LISTEN TO YOUR BODY

It all began with podcasts.

I'm not crazy about many technical innovations of the last 20 years.  The passion many share to impart every waking thought on TWITTER or FACEBOOK defies my understanding.  Even less comprehensible are those who follow these dispatches with the obsessiveness of meth addicts.  Today's lunch order from Arby's or your deep insight into last night's Gossip Girls are subjects best discussed in person or by phone with the very select few who share your love of the inconsequential.  Please don't proclaim them to the e-world at large like they're proverbs from Ecclesiastes..  The web has more important uses - like the self-promotion of blogs.

But podcasts are another story. My iPod is bursting with more spoken-word programming than I could listen to in a century.  And iTunes generates new batches every week like some electronic sorcerer's apprentice.  Since most podcasts are free, I am constantly adding new and increasingly arcane series into the mix.  I'm not sure how I came upon The Chopra Center offerings, but the titles of their episodes intrigued me: "Finding Balance In Your Life...," "Intention Setting," and the source for today's sermon, "Move Beyond Your Emotional Pain."

The session begins with a drawn-out Om-like tone followed by the deep, soothing voice of a narrator who makes Hal the computer from 2001 sound like Jackie Mason.

"The body is our subconscious mind containing all of our memories...Tune into your body.  See if there's an area that is calling for your attention.  Bring your awareness to this place.  Now, in your mind, ask your body what it is trying to tell you."1

Whoa.  My body is going to tell me how to overcome my emotional pain?  It's never helped me with the capital of North Dakota or the definition of "recondite," but apparently it's got the goods on my hang-ups.

Despite my skepticism, I figured I could use some help with a mental quirk or two, and talking to myself was bound to be cheaper than going to a shrink.  My attempts at intra-corporeal communication ran into problems from the start.

What is the proper protocol for addressing the parts of one's body?  It seems to me that having shared the same space for almost sixty years, we should be on a first-name basis.

"I say, my dear hamstring, what seems to be the problem?"

However, since I've never actually conversed with them before, more formality might be proper.  Maybe I should use the third person.

"Would the esteemed ascending colon be so kind as to inform me of its grievances?"

This seems courteous enough, but what happens if the respective organ, muscle, or joint doesn't understand English?  If my innards speak French, Italian, or Yiddish, I might muddle along, but anything else is dicey.  Given Dr. Chopra's fluency in these matters, perhaps my body speaks Hindi.  There's also the possibility that it uses its own languages in which case Rosetta Stone better come up with programs for Bowelish and Scapulese.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that language isn't a barrier.  Why should I believe that my various parts want to help me?  Given my disregard for their well-being over the years, I think it's likely they have more complaints about my behavior than concern for my psychological health.  Am I truly prepared to be called on the carpet by my guts?

How about this from my upper GI tract:

"You got some nerve asking me what's wrong.  'Oh, what ever could cause this distress?' you plead pitifully and expect some reassuring psychobabble in return.  Try shutting your gob once and awhile.  It's unbelievable - you stuff your face with every imaginable junk food in quantities that would stagger an elephant and need me to explain your heartburn.  That hot sauce you love so much is strong enough for spot-welding.  It's not childhood trauma, you idiot, it's gluttony."

Or this from my right rotator cuff:

"Oh, so now Mr. Big Shot wants muscles.  For sixty years, he barely lifts his butt off the couch, and now he's pumping iron like a defensive tackle in training.  You're sore?  You're old.  Try removing 10 lbs. on your fly reps, and don't hock me about your psychic pain."

What really scares me is that opening this Pandora's box won't lead to healing but provoke labor unrest instead.  Once my aggrieved viscera learn of their common suffering, they'll want to organize. I've always suspected my left ankle of unionist sympathies.  If I give him the opportunity, I bet that Commie bastard will incite my entire body to join in anti-me solidarity.  Any accusation of mistreatment - an anchovy pizza at midnight for example - could no longer be settled with antacids, but would require a visit from the NLRB.  A strike would be life-threatening, and I doubt local hospitals will let me raid their organ banks for scabs.

I have a better idea.  Let my insides do their jobs as best they can, and I won't ask them for psychotherapy.

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1 davidji, lead educator, The Chopra Center for Wellbeing.

VIRTUE

Dance around the issue all you want - the core principle of all diets is denial.  Sooner or later you're going to crave something your diet doesn't allow.  Welcome to the moral crises of the portly.

In the early stages of weight loss, these acts of abstinence become a form of Primal Therapy.  They strip away emotional armor and phony sociability faster than a six-year old opening birthday presents.  The idealistic goals of better health and longer life disappear.  Even vanity, that ever-stalwart defense, loses its sway.  The battle has moved from the war room to the trenches and it isn’t pretty.

Dieting, to paraphrase Bette Davis, is not for sissies.

Shame is now a stronger impetus than a thousand cardiac studies.  Often, when I failed early on during diets, the humiliation was so great that I kept the fact hidden for as long as possible, living a double life of outward respectability and clandestine gluttony.  This would last until my waistline ratted me out.

