Bio: Steve Rosenberg, 58, has been running regularly since age 29, when he read a magazine article touting its benefits. He also plays golf about twice a week, always walking the course rather than using a cart.
A graduate of Fort Collins High School and Colorado State University, he is a certified public accountant who works out of his house in Centennial, where he lives with his wife, Toni.
The challenge: Rosenberg’s wake-up call came about 5 o’clock in the morning on Sept. 19, 2002, when he experienced a generalized pain so intense that “it felt like I had a 1,000-pound gorilla sitting on my chest.”
His wife dialed 911, and he was rushed to the hospital, where doctors found the main artery in his heart was 95 percent blocked. “There was almost no blood getting through. That’s what caused the heart attack,” he says. “It was pretty scary.”
Ironically, Rosenberg recalls, he had undergone a heart scan just a few weeks earlier, and even had been put on Lipitor to control his LDL level. “But it happened anyway.”
Cardiologists cleaned out the artery, installed a stent to keep it open, and sent him home after five days with instructions to lower his cholesterol and lose weight.
How he’s doing it: Rosenberg has stepped up his running regimen from 3 miles a day to 5, mostly on routes through his neighborhood (or on a basement treadmill when the weather is bad), and he has radically changed his eating habits. His cholesterol count is now down from 215 to 150, and his weight has dropped from 185 pounds to a stable 163, giving him a body mass index in the normal range for a 5-foot-8 man.
“I wasn’t like some obese guy who never worked out,” he says. “But I did have a family history, and I had genetics working against me. My grandfather died of a heart attack at 63 and my mother died of a heart attack at 59.”
To minimize his fat intake, Rosenberg has given up cakes and pastries, French fries and ice cream, and only rarely eats cheese or red meat. Today he embraces “a very low-fat, Mediterranean-type diet” with two or three meals of broiled fish or seafood per week, along with more fruits, vegetables and nuts – especially almonds, which he buys in small batches so he won’t be tempted to gobble them all at once.
“My big sin was that I ate too many baked goods,” he says. “I do our grocery shopping, and I couldn’t go by the bakery counter without picking up a doughnut. Now it’s just like poison.”
Motivation: “Part of it is that I don’t want to be checking out on my wife,” he says, then kisses Toni on the cheek. “When I was in the hospital, I just said, well, the only way I’m going to make it to 75 or 85 is to get healthier. I thought, I can’t change my family history or my genetic code – that’s stamped. But I can eat better, and I can exercise more.”
Still Working On: “Just maintaining my fitness level, and eating right for a healthy lifestyle,” Rosenberg says. “There are certain foods I no longer eat, and if I go two days without running, I get antsy. If I have another coronary tomorrow, I’ll know I have done everything I can.”
Best Advice: “You don’t have to run 5 miles a day, but almost anybody can go out and walk a mile or two a day and avoid a lot of health problems,” he says. “And if you want to, you can go to almost any restaurant and have a healthy meal. Even in a sports bar, you can order a salad instead of a burger and fries.”
