Yesterday I blogged about meditation, a practice that I recognize would benefit me greatly if I did it more often than sporadically. Today, I would like to add a few more things that I do do, and wish I did even more often.
You've probably heard by now that, as a society, our health is basically screwed because of all the routine practices we have. Spend most of your life commuting in a car? You're going to die young. Sit at a desk all day long? You're going to die young and fat. Probably with diabetes and cancer. Yeah, yeah, I'm exaggerating, but I'm sure you've heard all about it too. Even if you get yourself some kind of awesome standing desk (like I have), it turns out you're still up a creek, because it's not just sitting that's bad for you, it's not moving around. And the research is pointing toward it being the case that just going and exercising isn't enough to make up for all the movement you're not doing throughout any given day.
Anyway, I've been trying to incorporate more movement and mobility work into my everyday activities at work. What I'm going for here is not to add another workout to my week; the point is to have some little things that I can add, that just take a minute or two here and there, but that add up to big improvements in flexibility, strength, what have you.
One of the most basic things I've added is the deep squat. I just hang out there for a while. Not surprisingly, this is easier to do on Sundays--the day before my workout that includes back squats--than it is on Monday (or Tuesday).
I started doing deep squats even before I saw this article, and since it recommended squats along with three other movements, I was pretty sure it was legit. So to squats I added glute contraction, a hamstring stretch, and something called the crucifix stretch, which is almost as much fun as it sounds (good for the chest, shoulders, and back, anyway).
For a while, I was really into Kelly Starrett's Mobility WOD (Workout of the Day). I started with episode 1 and for a while there I was doing every stretch in the first four or five daily, but in retrospect that probably wasn't sustainable. I did feel pretty good when I was doing it, though.
The real magic that I've found, though, is something called shoulder dislocates. Which sounds almost as good as a crucifix stretch, I know, but it's done great things for me. Specifically, the last couple years, I've had elbow pain when I play tennis. So you might think it's some kind of repetitive stress thing, like, you know, "tennis elbow," but it turned out, as I tracked this problem to its source, the source was my shoulder. You see, a couple years ago I injured my right shoulder in the weight room. What stupid thing I was attempting to do isn't important, but between the injury and the time off to recover, I lost a good deal of mobility in my shoulder without realizing it. Then when I played tennis, to compensate for poor shoulder mobility, I would--unknowingly--put my elbow in a compromised position. I started doing shoulder dislocates regularly, improved shoulder mobility, and the elbow pain disappeared. Cue the choirs of angels.
I really liked the idea of hanging as being a good thing. For that matter, I like the idea of doing chin-ups or pull-ups or what-have-you more or less every day. Outside of the gym, however, my options are limited. Living in an old farmhouse, we literally have no doors that will fit a standard pull-up bar. My office door at work is perfect for a pull-up bar, but... I feel kind of awkward doing chin-ups in my jacket and tie any time anyone walks into the building. And it's pretty much a guaranteed thing that as soon as I hang up the bar and start to hang or do chin-ups, someone's coming into the building, even if it's been dead quiet for the previous hour.
But then, all of these are things that I feel like I could/should/would do more of, otherwise they wouldn't have made this blog post, so in that regard there's nothing special about hanging or chin-ups.
What do you think, gentle readers? Do any of these things appeal to you? Are there little things that you'd like to put into practice in your own life?
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Monday, December 8, 2014
Meditation
Today's Holidailies prompt:
I think I first encountered meditation from two directions in high school: there was sophomore year world history, where we talked about Buddhism and the Buddha, and then there was... the International Thespian Conference, in the early summer after that year. One of the sessions they had was on using yoga for relaxation, to improve theater performance. Intrigued, I came back to small-town Ohio and checked out every book our library had on yoga, which I'm pretty sure was two.
It's probably fair to say that you can't learn physical skills through reading, but that didn't stop me with yoga (or tennis). Ironically, I've gone on to teach both of them in one way or another. But I digress.
I've been more and less into yoga over the years, but as anyone who's ever done yoga would probably attest, the best part of the whole thing is "corpse pose," the last thing you do, which as the name implies is basically laying there like you're dead. It's meant, of course, for meditation, not for falling into an exhausted sleep.
Aside from that meditation, I've also had an interest in other forms of meditation, gravitating most toward the sort where you observe and/or control your breath. I did this even before I connected it to music, but there's a natural fit. Breath control is an important technique for singing and for playing a wind instrument, and I've done both in my time. I suppose music is a meditation in and of itself.
Although I've been acquainted with meditation for over 20 years, I'm afraid I can't say that I've built a really consistent practice in that time, though I've done enough to have moments of--oh yeah--enlightenment in which I realize that life would be better if I did have that kind of practice.
I've become in some ways reacquainted with meditation through the health and fitness communities that I've participated in, which have moved beyond nutrition and exercise into broader areas of one's lifestyle, including sleep and stress management, particularly meditation. I skimmed through 8 Minute Meditation in roughly 8 minutes (spoiler alert: the book is too long to actually read in 8 minutes), and mostly what I got out of it was nothing new, just the idea of setting a timer for eight minutes and, you know, meditating.
I've had a few times in the last few months where I've hit a wall in the middle of the afternoon, where I felt tired and unfocused and just generally unlikely to get any productive work done. Sometimes I go get coffee. Sometimes I end up wasting time. But sometimes, I set the timer and meditate. I turn off the light, close the blinds, lock my door, lie down and meditate. And two things seem to happen: first, I hit my 8 minutes and it's so good that I just set the timer to do another 8--but then almost exactly 4 minutes in someone knocks on my door. It's uncanny, like 12 minutes is how long the universe decrees that I should meditate. The second thing that happens is that I feel fantastic and have no problem getting to work and being super productive.
Seriously, why don't I do that every day? I guess that's what I meant at the beginning of the post when I said I hadn't really found enlightenment.
Today is Bodhi Day, a Buddhist holiday that commemorates the day that Buddha experienced enlightenment. Tell us about a time when you felt truly enlightened.Um, I can't say that I've "felt truly enlightened." At least, not in a way that made a lasting change in my life, which it seems to me like "enlightenment" would have to do in order to qualify. So instead, I'll talk about my experience with a practice associated both with Buddhism and with his experience of enlightenment: meditation.
I think I first encountered meditation from two directions in high school: there was sophomore year world history, where we talked about Buddhism and the Buddha, and then there was... the International Thespian Conference, in the early summer after that year. One of the sessions they had was on using yoga for relaxation, to improve theater performance. Intrigued, I came back to small-town Ohio and checked out every book our library had on yoga, which I'm pretty sure was two.
It's probably fair to say that you can't learn physical skills through reading, but that didn't stop me with yoga (or tennis). Ironically, I've gone on to teach both of them in one way or another. But I digress.
I've been more and less into yoga over the years, but as anyone who's ever done yoga would probably attest, the best part of the whole thing is "corpse pose," the last thing you do, which as the name implies is basically laying there like you're dead. It's meant, of course, for meditation, not for falling into an exhausted sleep.
Aside from that meditation, I've also had an interest in other forms of meditation, gravitating most toward the sort where you observe and/or control your breath. I did this even before I connected it to music, but there's a natural fit. Breath control is an important technique for singing and for playing a wind instrument, and I've done both in my time. I suppose music is a meditation in and of itself.
Although I've been acquainted with meditation for over 20 years, I'm afraid I can't say that I've built a really consistent practice in that time, though I've done enough to have moments of--oh yeah--enlightenment in which I realize that life would be better if I did have that kind of practice.
I've become in some ways reacquainted with meditation through the health and fitness communities that I've participated in, which have moved beyond nutrition and exercise into broader areas of one's lifestyle, including sleep and stress management, particularly meditation. I skimmed through 8 Minute Meditation in roughly 8 minutes (spoiler alert: the book is too long to actually read in 8 minutes), and mostly what I got out of it was nothing new, just the idea of setting a timer for eight minutes and, you know, meditating.
I've had a few times in the last few months where I've hit a wall in the middle of the afternoon, where I felt tired and unfocused and just generally unlikely to get any productive work done. Sometimes I go get coffee. Sometimes I end up wasting time. But sometimes, I set the timer and meditate. I turn off the light, close the blinds, lock my door, lie down and meditate. And two things seem to happen: first, I hit my 8 minutes and it's so good that I just set the timer to do another 8--but then almost exactly 4 minutes in someone knocks on my door. It's uncanny, like 12 minutes is how long the universe decrees that I should meditate. The second thing that happens is that I feel fantastic and have no problem getting to work and being super productive.
Seriously, why don't I do that every day? I guess that's what I meant at the beginning of the post when I said I hadn't really found enlightenment.
Friday, December 5, 2014
Pain and Discomfort
Wednesday, uncharacteristically, my almost-5-year-old asked to go to bed early. She wanted me to put her to bed, so I laid down and snuggled with her. She snuggled in the crook of my arm, her head on my shoulder.
And it hurt, mostly because I was still sore from my bench press workout a couple days before. Which got me thinking about pain. First, there's your response to it. We have a natural aversion to pain (uh, duh). Even a little bit of pain sets my little girls off, screaming and fussing. Yet as we get older, we learn to put up with it. For instance, I was happy enough to put up with this pain, because it seemed to serve a purpose. If I pushed my daughter off my shoulder, denied her the snuggling embrace, I would set back the going-to-sleep process. So even though it was uncomfortable, and a bit painful, I endured it.
For that matter, this pain came, in the first place, from exercise, which itself is a form of enduring discomfort. Whether one is lifting weights or running or doing yoga, there are always--if you're doing it right--moments when you become uncomfortable and you would like to quit. However, you endure that pain, you push through it, and you do more of the exercise in question. You get another rep, you rest a little do another set, you run another minute, another ten minutes, another mile, you hold a pose that much longer. We do it to make ourselves better: stronger, faster, with more endurance. We embrace the pain of the moment, we even embrace the pain that comes in the days afterward, may come to enjoy it because we know the benefits it ultimately brings.
All this, of course, goes against our natural instincts. Young children don't do this--they stop running when it becomes uncomfortable. They don't even seem to know how to "push through." Many people who start exercising for the first time, they encounter the pain and they can't push through it. They encounter the post-workout pain and they decide this isn't for them. We have to learn how, and we can only learn by doing it, by stretching our boundaries.