DELUSIONAL EATING PRINCIPLE #1:  ANY FOOD EATEN IN SECRET WILL NOT CAUSE YOU TO GAIN WEIGHT.  This is a variation of the “tree falling in the forest with no one to hear” paradox.  If no one catches you, the food has no caloric reality, but if you’re discovered, the weight goes on.  Observation is the linchpin in this digestive version of “Schrödinger’s Cat.”1

My wife, who has often confronted me with this fallacy, has an interesting myth of her own:

DELUSIONAL EATING PRINCIPLE #2:  ANY FOOD WHICH IS PROVIDED FREE OF CHARGE WILL NOT CAUSE YOU TO GAIN WEIGHT (Also known as the Supermarket Sample Syndrome.)

Anyway…

As civility disintegrates and inner demons emerge, it becomes increasingly hard to remain disciplined.  Most diets solve this problem by relieving the practitioner of choice.  Once you’ve pledged allegiance, you can shut down your higher brain functions and activate your cruise control.  Newton's first law states that a body in motion tends to stay in motion.  Having adopted a pattern of behavior, it requires minimal energy and no brains to keep going in the same direction.

To achieve this state, all directives must be followed without question, even if they seem beyond the realm of diet.  If your program says, "Wear lederhosen to work," off you go in jacket, tie, and leather shorts.

Personally, I’d rather not sacrifice my free will.  According to Sartre, we are all ultimately responsible for our choices anyway, and he was one trim Existentialist.

Besides embarrassment, there is another powerful incentive for staying the course, self-righteousness. Overcoming the siren call of your stomach even for an hour entitles you to instant sainthood, and the longer you maintain your diet, the more virtuous you become.  Pretty soon, piety is just leaking out your ears, and compared to your ascetic sensibilities, Gandhi was a bon vivant.  If you have to give up chili dogs, the theory goes, you might as well be smug about it.

There is, however, a drawback to consider while polishing your halo.  You’ve transformed eating from a biological need wrapped in ritual pleasure into an indicator of moral rectitude.  Straying from your program now has consequences more grave than a few extra pounds and the derision of your neighbors.  Having once dazzled the world with your self-control and having condemned lesser souls for their lack thereof, it's a long humiliating trip back to fallibility.  You've shown yourself weak, unworthy, no longer fit to dwell in civilized society.  Try bouncing back from that in a couple of days.

Once you embrace the “weight equals virtue” principle, people are only too happy to hold you to that standard.  No longer will you be judged simply as healthy or unhealthy, attractive or ungainly.  Your size is now a benchmark of good and evil.  The world may have made some limited progress in its tolerance of physical diversity, but it remains medieval about moral and ideological transgression.  Is your dietary hubris strong enough for this kind of scrutiny?  Remember The Crusades?  The Inquisition?  The Cultural Revolution?  Look how well they turned out.

More is at stake than your waistline when you travel the path to sveltehood.  Your confidence, mood, identity, even your standing in the community may become hostage to the continual shedding of pounds.  The more successful you are and the more noticeable the improvement, the higher the stakes become and the greater your insecurity and dependence on the process for reinforcement.  Break this cycle at your peril.  For if you fail, it's not a misdemeanor but a fall from grace.

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1 Thought experiment of physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) in which the fate of a cat is determined by the observation of an atom’s state of excitation.

EXERCISE

Unless you've been in a coma for the last fifty years, you've been subjected to some discussion of the value of exercise in dieting.  Almost all the experts agree that it's a good idea -  unlike other issues surrounding weight loss which are disputed constantly, lengthily, and with the acrimony normally reserved for ethnic conflicts in the Balkans.  Occasionally, entire forests are clear-cut in order to publish the papers of dueling nutritionists.  In November of 2007, the media ballyhooed two seemingly contradictory studies claiming that being overweight was either a risk factor for, or protection against certain forms of cancer1.  Consensus is rare and discord the norm.

But there are apparently no diets for layabouts and idlers, or more specifically, diets that suggest they remain layabouts and idlers.  I’ve yet to find a program that didn’t advise or even demand an exercise regimen as part of its system.  And just as it was necessary to find the right motivation to diet, it is equally important to find the right impetus to exercise.

Dieting only requires that you don’t do certain things - in theory, you can diet while sitting on your couch watching TV - but exercise requires you to get off your ass and actually do something.  This seems an obvious point until you try it and realize just how unpleasant that can be.  Having worked out once, it’s hard to justify doing it again.

Many of the psychological hurdles surrounding fitness are exacerbated by having to expose your lack thereof in public.  For those of us who drag around the baggage of unathletic youths like Jacob Marley’s chains, it is doubly hard to dwell openly in the land of the buff.  To do so in shorts and t-shirt borders on the masochistic. 

