become a trainer was directly informed by my desire to take my health and fitness more seriously in the wake of the above diagnosis. But, I’m not perfect and I’m always trying to find balance and get out of my own way.
17. If I forget my headphones in the gym, I’m screwed. I work out almost every weekday, but I don’t do enough cardio. As a way to keep me accountable, I started posting photographs of the LED screen from my time on the cardio machines to my Facebook profile.
18. I’m rethinking how I feel about the terms “fag” and “queer.”  I get the whole “reclaiming the word” thing, but I reject that the words ever belonged to the gay community in the first place. How can a pejorative term ever be reconstituted as positive?
19. The physical accomplishment of which I’m the proudest is completing the 2000 AIDSRide from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which took 7 days and a whole lot of Gatorade.
20. The first book I remember reading is Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, but I don’t really like fiction.  I have a tattoo of  the main character, “wild” Max, on my right shoulder.  My second tattoo (the word “Discipline” across my back) took four hours. The tattoos taken together represent for me the dynamic tension of my life experience.
21. The last book I read was Where’s My Fifteen Minutes by Howard Bragman—a really great read.
22. My favorite sound are “I’m home,” which is tied with the sound of a rainstorm pounding against the roof.  The two together?  Heaven.
23. My favorite quote of all time:
    “I want to beg you, as much as I can, be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves—they are like locked rooms or books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live some distant day into the answer.” (Rainer Maria Rilke,  Letters to a Young Poet).
24. I don’t agree with Rush Limbaugh or Dr. Laura, but I listen to both of them. Show me an absolutist and I’ll show you a hypocrite.
25. Everyone should work in a bar at least once. It’s a microcosm for the whole world. Also, there’s no place on Earth more humbling than a porn set.

The first time I saw Dan Pallotta, I was in a small theater watching his safety video for the 2000 California AIDS Ride, and his remarks left such an impression on me that I sought him out as an adviser to my magazine. Two years later, I became part of Dan’s special team at Pallotta Teamworks, and also helped him produce the X PRIZE space flights in 2004. Our working friendship has now spanned seven years. His newest book, Uncharitable, re-ignites his passion for charitable giving and calls for a drastic overhaul of the philanthropic machine. I think when you see him speak (and read this interview) you’ll totally get why I wanted to work with him.

Are there any charitable organizations really “doing it right” in your view?

No charity that receives the majority of its support from the general public can dare to do it right. In the current climate, it would almost be irresponsible; they’d lose their support — they’d be subject to scandal.

In the book, I talk about five double standards between the nonprofit sector and the rest of the economic world. We let business pay people based on value. But we don’t want people making money in charity. Want to make a million as a CEO selling violent video games to kids? Go for it. Want to make a million curing kids of cancer? You’re a parasite. So our top business school grads gravitate to the for-profit sector. We let business advertise ‘til the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value, but we don’t want charitable donations spent on advertising. So charities can’t build demand for causes. Budweiser’s all over the Superbowl. AIDS and Darfur? Absent.

Sounds like there’s kind of a double standard going on.

We let business make mistakes, but expect charity to spend contributions cautiously. It’s OK if a $100 million Disney movie flops, but if a $5 million charity walk doesn’t show a 75 percent profit year one? Call the attorney general. So charities can’t develop learning curves for revenue generation. Amazon could forgo investor returns for six years to build market dominance. But if a charity embarks on a long-term plan with no return for the needy for six years we expect a crucifixion. Business can offer profits to attract investment capital. But you can’t pay a profit off of investment in charity — it’s illegal. So the for-profit sector monopolizes the multi-trillion dollar capital markets.

You get the picture: anything a charity might do to test the rules brings a guillotine down on its reputation.

Was the timing of the book release (after the election) a coincidence?

A complete coincidence, unless of course you believe in some kind of divine synchronicity in the universe — which i do. I think it’s a fertile time for imaginative ideas and transformative thinking.

Should government have a role in changing the ways charitable organizations work?

Yes, absolutely. Government can make a big difference, on two fronts in particular. The government should fund a large national charity data agency — what I call the “Super Database for Charity,” that would have an iTunes-like, easy-to-understand user interface on front of a massive database of up-to-date narrative, audio, video and financial information on every major human service charity in America.

Yeah, it blows my mind that something like that doesn’t exist already.

Americans give $300 billion a year to charity. Know what we spend to make sure the giving is smart? Almost nothing. There are three national “watchdog” agencies — the Better Business Bureau, Charity Navigator, and the American institute for Philanthropy. Collectively, they have about 40 staff and annual budgets of less than $5 million — a statistical zero percent of the $300 billion we give away each year. They look at fewer than 5,000 of the 1.6 million registered U.S. nonprofits, and they don’t look at program quality — which is all any of us should give a damn about.

Okay, so what do we need from the government, specifically?

We need an agency that has teams of surveyors that visit every major charity each year to conduct a week-long study and gather rich multimedia data on the charity’s work that the public can view online. This would require somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars (less than half of one percent of the money we give away each year). For a billion dollars a year we could transform charity as we know it — get people to stop asking only about overhead, get them rich information on charity programs and long-term goals, which is what really matters, increase faith in charity, and increase giving as a result.