We all do this to some extent, of course. It turned out, I discovered in the middle of Wednesday night, that my daughter was coming down with a cold. She had a miserable night, which meant that my wife and I had a miserable night. Adults, we have developed a certain stoicism. A cold is lousy, we all know that. But we don't tend to fuss and cry and make everyone around us miserable too. We keep it to ourselves, we manage as best we can.
Now, all of this can be carried to extremes. We probably all know people who won't go see a doctor no matter how sick, how miserable they are. The only way they get to a hospital is by ambulance or carried there by someone else. In the exercise world, there are people who take the maxim "no pain, no gain" to the extreme... and end up injured as a result. There's a certain truth to the phase, but it's only in the way I described earlier: we have to endure some discomfort, push past it. Real pain, in this context, is a bad thing. If you tweak your knee or injure your shoulder while lifting weights, for instance, and you keep on exercising because, you know, "no pain, no gain," you're actually just going to further injure yourself, which will keep you out of the gym longer, which will limit your gains. Likewise, while it may be appropriate in your run-of-the-mill illness to "don't be such a baby," to keep a stiff upper lip and keep working through it or avoid burdening your family or friends with your complaints, we can also make things worse if we don't treat an illness.
In the end, it all comes down to moderation, and the wisdom to find it.
And it hurt, mostly because I was still sore from my bench press workout a couple days before. Which got me thinking about pain. First, there's your response to it. We have a natural aversion to pain (uh, duh). Even a little bit of pain sets my little girls off, screaming and fussing. Yet as we get older, we learn to put up with it. For instance, I was happy enough to put up with this pain, because it seemed to serve a purpose. If I pushed my daughter off my shoulder, denied her the snuggling embrace, I would set back the going-to-sleep process. So even though it was uncomfortable, and a bit painful, I endured it.
For that matter, this pain came, in the first place, from exercise, which itself is a form of enduring discomfort. Whether one is lifting weights or running or doing yoga, there are always--if you're doing it right--moments when you become uncomfortable and you would like to quit. However, you endure that pain, you push through it, and you do more of the exercise in question. You get another rep, you rest a little do another set, you run another minute, another ten minutes, another mile, you hold a pose that much longer. We do it to make ourselves better: stronger, faster, with more endurance. We embrace the pain of the moment, we even embrace the pain that comes in the days afterward, may come to enjoy it because we know the benefits it ultimately brings.
All this, of course, goes against our natural instincts. Young children don't do this--they stop running when it becomes uncomfortable. They don't even seem to know how to "push through." Many people who start exercising for the first time, they encounter the pain and they can't push through it. They encounter the post-workout pain and they decide this isn't for them. We have to learn how, and we can only learn by doing it, by stretching our boundaries.
We all do this to some extent, of course. It turned out, I discovered in the middle of Wednesday night, that my daughter was coming down with a cold. She had a miserable night, which meant that my wife and I had a miserable night. Adults, we have developed a certain stoicism. A cold is lousy, we all know that. But we don't tend to fuss and cry and make everyone around us miserable too. We keep it to ourselves, we manage as best we can.
Now, all of this can be carried to extremes. We probably all know people who won't go see a doctor no matter how sick, how miserable they are. The only way they get to a hospital is by ambulance or carried there by someone else. In the exercise world, there are people who take the maxim "no pain, no gain" to the extreme... and end up injured as a result. There's a certain truth to the phase, but it's only in the way I described earlier: we have to endure some discomfort, push past it. Real pain, in this context, is a bad thing. If you tweak your knee or injure your shoulder while lifting weights, for instance, and you keep on exercising because, you know, "no pain, no gain," you're actually just going to further injure yourself, which will keep you out of the gym longer, which will limit your gains. Likewise, while it may be appropriate in your run-of-the-mill illness to "don't be such a baby," to keep a stiff upper lip and keep working through it or avoid burdening your family or friends with your complaints, we can also make things worse if we don't treat an illness.
In the end, it all comes down to moderation, and the wisdom to find it.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Michael Pollan explains what's wrong with the Paleo Diet?!
A recent article on Mother Jones made the rounds: "Michael Pollan explains what's wrong with the Paleo Diet." The article is, itself, based on almost an hour of podcast interview. I haven't listened to the interview, which I suppose makes me about as guilty of ignorant pontificating as Michael Pollan and Mother Jones's Cynthia Graber are when it comes to Paleo. But what the heck--they started it, so I'll offer a first reaction, which is that this article says almost nothing important about Paleo, because neither Pollan nor Graber seem to understand Paleo in any detail. Unfortunately, getting only the basic gist of something really only qualifies you to tell us what's wrong with the strawman you've created for the purpose of criticism.
First, I think it's important to note that most of the most prominent proponents of Paleo have some reservations about the term "Paleo Diet." Partially, the term is problematic because it puts too great an emphasis on Paleo as a list of rules: eat this, not that, period. And to be fair, a lot of people who are practicing Paleo do view Paleo that way. That's why we have recipes for "Paleo" foods that aren't particularly healthy but that adhere to the letter of the "law" of "The Paleo Diet." But the people who are propagating Paleo at the highest levels (by which I mean the people who have done the most to define and refine it in the years when it's become popular) view it more as a set of principles for figuring out what a person should eat for optimal health. Listen to what Robb Wolf has to say about Paleo--he's about as far from dogmatic as you can be, and he's widely considered to be one of the most prominent proponents of "Paleo." Chris Kresser's ultra-recent Your Personal Paleo Code makes this explicit, the idea that it's less a one-size-fits-all dietary prescription and more a framework for figuring out what's best for any particular person (while I'm linking to books, I would say that Jason Seib's The Paleo Coach also does a great job of laying out the principles rather than prescribing rules). Although early on in the Paleo movement, there were a lot more absolute statements along the lines of "this is what ancient hunter-gatherers ate" or cut-and-dried food prohibitions, this just isn't true of the current versions of Paleo that are central to the movement.
So, with that out of the way, let's see "what's wrong with the Paleo Diet." After talking about how much humans love meat, and basically saying that early humans probably would have eaten as much meat as they could get, we get the "criticism" of Paleo:
Oh, and let's add one more caveat to the whole Paleo thing: as several Paleo proponents have noted, "Paleo is a logical framework applied to modern humans, not a historical reenactment." To say "we don't really know what Paleolithic people ate," or "Paleolithic people ate different things in different places," or "the foods that Paleolithic people ate have changed so much that they don't really exist any more" all miss the point. They're all true, but so what? The answer isn't "I might as well have bagels and doughnuts for breakfast."
Which kind of leads to the second point in the article: "Humans can live on bread alone." Well, okay, you can "survive" on bread alone. But you're not going to be all that healthy. And if you're going to eat bread, you're definitely better off eating sourdough bread, because the fermentation process breaks down quite a few of the problematic constituents of bread. But the fact is that gluten is still problematic to a lot of people, even beyond the portion of the population that has celiac disease. Some of us tolerate it better than others, but there's still a legitimate critique of grains coming from the Paleo folks. And most people who are still eating bread and grains are not eating sourdough anyway.
"3. Eat more microbes." There is absolutely nothing in here that most Paleo advocates would argue against. Sort of. I mean, Paleo generally advocates fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi, as well as pickles, for the same reason: beneficial microbes for our gut health. Although Paleo starts from a position of skepticism about dairy, proponents often suggest adding in dairy if you tolerate it and seeing how you look, feel and perform when consuming it--and when they do, they generally recommend starting with fermented dairy like yogurt and cheese (preferably from grass-fed animals).
"4. Raw food is for the birds (too much of it, anyway)." Okay, this point really has nothing to do with Paleo. Paleo is certainly distinct from raw-food vegan as a dietary strategy, and Paleo advocates have nothing against cooking food. In fact, a good understanding of Paleo principles (which derive from an understanding of evolution) actually feeds into the importance of cooking certain vegetables that can cause problems if they're not cooked. And why do they cause problems? Because those veggies have evolved defense mechanisms that make them hard on the digestive system, particularly when consumed raw. So yeah, this point has nothing to do with Paleo (and everything to do with Pollan selling his book on cooking). Which is also true of his fifth point.
So, in the end, here's what this article looks like to me: Pollan gives an interview to push his latest book. He makes a few under-informed comments about Paleo, and because Paleo is very popular now, Cynthia Graber cobbles together an article that pits Michael Pollan against the Paleo diet, to drive traffic. And I suppose it worked, but as a critique of Paleo, it's critically flawed.
First, I think it's important to note that most of the most prominent proponents of Paleo have some reservations about the term "Paleo Diet." Partially, the term is problematic because it puts too great an emphasis on Paleo as a list of rules: eat this, not that, period. And to be fair, a lot of people who are practicing Paleo do view Paleo that way. That's why we have recipes for "Paleo" foods that aren't particularly healthy but that adhere to the letter of the "law" of "The Paleo Diet." But the people who are propagating Paleo at the highest levels (by which I mean the people who have done the most to define and refine it in the years when it's become popular) view it more as a set of principles for figuring out what a person should eat for optimal health. Listen to what Robb Wolf has to say about Paleo--he's about as far from dogmatic as you can be, and he's widely considered to be one of the most prominent proponents of "Paleo." Chris Kresser's ultra-recent Your Personal Paleo Code makes this explicit, the idea that it's less a one-size-fits-all dietary prescription and more a framework for figuring out what's best for any particular person (while I'm linking to books, I would say that Jason Seib's The Paleo Coach also does a great job of laying out the principles rather than prescribing rules). Although early on in the Paleo movement, there were a lot more absolute statements along the lines of "this is what ancient hunter-gatherers ate" or cut-and-dried food prohibitions, this just isn't true of the current versions of Paleo that are central to the movement.
So, with that out of the way, let's see "what's wrong with the Paleo Diet." After talking about how much humans love meat, and basically saying that early humans probably would have eaten as much meat as they could get, we get the "criticism" of Paleo:
In any case, says Pollan, today's meat is nothing like that of the hunter-gatherer.
One problem with the paleo diet is that "they're assuming that the options available to our caveman ancestors are still there," he argues. But "unless you're willing to hunt your food, they're not."
As Pollan explains, the animals bred by modern agriculture—which are fed artificial diets of corn and grains, and beefed up with hormones and antibiotics—have nutritional profiles far from wild game.
