Welcome to the quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

When I meet people for the first time and answer that, what do you do, question with,

I'm a health and fitness coach.

People often get a panicked look in their eye and then they blurt out something like,

I would love to run a marathon, but I have bad knees.

Or, I used to belong to a gym, but it got too expensive.

It's as if they think that I'm silently judging them,

or that I'm about to launch into a sales pitch,

and they need to stop me before I pull my business cards out.

Whatever their motivation, they all seem to have an excuse.

Some of them, more than one.

So, as a way of putting all my rebuttals into one location for posterity,

and also for future reference,

here is a list of my favorite excuses not to exercise and my response to each. Perhaps you can use these on

your less than active friends, or perhaps even on yourself? All right, number one on our list is

I'm too busy. Yes, I get that you're busy. We all have too much on our plate. It's even a badge of

honor in many circles to be too busy to sleep. And you know what? I don't pretend to be the

busiest person in the world and even I've used this excuse. But I bet if you were to track

exactly how you use every minute of your day,

you could find a spare 20 minutes or probably more. There are some studies out there that show

that we check our smartphones 105 times per day. Apple recently confirmed that its users alone unlock their phones an average of 80 times per day.

...