We also need to change the tax code in two areas: first, to allow people to make a financial return off of capital investment in charity so charities can raise growth capital, and second, offer tax-deductibility for social good embedded in consumer goods.

If asked to be the “Charity Czar” in Barack Obama’s administration, what advice would you give the president?

Fund “the Super Database for Charity” and change the tax code.

You live and work in Los Angeles. Is L.A. a particularly charitable city?

Not with respect to dating when you get older, but fortunately, I have a partner for eight years now.

This is your second book. Did you learn anything about yourself as you were writing it?

I learned that I really love history — I spent six months doing in-depth research on the earliest Puritan settlers to America and their ideas about charity. It was like detective work. I found the smoking gun. I also learned to trust my instincts — I didn’t know that in the days when we were being pretty viciously attacked for trying things in a new way.

How do you think social networking sites (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) should be leveraged to change the ways charitable organizations work?

They’re a form of marketing, and charities should put a lot of resource into reaching out through them, as well as into other forms of marketing. marketing builds demand, demand builds revenues, revenues create social change.

Has being a father changed the way you think about these issues?

Absolutely. I worry now about the world my children will grow up in. More than ever, I want a serious say in what that world will look like. I believe we can create a world that works for everyone, and i want to play a role in creating it.

What’s next?

I’m going to leave that up to God a little bit – but three things that interest me – running for public office, creating the Super Database for Charity, and re-creating Pallotta TeamWorks and making good on its vision of creating the “Disney of Meaning.”

For more, check out the book’s website.

The late Chad Presswood (1969-1999) was Bronson’s best friend. For those of you who have spent a bunch of time here on PLL, you may know that I’ve referred to him as my “guardian angel” for some very special reasons which I spoke about at the Spirit of Hope Awards last year.

Last year, our friend Christine in Naples sent us Chad’s sparkly aluminum tree, which had remained in her possessions after his death, as a Christmas gift. It’s become a very special part of our holiday tradition. (I joked with Bronson yesterday how pleased Chad would be that we have not one, not two, but THREE Christmas trees at our house—and all of them sparkle like a disco ball).

This week as we commemorate World AIDS Day, I’m thinking about Chad, wishing his personality was still here to reflect and grace the many lives he touched, and who miss him very much.

“There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple of years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their web sites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people who read this book realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts.”

I try to keep a book in the “mix” of my day to day life. My goal is to read one chapter, every day, over lunch. I figure in our culture of 24-hour cable news, the immediacy of the internet, and web-enabled cell phones, that if I don’t impose some sort of “old school” discipline about reading on my daily life, that it just won’t happen.

Like it or not, I don’t get through the books fast enough, and so many that I want to read continue to pile up (one of them is quoted, above). But currently, I’m reading a special kind of book. Actually, it’s the journal of one of my clients (who I won’t name to protect his identity).  It’s his very personal account of his AIDS Ride.  Besides being beautifully written and spectacularly illustrated, it’s bound with a section of bike tire that came from the actual bike he pedaled, the entire stretch of road between Minneapolis and Chicago.  Reading it brings back so many memories of my own (and only) AIDS Ride back in 2000 — the pain, the giddy excitement, the nervousness, (did I mention the pain?).  In one specific section of his journal, he describes a moment toward the beginning of his ride, being at once overwhelmed and inspired at the journey ahead.  He mentions one of my good friends, Dan Pallotta, (who created the AIDS Ride) and the impact that Dan’s vision had on him, and the thousands of others.  Reading his journal is like a little oasis of inspiration, a reminder of what’s possible when you simply believe.

One thing that I’ve learned from knowing Dan over the years is that great things often start small. In fact, important things almost always start small.  But just because they are small does not mean they’re unimportant. I’ve learned that it’s essential when starting anything new not to lose sight of the bigger picture.  So, like Dan did with the AIDS Ride: dream big.  Plan big.  Color outside the lines.  A bicycle ride of 500 miles begins with a single stroke.  A symphony of 10,000 measures begins with a single note.  A best-seller starts with a single sentence.  The list goes on.

As the quote at the beginning says, there’s no substitute for hard work.  Accomplishing anything takes discipline, determination, focus, and passion. That’s why I have the word discipline tattooed on my back.  Each day, I have to earn anew the right to wear the word on my shoulders—with compassion, humility, and love. Someday, if I work hard enough—maybe, just maybe—like Dan and those heroic AIDS Riders, I’ll actually inspire someone else to look beyond their own limits to glimpse their true potential.

I’VE HEARD THAT TAKING THE AMINO ACID glutamine with creatine can have positive effects in people who are HIV-positive. But there doesn’t seem to be much information about these sports supplements and any potential interactions with HAART therapy. Can you shed some light on this? —John, West Hollywood

You’re right. Studies on the role of micronutrient supplementation in people with HIV are ripe for further research, according to Dr. Alice Tang, associate professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, and an expert in the area of supplementation and HIV. A few of these studies have examined glutamine, primarily for its muscle-building effects. To my knowledge, there are no published studies on creatine in people with HIV. (more…)