Pastured animals, raised on diets of grass and grubs, are closer to their wild relatives; even these, however, are nothing like the lean animals our ancestors ate.First, is there any Paleo advocate who isn't aware that factory farmed animals are terrible for our health? Is there any Paleo advocate who isn't favoring pastured animals? Second: really? They're "nothing like the lean animals our ancestors ate"? Really? Sure, they're not mastodons, and cattle have certainly evolved through human selection over the centuries and millennia, but just as Paleo practitioners are looking for the diet that's healthiest for human beings, pasturing ruminants like cows is giving them the diet that's healthiest for them, which makes the meat of those animals the healthiest it can be for us. And, I should add, more like what our ancestors would have eaten.
Oh, and let's add one more caveat to the whole Paleo thing: as several Paleo proponents have noted, "Paleo is a logical framework applied to modern humans, not a historical reenactment." To say "we don't really know what Paleolithic people ate," or "Paleolithic people ate different things in different places," or "the foods that Paleolithic people ate have changed so much that they don't really exist any more" all miss the point. They're all true, but so what? The answer isn't "I might as well have bagels and doughnuts for breakfast."
Which kind of leads to the second point in the article: "Humans can live on bread alone." Well, okay, you can "survive" on bread alone. But you're not going to be all that healthy. And if you're going to eat bread, you're definitely better off eating sourdough bread, because the fermentation process breaks down quite a few of the problematic constituents of bread. But the fact is that gluten is still problematic to a lot of people, even beyond the portion of the population that has celiac disease. Some of us tolerate it better than others, but there's still a legitimate critique of grains coming from the Paleo folks. And most people who are still eating bread and grains are not eating sourdough anyway.
"3. Eat more microbes." There is absolutely nothing in here that most Paleo advocates would argue against. Sort of. I mean, Paleo generally advocates fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi, as well as pickles, for the same reason: beneficial microbes for our gut health. Although Paleo starts from a position of skepticism about dairy, proponents often suggest adding in dairy if you tolerate it and seeing how you look, feel and perform when consuming it--and when they do, they generally recommend starting with fermented dairy like yogurt and cheese (preferably from grass-fed animals).
"4. Raw food is for the birds (too much of it, anyway)." Okay, this point really has nothing to do with Paleo. Paleo is certainly distinct from raw-food vegan as a dietary strategy, and Paleo advocates have nothing against cooking food. In fact, a good understanding of Paleo principles (which derive from an understanding of evolution) actually feeds into the importance of cooking certain vegetables that can cause problems if they're not cooked. And why do they cause problems? Because those veggies have evolved defense mechanisms that make them hard on the digestive system, particularly when consumed raw. So yeah, this point has nothing to do with Paleo (and everything to do with Pollan selling his book on cooking). Which is also true of his fifth point.
So, in the end, here's what this article looks like to me: Pollan gives an interview to push his latest book. He makes a few under-informed comments about Paleo, and because Paleo is very popular now, Cynthia Graber cobbles together an article that pits Michael Pollan against the Paleo diet, to drive traffic. And I suppose it worked, but as a critique of Paleo, it's critically flawed.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
5ks and Competition
Recently, a friend posted on Facebook about his weight loss and--probably more importantly--his efforts and successes at becoming more fit, which included working up to running a 5k (and now he's aiming for a half marathon!). That's a pretty cool accomplishment, in my book, to go from not being able to run a 5k to actually running a 5k. I know other people who've made that journey.
I'm not really one of them. I mean, yes, there was a time when I couldn't run 3.1 miles all at once, but it was sometime before I went to college (or, anyway, before I graduated). And it was at least 5 years after I was regularly running 5 miles at a time that I ran in my first organized 5k, so I wasn't exactly feeling suspense about whether or not I could complete it. Basically all my adult life, I've felt pretty confident that I could complete a 5k. This was true regardless of whether I was running daily or getting all of my exercise between the couch and the fridge (shout out to Pizza Rolls and beer every night, aka "spring schedule" movie nights in 2005 and 2006 and to Tastefully Simple's beer bread and spinach dip, aka every night in my first year of marriage and to massive pool of molten cookie dough covered with ice cream, aka every night of Lauren's first pregnancy). But really, I still could manage a 5k, even if it would hurt the next morning. And at the same time, even at my fittest, I've never been a fast runner (again, excepting short sprints to the fridge), so it didn't seem to make any sense to care about times. They were never impressive enough to care about.
Saturday, I ran an organized 5k for just the third time in my life. And I'll be damned if there wasn't a part of me that really wanted to brag about it, to say something about it on Facebook, or whatever. Where does that come from?
Only my shrink knows for sure.
But by the same token, as I've already outlined, it's hard for me to feel like running a 5k is anything to brag about. Now, this might have been my fastest organized 5k, but it was a run rather than a race, so there was no official time. I didn't even time it myself, so all I have to go on is what a friend who finished 30 seconds ahead of me said, that I'd finished in 24:00 even. He didn't feel like he'd run it as fast as all that, so my friend wondered if maybe the course was short, but yet another friend had some kind of GPS or something and it said that we'd all run 3.23 miles, so 24:00 would be even better than I thought.
Still, that wasn't the sort of time that put me anywhere close to the fastest finishers.
Of course, all this thinking just brought me back around to something that I've known for a long time: we should remember that if we're competing, we're really competing against ourselves. It's the only competition that's meaningful. Seriously, what would it matter if I was faster than my friend? Maybe if we were always running against each other, if we had some kind of back and forth where he sometimes wins and I sometimes win, but even the, so what? I could win while failing to improve or lose while getting a personal best. So who cares?
And yet, there's a sense in which competition does matter and is important. There's a sense in which the answer to my rhetorical question is: "I do!" Take my experience at the run. Somewhere in the last half mile or so, two girls from our school passed me (which, of course, I resented!). Up ahead of me, one stopped to walk and the other kept running, and I decided I was going to beat her to the finish line. I caught up and started passing, then she sped up to stay with me. So it's not like I was the only competitive one here. By the end we were in a full sprint, equally matched, and ended up in a photo finish that I absolutely won. In my own mind--she might have seen it differently. In any case, I'm sure we each ran faster and pushed ourselves harder because the other was there. For that moment, it was all about the competition.
As soon as we crossed the finish line, it didn't matter who "won." I clapped her on the back: "great finish!" (For the record: I won.)
And before that, my friend alluded to earlier spent most of the run about 20 yards ahead of me. The fact that he was there and that I had a vague sense that his mile splits were near where I hoped mine would be, I pushed myself to keep at least that close and maybe play a little catch-up when I could (mostly, I couldn't). Again, I probably ran faster because of the "competition" than I would have if I had just gone out for a nice jog by myself. Hypothetically, I know this could have worked against me: if I'd picked the wrong "competition," I might have started too fast and not been able to finish. But that's all part of running at this amateur level: figuring out whom to measure oneself against. It seems to me that if you have a general sense of how fast you can go / want to go, you can figure out as you go who's who. There was a joy, too, in discovering along the way people that got ahead of me earlier in the race that I could later pass (some were left behind, some passed me later; so it goes).
If it wasn't already obvious, I state it for the record: I'm a pretty casual runner. There was a time in my life when it was my primary form of exercise, when I would go for 5-mile runs three to five times a week, but now I hardly ever run any distances. Instead, I gravitate mostly to weight training and tennis. Which, really, are the opposite ends of the spectrum, with running squarely between them.
Hitting the weights is, for me at least, pretty purely about competition with myself. I'm not going to be entering any strongman competitions, and I've learned long ago not to bother with comparisons. If someone's lifting a lot more weight that I am, well, good for them. Maybe some day I can get there. Maybe I can learn something. If someone's lifting a lot less weight than I am, well, so what. Everyone has to start somewhere--there shouldn't be any shame in being a beginner. If you're showing up and doing the work, you're in the club.
While I still sometimes do it, mostly I don't judge the workouts that other people are doing, either. Sure, I might feel like some of the kids are spending too much time just on bench press and curls or that some people should venture away from the cardio machines and join in the fun of moving heavy weights around, but the bottom line is that we're all on our own journey with our own goals. We've found our own "information," and I'm happy to share what I "know" (I put it in quotes because I recognize the provisional nature of that knowledge), but I don't think there's one right way that everyone should be working out.
Then there's tennis. I can wax Zen on the subject of tennis, but really, it's pretty competitive, whether I'm playing against a former D-1 college player in a tournament or against a JV player in our local league. I want to win, and basically so does everyone else you encounter on the courts.
If we were just competing against ourselves to play the perfect game or to improve, we could "just hit" and I could be happy because I've been more consistent with my forehand or I'm getting more zip on my backhand or whatever. Most of the people I know who play tennis are bored with hitting about 30 seconds in and will suggest taking some serves and starting a set. And then best two out of three.
In the summers, I play in a league. It's set up to provide roughly equal matches, to an even greater extent than the format of high school tennis, where there's a similar organizational principle, with teams required by both rules and a sense of fair play to present their singles players and their doubles teams in order of ability. But for most of us, whether our opponent is "better" or "worse" than us (and most of us have made a judgment about that within the first 10 seconds of hitting with them), we're there to win. That's probably why tennis players, as a category of people, tend to be so poorly adjusted. We have an intense desire to win, but we're constantly losing. Even when you win a game, you're likely losing points. Even when you're winning a set, you're likely losing games. But anyway, we care about winning and losing.
I've rambled long enough for most and far too long for some. If there's a point here, it's simply this: we humans have a natural tendency to compete, and that's not a bad thing. It can push us to do better in whatever it is that we're doing. But at the same time, for myself at least, I know that competition is just a thing of the moment. My ultimate worth isn't on the line when I'm under the bar, on the race course, or stepping up to the service line. It's all about perspective: we should embrace competition exactly to the extent that it makes us better, that it pushes us to work harder and achieve more, but beyond that we have to let it go and appreciate the moment of competition itself more than result of that competition.
