Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, MS, FNYAS
Ordinary Mortals®

This website offers representations of a variety of aspects of the work that I have produced in 40-plus years of professional life. While I have done some major work in health policy analysis over that time, here you can find examples of my work for both academe and the general public in the realms of health, wellness, the sport of triathlon, and exercise promotion in general. The site is organized into three major sections. On this page you will find my biography, a listing with brief descriptions of some of my books, and direct links to some of my writings on triathlon, regular exercise, and mobilizing motivation for health. On the "Books” page you will find more detailed book descriptions, with links for purchasing them as well. The "Articles” page is still primarily under construction, but eventually it will provide links to .pdfs of a selection of both academic articles and popular columns that I have published in recent years. I hope that you will find the site to be of interest and use.

Go well, “the other” Dr. J.

Dr. Steven Jonas (“the other Dr. J.”) is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at the School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794 8036; email: steven.jonas@stonybrook.edu; tel. (631) 444 2147. A graduate of Columbia College (BA), Harvard Medical School (MD), the Yale School of Medicine (MPH), and New York University (MS), he has been publishing books in both the academic and trade press since the mid-70s.

Since the mid-1980s, a major focus of his work has been on the promotion of regular exercise, weight management, and the centrality of the mobilization of motivation to success in making personal behavior changes. His other major field of endeavour has been health policy analysis. He has authored 12 books of his own, and collaborated as either co-author or editor/co-editor on 18 others. He has written, co-written, and co-edited more than ten books on exercise and fitness, weight management, wellness, and health promotion/disease prevention for both the academic and the lay audiences.

His first book on exercise was Triathloning for Ordinary Mortals®: And Doing the Duathlon Too (New York: WW Norton, 2nd ed., 2006) originally published in 1986. This book has sold over 45,000 copies. On triathloning he also wrote The Essential Triathlete (New York: Lyons and Burford, 1996, now Globe-Pequot/Lyons Press, Guilford, CT), which has sold over 8500 copies. Championship Triathlon Training, by George Dallam, Ph.D. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics) for which he was the co-writer, was published in May, 2008, and had passed the 4500 figure for sales by the Spring of 2009.

On regular exercise Dr. Jonas also wrote PaceWalking: The Balanced Way to Aerobic Health, co-authored by Peter Radetsky (New York: Crown Publishers, 1988), Regular Exercise: A Handbook for Clinical Practice and its companion for patients/clients, A Guidebook for the Regular Exerciser (sole author, New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1995), and, with Edward M. Phillips, MD, he is the first author of ACSM’s Exercise is Medicine®: A Clinician’s Guide to Exercise Prescription (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2009), the official textbook for the new American College of Sports Medicine national program, “Exercise is Medicine®.” With ACSM, he is also a member of the Editorial Board of the ACSM's Health and Fitness Journal, and a contributor to the ACSM Fitness Book, 3rd Ed.(Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2003).

On weight management he has written The "I-Don’t Eat (but-I-can't-lose)" Weight Loss Program, co-authored by Virginia Aronson (New York: Rawson/Macmillan, 1989), Take Control of Your Weight, written with the Editors of Consumers Reports Books (Yonkers, NY: CRB, 1993); Just the Weigh You Are, co-author to Linda Konner (Boston, MA: Chapters/Houghton Mifflin, 1997; trade paperback edition, 1998; reissued as Just as You Are: How to be Healthy Whatever Your Weight by Barnes & Noble Books, 2000); and 30 Secrets of the World's Healthiest Cuisines, co-author to Sandra Gordon (New York: John Wiley, 2000; reissued by Barnes & Noble Books, 2005).

He has also published on the academic side in the health promotion/wellness realm. He is Associate Editor of the textbook Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in Clinical Practice (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 1996; 2nd edition, 2008). His own academic book in the field, Talking About Health and Wellness with Patients, was published by Springer in 2000. In the 1990s he developed the "Four-Pathways Hypothesis" for improving the understanding of weight-gain/weight-loss. Take Control of Your Weight is based on that hypothesis. Dr. Jonas has also published extensively in the academic journal literature as well as the trade magazine press. He has given many presentations to both professional and lay audiences on both health policy and health, wellness, and regular exercise, and has been interviewed on these subjects numerous times for both the print and electronic media.

A triathlete for many years, 2009 marks his 27th season of multi-sport racing. As of the end of the 2008 season, he had done 76 duathlons and 119 triathlons, from sprints to the ironman distance. He has qualified five times as a member of Team USA for the International Triathlon Union’s Age-Group World Championships, at Madeira Island, Portugal (2004), Lausanne, Switzerland (2006), Hamburg, Germany (2007), and Vancouver, BC, Canada (2008), and for Gold Coast, Australia (2009).

Since his primary goal in each race is to finish happily and healthily and he continues to do that, he is having as much fun racing now as he ever has. He has been rather slow since he started racing and has been gradually getting slower. (Too, he claims to hold the world’s record for total time spent in transition, career, a record to which he comfortably adds in every race. At the 2008 USA-Triathlon National Championships at Hagg Lake, OR, he received the official post-race award for Most Time Spent in Transition, Male.) Still using the training program he originally developed for his book Triathloning for Ordinary Mortals® back in the 1980s, he keeps on truckin’ and just loves doin’ it. He is also a certified professional ski instructor, an endeavour he engages in part-time.

In the multi-sport periodical realm, “The other Dr. J.” has been a regular columnist with The Beast (of the East) (1985-86), The East Coast Triathlete (1987-89), the national monthly Triathlon Today! (1988-1993), the Triathlon Federation/USA's monthly Triathlon Times (1990-91), the American Medical Athletic Association Quarterly, then Journal (1999-, for which he has been Editor-in-Chief since 2002), and americanTRI magazine (2002-04). Presently he writes a regular feature for USA-Triathlon Life under the title “Ordinary Mortals®: Talking Triathlon with Steve Jonas.” Also with USA-Triathlon, he was a member of the National Coaching Commission (2000-02).

He is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences (elected), the American College of Preventive Medicine, the American Public Health Association (40 year member), the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Royal Society of Medicine (UK). He is the recipient (2006) of the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research’s Duncan Clark Award for Lifetime Achievement.

In the field of health policy analysis, the book for which he was the founding editor, Health Care Delivery in the United States (New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1977, 1st ed.) was the first textbook of its kind in the field. That book (with which Dr. Jonas is no longer actively involved), now known as Jonas-Kovner's Health Care Delivery in the United States, is currently in its 9th edition (2008). Reflecting his broad range of interests, he was, for example, the Founding Editor of the Springer Publishing Co. Series on Medical Education; during the 1980s, he was one of the early developers of the "Public Health Approach to the Drug Problem" (his chapter on that subject appears in the textbook Substance Abuse, 4th ed. [Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, 2005]); and of the "Co-Factor Hypothesis to Explain the Natural History of AIDS."


He is married to Mrs. Chezna Newman of New York City, has two adult children of his own, Jacob and Lillian, both elementary school teachers, a step-son Mark Newman, an architect and webdesigner/master (at conscious expressions™) and two grandchildren, Nathan Harold Wain and Adam Jonas Wain.