I'm not really one of them. I mean, yes, there was a time when I couldn't run 3.1 miles all at once, but it was sometime before I went to college (or, anyway, before I graduated). And it was at least 5 years after I was regularly running 5 miles at a time that I ran in my first organized 5k, so I wasn't exactly feeling suspense about whether or not I could complete it. Basically all my adult life, I've felt pretty confident that I could complete a 5k. This was true regardless of whether I was running daily or getting all of my exercise between the couch and the fridge (shout out to Pizza Rolls and beer every night, aka "spring schedule" movie nights in 2005 and 2006 and to Tastefully Simple's beer bread and spinach dip, aka every night in my first year of marriage and to massive pool of molten cookie dough covered with ice cream, aka every night of Lauren's first pregnancy). But really, I still could manage a 5k, even if it would hurt the next morning. And at the same time, even at my fittest, I've never been a fast runner (again, excepting short sprints to the fridge), so it didn't seem to make any sense to care about times. They were never impressive enough to care about.
Saturday, I ran an organized 5k for just the third time in my life. And I'll be damned if there wasn't a part of me that really wanted to brag about it, to say something about it on Facebook, or whatever. Where does that come from?
Only my shrink knows for sure.
But by the same token, as I've already outlined, it's hard for me to feel like running a 5k is anything to brag about. Now, this might have been my fastest organized 5k, but it was a run rather than a race, so there was no official time. I didn't even time it myself, so all I have to go on is what a friend who finished 30 seconds ahead of me said, that I'd finished in 24:00 even. He didn't feel like he'd run it as fast as all that, so my friend wondered if maybe the course was short, but yet another friend had some kind of GPS or something and it said that we'd all run 3.23 miles, so 24:00 would be even better than I thought.
Still, that wasn't the sort of time that put me anywhere close to the fastest finishers.
Of course, all this thinking just brought me back around to something that I've known for a long time: we should remember that if we're competing, we're really competing against ourselves. It's the only competition that's meaningful. Seriously, what would it matter if I was faster than my friend? Maybe if we were always running against each other, if we had some kind of back and forth where he sometimes wins and I sometimes win, but even the, so what? I could win while failing to improve or lose while getting a personal best. So who cares?
And yet, there's a sense in which competition does matter and is important. There's a sense in which the answer to my rhetorical question is: "I do!" Take my experience at the run. Somewhere in the last half mile or so, two girls from our school passed me (which, of course, I resented!). Up ahead of me, one stopped to walk and the other kept running, and I decided I was going to beat her to the finish line. I caught up and started passing, then she sped up to stay with me. So it's not like I was the only competitive one here. By the end we were in a full sprint, equally matched, and ended up in a photo finish that I absolutely won. In my own mind--she might have seen it differently. In any case, I'm sure we each ran faster and pushed ourselves harder because the other was there. For that moment, it was all about the competition.
As soon as we crossed the finish line, it didn't matter who "won." I clapped her on the back: "great finish!" (For the record: I won.)
And before that, my friend alluded to earlier spent most of the run about 20 yards ahead of me. The fact that he was there and that I had a vague sense that his mile splits were near where I hoped mine would be, I pushed myself to keep at least that close and maybe play a little catch-up when I could (mostly, I couldn't). Again, I probably ran faster because of the "competition" than I would have if I had just gone out for a nice jog by myself. Hypothetically, I know this could have worked against me: if I'd picked the wrong "competition," I might have started too fast and not been able to finish. But that's all part of running at this amateur level: figuring out whom to measure oneself against. It seems to me that if you have a general sense of how fast you can go / want to go, you can figure out as you go who's who. There was a joy, too, in discovering along the way people that got ahead of me earlier in the race that I could later pass (some were left behind, some passed me later; so it goes).
If it wasn't already obvious, I state it for the record: I'm a pretty casual runner. There was a time in my life when it was my primary form of exercise, when I would go for 5-mile runs three to five times a week, but now I hardly ever run any distances. Instead, I gravitate mostly to weight training and tennis. Which, really, are the opposite ends of the spectrum, with running squarely between them.
Hitting the weights is, for me at least, pretty purely about competition with myself. I'm not going to be entering any strongman competitions, and I've learned long ago not to bother with comparisons. If someone's lifting a lot more weight that I am, well, good for them. Maybe some day I can get there. Maybe I can learn something. If someone's lifting a lot less weight than I am, well, so what. Everyone has to start somewhere--there shouldn't be any shame in being a beginner. If you're showing up and doing the work, you're in the club.
While I still sometimes do it, mostly I don't judge the workouts that other people are doing, either. Sure, I might feel like some of the kids are spending too much time just on bench press and curls or that some people should venture away from the cardio machines and join in the fun of moving heavy weights around, but the bottom line is that we're all on our own journey with our own goals. We've found our own "information," and I'm happy to share what I "know" (I put it in quotes because I recognize the provisional nature of that knowledge), but I don't think there's one right way that everyone should be working out.
Then there's tennis. I can wax Zen on the subject of tennis, but really, it's pretty competitive, whether I'm playing against a former D-1 college player in a tournament or against a JV player in our local league. I want to win, and basically so does everyone else you encounter on the courts.
If we were just competing against ourselves to play the perfect game or to improve, we could "just hit" and I could be happy because I've been more consistent with my forehand or I'm getting more zip on my backhand or whatever. Most of the people I know who play tennis are bored with hitting about 30 seconds in and will suggest taking some serves and starting a set. And then best two out of three.
In the summers, I play in a league. It's set up to provide roughly equal matches, to an even greater extent than the format of high school tennis, where there's a similar organizational principle, with teams required by both rules and a sense of fair play to present their singles players and their doubles teams in order of ability. But for most of us, whether our opponent is "better" or "worse" than us (and most of us have made a judgment about that within the first 10 seconds of hitting with them), we're there to win. That's probably why tennis players, as a category of people, tend to be so poorly adjusted. We have an intense desire to win, but we're constantly losing. Even when you win a game, you're likely losing points. Even when you're winning a set, you're likely losing games. But anyway, we care about winning and losing.
I've rambled long enough for most and far too long for some. If there's a point here, it's simply this: we humans have a natural tendency to compete, and that's not a bad thing. It can push us to do better in whatever it is that we're doing. But at the same time, for myself at least, I know that competition is just a thing of the moment. My ultimate worth isn't on the line when I'm under the bar, on the race course, or stepping up to the service line. It's all about perspective: we should embrace competition exactly to the extent that it makes us better, that it pushes us to work harder and achieve more, but beyond that we have to let it go and appreciate the moment of competition itself more than result of that competition.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Healthy Decisions in the Land of Decadent Holidays
Often, people use New Year's as a springboard for new diet and fitness routines. Often, these attempts fail, but then sometimes people are very successful in these attempts. Certainly, there are a lot of products and programs on the market, such as P90X which gave me a good four months a couple years ago (starting in April, though, not January). Like P90X, several of these programs aim at 3 months, which seems to be a sort of sweet spot: long enough to have some significant results if successful, short enough to keep the end in sight, and more than enough time to establish habits, both in diet and exercise.
I had a thought back at the beginning of October: wouldn't it be great to start 3 months before New Year's instead of the same old "new start" thing? In a certain sense, it's absolutely, positively crazy. Change experts will tell you that it's important to get as many factors in your environment working with you: for instance, turning bad examples and enablers into helpful friends, coaches, and cheerleaders. For instance, if your spouse is the one who says "hey, let's order a pizza, eat a gallon of ice cream, and watch a movie tonight" when you're trying to drop 20 lbs, it's a huge help if you can get him or her on your side, not only not encouraging you to fail at your goals but actively working to help you stick to your diet and go exercise. If you can set up your physical environment in ways that help, too, you'll be way ahead: getting the junk food out of the house, or getting rid of the candy bowl on your desk at work, or changing your routine so that you don't walk by the staff room where that "nice" co-worker always puts out doughnuts.
Like I said, that's the good advice that the experts give you, and starting a weight-loss or health-improvement program on the months leading up to January 1 basically amounts to kindly asking the world to crush your ambitions. As the weather gets cooler, people tend to be more averse to going outside and exercising or, for that matter, leaving the nice warm bed early in the morning and going to the gym. The biggest dream killers, though, are the holidays. We might get through most of October unscathed, but then Halloween hits you with both barrels. If you have kids, you're almost doomed to be surrounded by candy, but even if you aren't, there are probably a bunch of well-meaning people at work bringing it in--heck, that might even be you! And Halloween, of course, is just a warm up for the Thanksgiving-Christmas season. Did you know that half of all American ovens are running at least 8 hours a day in November and December, baking cookies, cakes, pies, or bars? Okay, that's probably not true, but if you look around you, and you're trying to keep a healthy diet this time of year, it probably feels true.
And the thing is, it does feel like such a nice thing to do. I've done it, as recently as last week. I baked a double recipe of Mom's Cornflake Cookies to give first to one group of kids and then to another (with an "appropriate" number removed for our own enjoyment). I'm not taking any moral high ground here in my pointing out and implicitly condemning the empty-calorie-enablers.
"But John," I hear you saying, "Aren't you being too harsh on the nice people who give out candy like billionaires giving to Super-PACs and bake sugary, fatty desserts to give out like it will help us avoid the fiscal cliff?" At least, I think that's what you're saying: it's hard to hear you over the sounds of the crispy cookies I'm eating by the dozen. Who brought these in today, anyway?
...
Sorry, just woke up from a sugar coma. What was I saying? Oh yeah, I was talking about my bright idea to start a diet and fitness regimen on the months leading up to New Year's. It is, obviously, a hare-brained scheme, as only a rabbit, which naturally subsists on lawn clippings, could think it's a good idea. But here's the thing about it: what if you could make it work? If you could turn three months or two months or one month of the year that would normally be subtracting years from your life into 1-3 months of better health, that would be a huge net gain. In January, pure guilt, absent any intentional changes to your lifestyle, will probably cause you to lose a few pounds, if only from failing to eat in the face of depression. Your three months of Resolution-fueled goodness will only be slightly better than what you would have gotten anyway, you see?
Anyway, while it may be too late to have three good months before New Year's, you could always start here at the beginning of December. My wife is, and I'm awfully proud of her for swimming against the cultural current and trying to make changes now rather than just saying "I'll start next month..." You'd better believe I'm going to do everything I can to help her stay on track and meet her goals. And you know what? I'll support you too--if you need me to come to your place of employment and eat all the cookies, just give me the address and I'll be there. I've got your back (even if there is more of it to get than there was a month ago).
I had a thought back at the beginning of October: wouldn't it be great to start 3 months before New Year's instead of the same old "new start" thing? In a certain sense, it's absolutely, positively crazy. Change experts will tell you that it's important to get as many factors in your environment working with you: for instance, turning bad examples and enablers into helpful friends, coaches, and cheerleaders. For instance, if your spouse is the one who says "hey, let's order a pizza, eat a gallon of ice cream, and watch a movie tonight" when you're trying to drop 20 lbs, it's a huge help if you can get him or her on your side, not only not encouraging you to fail at your goals but actively working to help you stick to your diet and go exercise. If you can set up your physical environment in ways that help, too, you'll be way ahead: getting the junk food out of the house, or getting rid of the candy bowl on your desk at work, or changing your routine so that you don't walk by the staff room where that "nice" co-worker always puts out doughnuts.
Like I said, that's the good advice that the experts give you, and starting a weight-loss or health-improvement program on the months leading up to January 1 basically amounts to kindly asking the world to crush your ambitions. As the weather gets cooler, people tend to be more averse to going outside and exercising or, for that matter, leaving the nice warm bed early in the morning and going to the gym. The biggest dream killers, though, are the holidays. We might get through most of October unscathed, but then Halloween hits you with both barrels. If you have kids, you're almost doomed to be surrounded by candy, but even if you aren't, there are probably a bunch of well-meaning people at work bringing it in--heck, that might even be you! And Halloween, of course, is just a warm up for the Thanksgiving-Christmas season. Did you know that half of all American ovens are running at least 8 hours a day in November and December, baking cookies, cakes, pies, or bars? Okay, that's probably not true, but if you look around you, and you're trying to keep a healthy diet this time of year, it probably feels true.
And the thing is, it does feel like such a nice thing to do. I've done it, as recently as last week. I baked a double recipe of Mom's Cornflake Cookies to give first to one group of kids and then to another (with an "appropriate" number removed for our own enjoyment). I'm not taking any moral high ground here in my pointing out and implicitly condemning the empty-calorie-enablers.
"But John," I hear you saying, "Aren't you being too harsh on the nice people who give out candy like billionaires giving to Super-PACs and bake sugary, fatty desserts to give out like it will help us avoid the fiscal cliff?" At least, I think that's what you're saying: it's hard to hear you over the sounds of the crispy cookies I'm eating by the dozen. Who brought these in today, anyway?
...
Sorry, just woke up from a sugar coma. What was I saying? Oh yeah, I was talking about my bright idea to start a diet and fitness regimen on the months leading up to New Year's. It is, obviously, a hare-brained scheme, as only a rabbit, which naturally subsists on lawn clippings, could think it's a good idea. But here's the thing about it: what if you could make it work? If you could turn three months or two months or one month of the year that would normally be subtracting years from your life into 1-3 months of better health, that would be a huge net gain. In January, pure guilt, absent any intentional changes to your lifestyle, will probably cause you to lose a few pounds, if only from failing to eat in the face of depression. Your three months of Resolution-fueled goodness will only be slightly better than what you would have gotten anyway, you see?
Anyway, while it may be too late to have three good months before New Year's, you could always start here at the beginning of December. My wife is, and I'm awfully proud of her for swimming against the cultural current and trying to make changes now rather than just saying "I'll start next month..." You'd better believe I'm going to do everything I can to help her stay on track and meet her goals. And you know what? I'll support you too--if you need me to come to your place of employment and eat all the cookies, just give me the address and I'll be there. I've got your back (even if there is more of it to get than there was a month ago).
Monday, January 9, 2012
Back in the Saddle(s)
Although I actually spent all yesterday evening in the barrack on duty, today marked the official return to school. I had blogged earlier about the way that break takes us out of our routines, so I guess now it's time to blog about getting back into routines.
-----
I won't be writing about work, but the habit I'll spend my time on involved getting my fix of exercise. Even though my phone alarm failed to go off (I refuse to believe we didn't hear it at 5:30, since we certainly heard the 3 am "nature sounds" alarm on the radio out in the living room), I did get a workout in this morning. I continue to tinker with the routine, trying to find (decide) what fits my goals and constraints. Although I enjoyed my 90 days of P90X, now that Lauren and I need to either drive in to work together or else take two cars, I have trouble with a lot of the P90X workouts, because they tend to run to an hour and fifteen minutes or more. Anyway, I'm also very taken by the 4-Hour Body ideas of a "minimum effective dose" when it comes to exercise, and I suspect that P90X almost over-does it sometimes. So I think what I'm looking at will be something like this:
Monday: a pared down workout that focuses on exercises that work several muscles in a major group (bench press, deadlift, lat pulldowns) plus an ab workout with the dreaded Torture Twist. After three weeks off, they were, in fact, torturous.
Tuesday: yoga (I haven't done yoga in months now because of my shoulder injury, and I miss it), probably the P90X DVD.
Wedhesday: either similar to the Monday workout or some kind of shoulders and arms workout (maybe the P90X workout, but I'll probably cut it down to fit my schedule)
Thursday: I lead a plyometrics class, which is [ever more] loosely based on the P90X program.
Friday: an exercise routine that looks very much like Monday's
Saturday: P90X Kenpo X workout
Sunday: P90X X-Stretch
Day 1 back on the wagon is in the books. Assuming the scales haven't been recalibrated while I was gone, it looks like I haven't put on any weight in the past month, despite spending the holidays eating like the pig that we ate for Christmas. I'm back in the saddle and--so far--have no sores to report.
-----
I won't be writing about work, but the habit I'll spend my time on involved getting my fix of exercise. Even though my phone alarm failed to go off (I refuse to believe we didn't hear it at 5:30, since we certainly heard the 3 am "nature sounds" alarm on the radio out in the living room), I did get a workout in this morning. I continue to tinker with the routine, trying to find (decide) what fits my goals and constraints. Although I enjoyed my 90 days of P90X, now that Lauren and I need to either drive in to work together or else take two cars, I have trouble with a lot of the P90X workouts, because they tend to run to an hour and fifteen minutes or more. Anyway, I'm also very taken by the 4-Hour Body ideas of a "minimum effective dose" when it comes to exercise, and I suspect that P90X almost over-does it sometimes. So I think what I'm looking at will be something like this:
Monday: a pared down workout that focuses on exercises that work several muscles in a major group (bench press, deadlift, lat pulldowns) plus an ab workout with the dreaded Torture Twist. After three weeks off, they were, in fact, torturous.
Tuesday: yoga (I haven't done yoga in months now because of my shoulder injury, and I miss it), probably the P90X DVD.
Wedhesday: either similar to the Monday workout or some kind of shoulders and arms workout (maybe the P90X workout, but I'll probably cut it down to fit my schedule)
Thursday: I lead a plyometrics class, which is [ever more] loosely based on the P90X program.
Friday: an exercise routine that looks very much like Monday's
Saturday: P90X Kenpo X workout
Sunday: P90X X-Stretch
Day 1 back on the wagon is in the books. Assuming the scales haven't been recalibrated while I was gone, it looks like I haven't put on any weight in the past month, despite spending the holidays eating like the pig that we ate for Christmas. I'm back in the saddle and--so far--have no sores to report.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Food Friday: Holiday Diets
Quick note to anyone who may be interested: Holidailies, the blog-every-day web community, is back up and running again this year, under new management. It looks like they've gone back to the format before last year's Reddit experiment, and the month starts today.
_______________
For the benefit of anyone who's new around here, I should say that through diet and exercise, I lost just about 30 pounds since the start of the year, which has put me at a healthy weight. At this point, I'm more interested in maintaining than in losing additional weight.
All that said, I believe the maxim that "It isn't a diet, it's a live-it." In other words, it's about changing eating habits and eating trends, it's about a lifestyle, not just a quick-fix (or even a slow fix). But whether you're at the point of trying to lose weight or just trying to maintain a healthy weight, the holiday season is a tough time, no doubt about it.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it seemed like the temptations started piling up around mid-October. As soon as the air got a bit cooler and thoughts turned to Halloween, candy and junk food started appearing everywhere. As I would walk around different areas of campus here, I would see candy out in bowls or bags, on offer to everyone, and doughnuts and pastries brought in for this group or that group. In our culture, it seems like we can't hardly think of a nice thing to do for individuals or groups that doesn't involve delicious-but-bad-for-you food. We buy food to bring in, we bake cookies or cakes... it's always about the simple carbs and the sugars.
And it's hard to say no, especially when people have baked something themselves, but even if it's store-bought candy, it can be tough to say no. "I'll just have one," we say, but one piece of candy spikes the blood sugar, which calls out the insulin brigade, which lowers the blood sugar... and makes us want more. That's not even to mention the tacit peer pressure of seeing everyone else reaching for whatever it is, or the way that our will-power gets drawn down each time we resist (studies show) and of course can be weakened by stress, fatigue, or distraction, all of which seem to ramp up just about this time of year, at least for educators like me.
Perhaps it's because of where I am (maintenance), but in some ways this seems like the hardest time to resist temptation. I mean, when you're in weight-loss mode, you've got your goals, you're immersed in your diet and exercise, it's easy (okay, easy-ish) to stay focused. But once you've reached your goals, it's easy to justify "the occasional" bad-for-you food because you know you're at a healthy weight. So what could one [insert food demon here] hurt? But of course, it's never just one, which is why for the last month or so I've found myself 5-10 pounds over my lowest weight of the year.
I suppose I can't really write an entire blog post just about the problem, even if I'm not exactly the role model for resisting temptation.
As these things go, the diet I'm following (the "Slow Carb Diet" outlined in Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Body) is easy to follow--I feel full, I enjoy the meals I'm eating, and there's a cheat day built in. For the first month or two, that was enough, and I followed it well. It's just all these temptations...
So here are some ideas:
1) Plan ahead: know what you're going to eat and when, so you aren't tempted by the bad ideas of others.
2) Convert others to your diet--it's so much easier when you have a like-minded community. If you can get your significant other on the diet, it's so much easier (Lauren is pregnant, though, and doesn't like the Slow Carb meals nearly as well as I do, so I'm on my own--it's okay, I understand). An on-line community of like-minded individuals is the next best thing.
3) Practice saying no. From "No thank you" to "I really appreciate the offer, but I'm on a diet that doesn't allow X," the more you say it, the easier it gets. It can be hard to say no, because a) you want the food and b) the people who offer it are so nice to do so, but as discussed above, decisions to give in to temptation have a tendency to snowball rapidly.
4) If your plan includes a "cheat day," be sure to remind yourself of that fact. "I would like to have X, and I can have X; I just need to wait until Sunday." Of course, that's hard because so often the food that's being offered so freely is right there, right now, and won't be anywhere near you when your cheat day comes around. Refer back to #3.
5) Take time to talk yourself up. Remind yourself of your goals, whether it's weight loss or maintaining the healthy weight you have. Giving your attention to these things before temptation arises makes it easier for you to say no when it does, because you're conscious of where you want to be and what you need to do to get there.
6) Drink lots and lots of water. It's not just that it makes you feel full, although it does. It's not just that it's good for you, though in general it is, because most of us don't drink an optimal amount of water. The thing is that we often mistake our bodies' signals for thirst as signals for hunger.
7) Stay focused and productive. If you're really engaged in doing something, whether that's work or play or whatever, you're less likely to eat. Haven't we all had the experience of getting so wrapped up in something that we forget to eat? And haven't we also had the experience of eating for no other real reason than because we're bored? Look to avoid distracting yourself, look to avoid multitasking (which is often a form of procrastination and distraction), and you're less likely to eat food you don't need.
8) Avoid temptations. If you know that so-and-so always brings in doughnuts on Mondays and leaves them out for everyone in the lounge, stay the heck out of the lounge! Find somewhere else to work or eat or take a break, take a route to the restroom that doesn't take you past there--do what you have to do, but don't put yourself in a situation unnecessarily where you have to exercise willpower. It's not about parading temptations in front of yourself to prove how great your willpower is, it's about getting results, so don't risk sabotaging yourself.
And I'm running out of ideas and I'm running out of time in order to get this in before Friday becomes Saturday, so I'll leave it at that--you're encouraged to offer your own ideas in the comment section, or to make any comments about the ideas I've thrown out there.
_______________
For the benefit of anyone who's new around here, I should say that through diet and exercise, I lost just about 30 pounds since the start of the year, which has put me at a healthy weight. At this point, I'm more interested in maintaining than in losing additional weight.
All that said, I believe the maxim that "It isn't a diet, it's a live-it." In other words, it's about changing eating habits and eating trends, it's about a lifestyle, not just a quick-fix (or even a slow fix). But whether you're at the point of trying to lose weight or just trying to maintain a healthy weight, the holiday season is a tough time, no doubt about it.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it seemed like the temptations started piling up around mid-October. As soon as the air got a bit cooler and thoughts turned to Halloween, candy and junk food started appearing everywhere. As I would walk around different areas of campus here, I would see candy out in bowls or bags, on offer to everyone, and doughnuts and pastries brought in for this group or that group. In our culture, it seems like we can't hardly think of a nice thing to do for individuals or groups that doesn't involve delicious-but-bad-for-you food. We buy food to bring in, we bake cookies or cakes... it's always about the simple carbs and the sugars.
And it's hard to say no, especially when people have baked something themselves, but even if it's store-bought candy, it can be tough to say no. "I'll just have one," we say, but one piece of candy spikes the blood sugar, which calls out the insulin brigade, which lowers the blood sugar... and makes us want more. That's not even to mention the tacit peer pressure of seeing everyone else reaching for whatever it is, or the way that our will-power gets drawn down each time we resist (studies show) and of course can be weakened by stress, fatigue, or distraction, all of which seem to ramp up just about this time of year, at least for educators like me.
Perhaps it's because of where I am (maintenance), but in some ways this seems like the hardest time to resist temptation. I mean, when you're in weight-loss mode, you've got your goals, you're immersed in your diet and exercise, it's easy (okay, easy-ish) to stay focused. But once you've reached your goals, it's easy to justify "the occasional" bad-for-you food because you know you're at a healthy weight. So what could one [insert food demon here] hurt? But of course, it's never just one, which is why for the last month or so I've found myself 5-10 pounds over my lowest weight of the year.
I suppose I can't really write an entire blog post just about the problem, even if I'm not exactly the role model for resisting temptation.
As these things go, the diet I'm following (the "Slow Carb Diet" outlined in Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Body) is easy to follow--I feel full, I enjoy the meals I'm eating, and there's a cheat day built in. For the first month or two, that was enough, and I followed it well. It's just all these temptations...
So here are some ideas:
1) Plan ahead: know what you're going to eat and when, so you aren't tempted by the bad ideas of others.
2) Convert others to your diet--it's so much easier when you have a like-minded community. If you can get your significant other on the diet, it's so much easier (Lauren is pregnant, though, and doesn't like the Slow Carb meals nearly as well as I do, so I'm on my own--it's okay, I understand). An on-line community of like-minded individuals is the next best thing.
3) Practice saying no. From "No thank you" to "I really appreciate the offer, but I'm on a diet that doesn't allow X," the more you say it, the easier it gets. It can be hard to say no, because a) you want the food and b) the people who offer it are so nice to do so, but as discussed above, decisions to give in to temptation have a tendency to snowball rapidly.
4) If your plan includes a "cheat day," be sure to remind yourself of that fact. "I would like to have X, and I can have X; I just need to wait until Sunday." Of course, that's hard because so often the food that's being offered so freely is right there, right now, and won't be anywhere near you when your cheat day comes around. Refer back to #3.
5) Take time to talk yourself up. Remind yourself of your goals, whether it's weight loss or maintaining the healthy weight you have. Giving your attention to these things before temptation arises makes it easier for you to say no when it does, because you're conscious of where you want to be and what you need to do to get there.
6) Drink lots and lots of water. It's not just that it makes you feel full, although it does. It's not just that it's good for you, though in general it is, because most of us don't drink an optimal amount of water. The thing is that we often mistake our bodies' signals for thirst as signals for hunger.
7) Stay focused and productive. If you're really engaged in doing something, whether that's work or play or whatever, you're less likely to eat. Haven't we all had the experience of getting so wrapped up in something that we forget to eat? And haven't we also had the experience of eating for no other real reason than because we're bored? Look to avoid distracting yourself, look to avoid multitasking (which is often a form of procrastination and distraction), and you're less likely to eat food you don't need.
8) Avoid temptations. If you know that so-and-so always brings in doughnuts on Mondays and leaves them out for everyone in the lounge, stay the heck out of the lounge! Find somewhere else to work or eat or take a break, take a route to the restroom that doesn't take you past there--do what you have to do, but don't put yourself in a situation unnecessarily where you have to exercise willpower. It's not about parading temptations in front of yourself to prove how great your willpower is, it's about getting results, so don't risk sabotaging yourself.
And I'm running out of ideas and I'm running out of time in order to get this in before Friday becomes Saturday, so I'll leave it at that--you're encouraged to offer your own ideas in the comment section, or to make any comments about the ideas I've thrown out there.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Running
I woke up around 5 this morning, though my alarm wasn't due to go off until 5:30. I had my clothes set out for an early morning run. Rather than get up that early, I made myself go back to sleep to wait for my alarm. It's on thing to get up at 5:30 for a run, but quite another to do it at 5:00.
Except that instead of being set for "get up in time to exercise" it was set for "get up just in time."
My relationship with running goes back to junior high track, and it was not love at first sight. I only joined track because some of my friends were doing it and because I liked the coach, but I was terrible. I wasn't fast and I couldn't run long distances--or, really, any distance--without getting shin splints. I threw shot and discus for two years even though I was terrible at both.
Still, a year after I quit track, I found myself running when a 4-H project on fitness got me interested in fitness. Two of my closest friends--both in my heart and geographically speaking--would be legit high school runners, but I was just doing my own thing. I probably ran not more than a mile at a time, but I was doing it because I wanted to and that made all the difference. I didn't have any problem with shin splints, and running plus puberty plus a healthier diet took me from pudgy to thin, where I would spend the next seven to ten years.
When my alarm finally went off, it was getting to be too late to work out and, anyway, the air beyond our flannel sheets was not particularly inviting, cold as it was. The whole morning, from our apartment to my office, was a chilly one. I did my fair share of work and then came home to go for a run.
For the past five weeks or so, I've been nursing a shoulder injury. Its cause was overconfidence and under-attention, and I think I've been side-lined long enough by now to learn my lesson, but my body disagrees. I've had to lay off the bulk of my training: whereas I was lifting weights three days a week plus teaching a plyometrics class and doing some other cardio workout, now I'm saving myself for the class I have to teach--and I've rediscovered running.
I first really discovered running at the end of my junior year of college. I was on campus after most had left, because I was working Reunion Weekend, and I had some time to kill, so I was looking through books at The Kenyon College Bookstore and came across a book on running. I tore through it, quickly grasping the basic premise: if you can walk for at least 40 minutes at a time, you start gradually alternating running and walking, for instance running 2 minutes then walking 8 then running 2, etc, and gradually running more and walking less until you're running the whole 40 minutes. When I went home that summer, I started doing just that.
While I was at my office, the day had gotten quite nice--there was still a crispness to the air, but the sun was out and changing that minute by minute. I went home and changed into shorts, a t-shirt, and my Vibram Five Fingers shoes. I discovered Vibrams and "barefoot" running a few years ago--but long after my regular running days--after seeing Christopher McDougall interviewed about his book Born to Run on The Daily Show. I was intrigued by the things I learned about running... just not intrigued enough to really get back into running, especially since I was around 190 pounds at the time, with the cardiovascular fitness you'd expect of such a one. I bought the shoes back in early 2010 and ran some in them but hadn't really committed to running either in Vibrams or any other shoe. Until this injury limited severely my athletic choices.
I don't know how long it was before I was running for the whole 40 minutes, but I spent the next couple summers running the flat square miles of the Ohio countryside near my childhood home. The way I remember it, I was running 4 or 5 times a week at a steady 8:00-minute pace. I've never been fast, but I got to where I could churn out the miles. I remember a magazine describing a runner "eating up the miles with Zen-like calm," and that's how I envisioned myself. I experienced a real runner's high just once, while I was working at a summer school program in Connecticut: I actually ran about a mile and felt awful, didn't want to run any more, so I started walking, but then I berated myself into running--and just didn't want to stop. I ran for over an hour and felt like I could have kept going indefinitely, running 'til sometime after the sun had gone down.
Where I grew up in rural Ohio, all the county and township roads were layed out in a grid pattern with a mile between corners (state routes cut across willy nilly). This was great for my running, as I could easily mark out how far I'd gone, at least to the nearest mile. My usual route was to run down to the nearest corner, run 2 flat miles due west, and then come back, but often I would vary my routine to run around a while block. I was kind of bored, being home for the summer, and running was my escape.
Having read in The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss that I might encourage good running form by, among other things, keeping my stride rate above 180 beats per minute, I set about some weeks ago to put together a playlist that would keep me at the right tempo. When I started running 3 weeks ago, I put together the first list, but found it unsatisfactory. I found instead a bunch of old .midi files from back in the day, gathered ones that were nearly the right tempo and made them the right tempo, then also worked to emphasize the beats. That worked well, except for the computery sound of the music. Today I brought out another attempt at a playlist, and I went ahead and upped the tempo from 180 bpm to 200+. In other words, I may have learned something about what to do and not to do in the weight room, that wisdom is non-transferable to the running course.
I loved running enough in my early 20s to keep it up, at least occasionally, through my two years of graduate school, though as I got busier, the runs grew more infrequent, preparing my body for the years of not running that would follow. Once I got my first teaching job in western Pennsylvania, I was ready to close the door on my running career (without, it should be added, running a single competitive race). I thought I would keep running, but I think it only took one run with my taller, more athletic friend Tom to cure me of that notion, not only because I was hopelessly behind him in every way imaginable, but also because running in Pennsylvania meant running up and down hills. Growing up in Ohio did not prepare me for such things. I can remember vividly the hill that ate the soul of my running: it went up and up and up, and just when it looked like I'd reached the top, it turned and continued up. Twice. Twice it fooled me into thinking I had arrived, only to dash my hopes. I wouldn't be a regular runner much longer, contending with that, especially not when the hills were allied with fattening school food and generic adult busy-ness. I put on weight steadily through my 20s, though getting into weight lifting was at least some consolation, as it allowed me to carry my weight better.
I gamely set out through my yard at the faster tempo I'd set myself, working my way down to where I could run along the lake that borders our school campus. It's the same way that I've been running for the past several weeks when I've gone out, but it looks a lot different at 11 am than it does around 6 am, in that I can actually see the lake instead of the moonlight glinting off the lake, can actually see the grass instead of just feel it putting a damp chill up my feet and legs. I started off a few weeks ago running 30 minutes once a week, then twice a week, then upping it to 35 minutes. Today? Back to my college days and 40-minute runs. I had trouble staying on the pace I set for myself, but it was still a good run.
Ultimately it took two things to get me back into running, if that's what I am: an injury and losing 30-35 pounds. I'd been thinking about it before but it wasn't until I couldn't do my first choice workouts that I was able not only to go back to where my fitness journey started, but to reinterpret it through my experiences since then--the interest in biomechanics and "barefoot" running and a very different overall body than the one I had a decade ago.
Except that instead of being set for "get up in time to exercise" it was set for "get up just in time."
My relationship with running goes back to junior high track, and it was not love at first sight. I only joined track because some of my friends were doing it and because I liked the coach, but I was terrible. I wasn't fast and I couldn't run long distances--or, really, any distance--without getting shin splints. I threw shot and discus for two years even though I was terrible at both.
Still, a year after I quit track, I found myself running when a 4-H project on fitness got me interested in fitness. Two of my closest friends--both in my heart and geographically speaking--would be legit high school runners, but I was just doing my own thing. I probably ran not more than a mile at a time, but I was doing it because I wanted to and that made all the difference. I didn't have any problem with shin splints, and running plus puberty plus a healthier diet took me from pudgy to thin, where I would spend the next seven to ten years.
When my alarm finally went off, it was getting to be too late to work out and, anyway, the air beyond our flannel sheets was not particularly inviting, cold as it was. The whole morning, from our apartment to my office, was a chilly one. I did my fair share of work and then came home to go for a run.
For the past five weeks or so, I've been nursing a shoulder injury. Its cause was overconfidence and under-attention, and I think I've been side-lined long enough by now to learn my lesson, but my body disagrees. I've had to lay off the bulk of my training: whereas I was lifting weights three days a week plus teaching a plyometrics class and doing some other cardio workout, now I'm saving myself for the class I have to teach--and I've rediscovered running.
I first really discovered running at the end of my junior year of college. I was on campus after most had left, because I was working Reunion Weekend, and I had some time to kill, so I was looking through books at The Kenyon College Bookstore and came across a book on running. I tore through it, quickly grasping the basic premise: if you can walk for at least 40 minutes at a time, you start gradually alternating running and walking, for instance running 2 minutes then walking 8 then running 2, etc, and gradually running more and walking less until you're running the whole 40 minutes. When I went home that summer, I started doing just that.
While I was at my office, the day had gotten quite nice--there was still a crispness to the air, but the sun was out and changing that minute by minute. I went home and changed into shorts, a t-shirt, and my Vibram Five Fingers shoes. I discovered Vibrams and "barefoot" running a few years ago--but long after my regular running days--after seeing Christopher McDougall interviewed about his book Born to Run on The Daily Show. I was intrigued by the things I learned about running... just not intrigued enough to really get back into running, especially since I was around 190 pounds at the time, with the cardiovascular fitness you'd expect of such a one. I bought the shoes back in early 2010 and ran some in them but hadn't really committed to running either in Vibrams or any other shoe. Until this injury limited severely my athletic choices.
I don't know how long it was before I was running for the whole 40 minutes, but I spent the next couple summers running the flat square miles of the Ohio countryside near my childhood home. The way I remember it, I was running 4 or 5 times a week at a steady 8:00-minute pace. I've never been fast, but I got to where I could churn out the miles. I remember a magazine describing a runner "eating up the miles with Zen-like calm," and that's how I envisioned myself. I experienced a real runner's high just once, while I was working at a summer school program in Connecticut: I actually ran about a mile and felt awful, didn't want to run any more, so I started walking, but then I berated myself into running--and just didn't want to stop. I ran for over an hour and felt like I could have kept going indefinitely, running 'til sometime after the sun had gone down.
Where I grew up in rural Ohio, all the county and township roads were layed out in a grid pattern with a mile between corners (state routes cut across willy nilly). This was great for my running, as I could easily mark out how far I'd gone, at least to the nearest mile. My usual route was to run down to the nearest corner, run 2 flat miles due west, and then come back, but often I would vary my routine to run around a while block. I was kind of bored, being home for the summer, and running was my escape.
Having read in The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss that I might encourage good running form by, among other things, keeping my stride rate above 180 beats per minute, I set about some weeks ago to put together a playlist that would keep me at the right tempo. When I started running 3 weeks ago, I put together the first list, but found it unsatisfactory. I found instead a bunch of old .midi files from back in the day, gathered ones that were nearly the right tempo and made them the right tempo, then also worked to emphasize the beats. That worked well, except for the computery sound of the music. Today I brought out another attempt at a playlist, and I went ahead and upped the tempo from 180 bpm to 200+. In other words, I may have learned something about what to do and not to do in the weight room, that wisdom is non-transferable to the running course.
I loved running enough in my early 20s to keep it up, at least occasionally, through my two years of graduate school, though as I got busier, the runs grew more infrequent, preparing my body for the years of not running that would follow. Once I got my first teaching job in western Pennsylvania, I was ready to close the door on my running career (without, it should be added, running a single competitive race). I thought I would keep running, but I think it only took one run with my taller, more athletic friend Tom to cure me of that notion, not only because I was hopelessly behind him in every way imaginable, but also because running in Pennsylvania meant running up and down hills. Growing up in Ohio did not prepare me for such things. I can remember vividly the hill that ate the soul of my running: it went up and up and up, and just when it looked like I'd reached the top, it turned and continued up. Twice. Twice it fooled me into thinking I had arrived, only to dash my hopes. I wouldn't be a regular runner much longer, contending with that, especially not when the hills were allied with fattening school food and generic adult busy-ness. I put on weight steadily through my 20s, though getting into weight lifting was at least some consolation, as it allowed me to carry my weight better.
I gamely set out through my yard at the faster tempo I'd set myself, working my way down to where I could run along the lake that borders our school campus. It's the same way that I've been running for the past several weeks when I've gone out, but it looks a lot different at 11 am than it does around 6 am, in that I can actually see the lake instead of the moonlight glinting off the lake, can actually see the grass instead of just feel it putting a damp chill up my feet and legs. I started off a few weeks ago running 30 minutes once a week, then twice a week, then upping it to 35 minutes. Today? Back to my college days and 40-minute runs. I had trouble staying on the pace I set for myself, but it was still a good run.
Ultimately it took two things to get me back into running, if that's what I am: an injury and losing 30-35 pounds. I'd been thinking about it before but it wasn't until I couldn't do my first choice workouts that I was able not only to go back to where my fitness journey started, but to reinterpret it through my experiences since then--the interest in biomechanics and "barefoot" running and a very different overall body than the one I had a decade ago.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Spirituality and Yoga and such
I love it when blogging gets going in a cycle of mutual inspiration. Thanks Hilary. In a recent blog written in response to a recent blog, she tackled the issue of yoga as spiritual practice and tried to pin down what that meant. Much as her blog started as a comment overflowing its little box, so did mine. So you'd be well advised to do any background reading you haven't already done (i.e. the blogs mentioned above), but also feel free to dive in without a net if you so choose.
She references an essay on the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the term "spiritual." While I'm not unsympathetic to what the writer is saying, and in fact largely agree, I think the question of the meaning of "spiritual" also depends on context. The context of the essay is almost exclusively the designation of how one defines one's religious beliefs, i.e. "spiritual but not religious" (which I've always, perhaps rather cynically and certainly a bit tongue in cheek, defined as "too lazy to go to church"). But what I'm getting at is a difference between "being spiritual" and "spiritual matters." To me, the latter refers to things other than physical. To some people, that would be a soul, perhaps "God," or "meaning." The idea seems to derive at least in some measure from the mind-body duality, which I believe to be bullshit--but rather useful bullshit in the right context. That is to say, I don't believe in a soul or a mind as distinct from the body... but as a practical matter, I think it can sometimes be useful to think of them as separate.
But I also think that this artificial distinction gets at the meaning of spiritual that Hilary was getting at with her idea of sacred space. Something or somewhere is sacred because of the meaning and significance that human minds attribute to it. Whether that place is a church or mosque, a hill where something happened or a quad at a school, it gains significance from our thinking of it as significant, as special.
In any case, I want to get back to the idea of yoga as a spiritual practice as opposed to just an exercise. I was thinking about the difference this morning while in a yoga class, and one of the things that occurred to me was that yoga is perhaps the only exercise routine we do where an integral part of it is laying down and relaxing. At the end of it, after we've stretched and worked our muscles to the shaking point, what do we do in yoga? We lay down and take the opportunity to relax. Even if we do not also take the opportunity to practice meditation as well, we nonetheless have changed our minds in a very real way. Hilary gets at this in her story of her experience discovering yoga in college. You've worked your muscles and tendons, ligaments and joints in such a way that you can really--really--relax them, and that can't help but alter your mental landscape. For myself, there are few times that I feel more clear-minded than right after a good yoga practice. Refreshed, focused, ready.
I think most exercise changes the mind, because of course I don't believe that there is a mind separate from the body. The body isn't just where the mind hangs out, it's all interconnected. And thus, what affects one (which is really one part) effects the other. We all know this, don't we? What's on our mind can make us tense or relaxed, upbeat or sluggish. And the state of our body can certainly change our mental landscape.
But I'll say again that yoga is different from other physical exercise, either because of the nature of the exercises or because of the practices that have attached to it or both. Certainly, I think the range of motion, flexibility, and work we do is an important part of it, because it offers our bodies such variety and uses the body in ways very different from the ways that daily life uses us. But so, too, is an integral part of yoga the way that yoga engages our attention and draws that attention to our breathing, to tension and relaxation, to little-used muscles, to balance. And, again, there's the relaxation at the end, which both changes our mind and opens space for using it in different ways (i.e. meditation).
Is that "spiritual"? At least in some senses of the word, I should think.
She references an essay on the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the term "spiritual." While I'm not unsympathetic to what the writer is saying, and in fact largely agree, I think the question of the meaning of "spiritual" also depends on context. The context of the essay is almost exclusively the designation of how one defines one's religious beliefs, i.e. "spiritual but not religious" (which I've always, perhaps rather cynically and certainly a bit tongue in cheek, defined as "too lazy to go to church"). But what I'm getting at is a difference between "being spiritual" and "spiritual matters." To me, the latter refers to things other than physical. To some people, that would be a soul, perhaps "God," or "meaning." The idea seems to derive at least in some measure from the mind-body duality, which I believe to be bullshit--but rather useful bullshit in the right context. That is to say, I don't believe in a soul or a mind as distinct from the body... but as a practical matter, I think it can sometimes be useful to think of them as separate.
But I also think that this artificial distinction gets at the meaning of spiritual that Hilary was getting at with her idea of sacred space. Something or somewhere is sacred because of the meaning and significance that human minds attribute to it. Whether that place is a church or mosque, a hill where something happened or a quad at a school, it gains significance from our thinking of it as significant, as special.
In any case, I want to get back to the idea of yoga as a spiritual practice as opposed to just an exercise. I was thinking about the difference this morning while in a yoga class, and one of the things that occurred to me was that yoga is perhaps the only exercise routine we do where an integral part of it is laying down and relaxing. At the end of it, after we've stretched and worked our muscles to the shaking point, what do we do in yoga? We lay down and take the opportunity to relax. Even if we do not also take the opportunity to practice meditation as well, we nonetheless have changed our minds in a very real way. Hilary gets at this in her story of her experience discovering yoga in college. You've worked your muscles and tendons, ligaments and joints in such a way that you can really--really--relax them, and that can't help but alter your mental landscape. For myself, there are few times that I feel more clear-minded than right after a good yoga practice. Refreshed, focused, ready.
I think most exercise changes the mind, because of course I don't believe that there is a mind separate from the body. The body isn't just where the mind hangs out, it's all interconnected. And thus, what affects one (which is really one part) effects the other. We all know this, don't we? What's on our mind can make us tense or relaxed, upbeat or sluggish. And the state of our body can certainly change our mental landscape.
But I'll say again that yoga is different from other physical exercise, either because of the nature of the exercises or because of the practices that have attached to it or both. Certainly, I think the range of motion, flexibility, and work we do is an important part of it, because it offers our bodies such variety and uses the body in ways very different from the ways that daily life uses us. But so, too, is an integral part of yoga the way that yoga engages our attention and draws that attention to our breathing, to tension and relaxation, to little-used muscles, to balance. And, again, there's the relaxation at the end, which both changes our mind and opens space for using it in different ways (i.e. meditation).
Is that "spiritual"? At least in some senses of the word, I should think.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
What's up, Doc?
I went to see the doctor this week, largely based on the results of a health screening that my employer paid for back at the end of October. It said my cholesterol levels were high, which wasn't exactly a surprise.
When I lived in Providence, I found this out and went on medication, which I took for perhaps two years. When I moved to Pennsylvania and my prescription ran out, a combination of laziness and wishful thinking took me off the medication. It turned out to be a hassle to find a new doctor, so I didn't do it. I've been off medication for two years, I've exercised with regularity off and on, added more vegetables to my diet, and hoped for the best.
No such luck, it turns out.
So, I went to see the doctor. It wasn't quite as tedious to get a new doctor this time, since our pediatrician is also a general practitioner. He wasn't taking new patients, but since I had a family member seeing him (our baby), they fit me in. Our pediatrician--now my primary care provider--seems like a really nice guy, which is why we sometimes feel bad about lying to him all the time. You see, it's just that our infant care philosophy (attachment parenting) doesn't really fit with what he thinks we should be doing. We have the feeling that he would be appalled at how long we waited for solid foods, the fact that our daughter still sleeps in our bed with us (or even in our room with us!), but oh well. Like I said, he's a nice guy, and we don't know of a pediatrician in our area who would be more in line with what we're doing.
With that in mind, let me say that I really felt good about my appointment with him. I basically went in to reluctantly renew my relationship with cholesterol-lowering medication. I showed him the results of my blood work, we talked about my lifestyle choices. For instance, the way I work out five days a week (at least, when I work out--after Thea was born I didn't see the gym for over 5 months, then I worked out consistently for 2, and then had almost 4 more months off before I got back into a routine again (which, admittedly, lost a few weeks to the holiday break). And I've been working to eat more vegetables and less meat--I also told him about my New Year's Resolution to only eat meat that I feel good about.
As we went through this, he admitted that it if I wanted a prescription for cholesterol-lowering medication, it would be hard to argue against it, because my cholesterol levels are high. However, out of the top five risks for heart problems, I only have that one--I don't smoke, I'm not diabetic, I don't have high blood pressure, and I'm not physically inactive. Interestingly enough, he asked me what I thought my ideal weight should be. I weighed in at 200 pounds and told him that I thought probably around 180. He said that while the charts might say my weight should be even lower, that since I exercise and lift weights, 180 might be a very good weight for me, and attainable. I've heard stories of people going to their doctor and being told to lose weight, so I thought it was an interesting and positive approach to ask me what I thought. Granted, he might have come out and told me I needed to lose weight anyway if I'd said I thought I was already at a good weight, but ultimately it felt more meaningful this way. To look my doctor in the eyes and say--not be told--that I could stand to lose 20 pounds: I think it's more likely that I will do what I need to do to get there. I've already started, though the biggest step was probably planning out our family meals for the next week from the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites cookbook. We had steaks on Saturday, but we'll probably go more or less meatless over the next week (and the recipes look delicious, so I don't think we'll be suffering for the lack!).
So yeah. All things considered, it was a pretty good visit to the doctor's office.
When I lived in Providence, I found this out and went on medication, which I took for perhaps two years. When I moved to Pennsylvania and my prescription ran out, a combination of laziness and wishful thinking took me off the medication. It turned out to be a hassle to find a new doctor, so I didn't do it. I've been off medication for two years, I've exercised with regularity off and on, added more vegetables to my diet, and hoped for the best.
No such luck, it turns out.
So, I went to see the doctor. It wasn't quite as tedious to get a new doctor this time, since our pediatrician is also a general practitioner. He wasn't taking new patients, but since I had a family member seeing him (our baby), they fit me in. Our pediatrician--now my primary care provider--seems like a really nice guy, which is why we sometimes feel bad about lying to him all the time. You see, it's just that our infant care philosophy (attachment parenting) doesn't really fit with what he thinks we should be doing. We have the feeling that he would be appalled at how long we waited for solid foods, the fact that our daughter still sleeps in our bed with us (or even in our room with us!), but oh well. Like I said, he's a nice guy, and we don't know of a pediatrician in our area who would be more in line with what we're doing.
With that in mind, let me say that I really felt good about my appointment with him. I basically went in to reluctantly renew my relationship with cholesterol-lowering medication. I showed him the results of my blood work, we talked about my lifestyle choices. For instance, the way I work out five days a week (at least, when I work out--after Thea was born I didn't see the gym for over 5 months, then I worked out consistently for 2, and then had almost 4 more months off before I got back into a routine again (which, admittedly, lost a few weeks to the holiday break). And I've been working to eat more vegetables and less meat--I also told him about my New Year's Resolution to only eat meat that I feel good about.
As we went through this, he admitted that it if I wanted a prescription for cholesterol-lowering medication, it would be hard to argue against it, because my cholesterol levels are high. However, out of the top five risks for heart problems, I only have that one--I don't smoke, I'm not diabetic, I don't have high blood pressure, and I'm not physically inactive. Interestingly enough, he asked me what I thought my ideal weight should be. I weighed in at 200 pounds and told him that I thought probably around 180. He said that while the charts might say my weight should be even lower, that since I exercise and lift weights, 180 might be a very good weight for me, and attainable. I've heard stories of people going to their doctor and being told to lose weight, so I thought it was an interesting and positive approach to ask me what I thought. Granted, he might have come out and told me I needed to lose weight anyway if I'd said I thought I was already at a good weight, but ultimately it felt more meaningful this way. To look my doctor in the eyes and say--not be told--that I could stand to lose 20 pounds: I think it's more likely that I will do what I need to do to get there. I've already started, though the biggest step was probably planning out our family meals for the next week from the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites cookbook. We had steaks on Saturday, but we'll probably go more or less meatless over the next week (and the recipes look delicious, so I don't think we'll be suffering for the lack!).
So yeah. All things considered, it was a pretty good visit to the doctor's office.
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