There is a degree of paranoia here.  I suspect that among the fit, we flawed mortals are more often ignored than derided.  I know that as we get older, we become increasingly transparent to younger generations until in late middle age, we achieve total invisibility in a feat that would astound H. G. Wells.  You might think there would be some solace in this phenomenon, yet paradoxically, it too is a problem.  We may not want our failings on open display or to have others judge us by them, but we certainly don’t want our efforts toward betterment to go unobserved.  If we’re going to risk humiliation in order to pant and wheeze our way to better health, then, damn it, the world better notice!

If dieting at its core is a system of abstinence, exercise, minus the trappings, is physical drudgery. I like the feeling after a work out, when all those endorphins and encephalins are swimming around my brain, but I struggle to make the process itself tolerable much less pleasurable.  It’s no coincidence that invention of the walkman occurred during the exercise boom of the seventies and eighties; people were desperate for distraction from their aching muscles and labored breathing.  Ultimately, exercise is another burden in life whose benefits I appreciate after the fact, like getting a flu shot or reading Henry James.

Those benefits, however, are too well documented to be ignored, especially by the inertia-prone.  It would be comforting to think that health concerns alone would be sufficient motivation, but sadly, this is rare.  In all other aspects of human endeavor, one should prize thoughtfulness and reserve, but when it comes to exercise, it’s permissible, even desirable to be as shallow as a stool pigeon's grave.

 In other words, embrace the trappings and brag freely about your efforts.  The clothing, the shoes, the books and magazines, the endless prattle about technique, the obsessive recording and trumpeting of minuscule improvements in time, distance or endurance - these are the rewards.  If working out also prevents a massive coronary, well, that's nice too.

I walk for exercise.  I also walk to buy lottery tickets at the local convenience store.  Therein lies my dilemma.

The virtues of walking are extolled by most every health and fitness guru; it can provide a good aerobic workout with minimal stress to bones, joints, and muscles, it doesn't require expensive equipment, and it is safe for those even woefully out of condition.  There are no complicated skills to be learned; you don't need pricey lessons from overbearing pros.  Walking is sensible…and that's the problem.

Using the superficial frame of reference, it's easy to see the limitations of walking.  How much cachet can there be in a skill mastered by one's first birthday and practiced by many into their nineties and beyond?  What arrogance can be derived from knowing that walking is not only exercise, but the planet's oldest and most widely utilized form of transportation.  Who wants to think that their strenuous aerobic workout could be mistaken for an errand?

Walking is deficient in all matters valued by the fitness dilettante, but most notably in equipment and clothing.  Bicyclists wear helmets and logo-covered jerseys.  Rollerbladers need knee and elbow pads.  Runners and joggers can choose from entire designer wardrobes made from the latest high-tech materials.  Basketball players use footwear more complicated than the space shuttle, larger too.  And walkers?

Sneakers, sweatpants, and optionally, radio headphones tuned to NPR.  The major athletic suppliers do market walking shoes, but they mostly resemble the orthopedic oxfords your school nurse wore in the '50s.  For a man with my frivolous criteria, could there be a bigger curse?

There are more vigorous modes of the "sport;" power walking, race walking, and the burgeoning fad of pole walking.  While the gear for these mutations is significantly more stylish, the overall presentation leaves much to be desired.  The power walker, with forceful stride, pumping arms, and determined glare, suggests nothing more than a demented drum major, while the race walker more closely resembles someone desperate to find a bathroom.  As for pole walkers, they seem like delusional or perhaps just scatterbrained cross-country skiers who forget they needed skis and snow.  These forms may be more strenuous, but they're infinitely dorkier.

There is also hiking, walking’s backcountry cousin.  You can pretty much get away with anything in hiking - Compass, maps, GPS, crampons, snowshoes, goose down, Gore-tex®, just the coolest gear your can think of.  Dress up like Edmund Hillary, and no one will even blink.  Hiking also provides the distraction of mind-blowing scenery.  This is a wonderful alternative assuming you live in Colorado or Switzerland.  If you live in Boston or New York, it’s not an option unless you’re Bill Gates and can jet off to the Alps for thirty minutes a day.

The practical and low-key nature of walking doesn’t seem to bother women as much as men whose vanity about things physical is staggering.  If walking is ever to appeal to them in a major way, radical changes must be made in the marketing.

There definitely needs to be more gadgetry including multi-function watches that measure everything from blood pressure to the ambient temperature on Mars.  Aerodynamic sunglasses are also a must too since the effects of wind resistance are fierce when you’re moving at 4 MPH.  Cutting edge, graphics-heavy magazines abound for surfers and skateboarders – why not walkers?  The last attempt at a periodical was Walking, a lame effort nearly devoid of men.  The cover models were attractive, fit, non-threatening women in their thirties and forties who exemplified the wholesome nature of the sport.  Those few of my gender interspersed between articles on menopause and skin care were born-again health types who were very in touch with their emotional side.  It should have been called Neutered Monthly.

Less emphasis should be placed on aerobic efficiency, and more on attitude.  What's missing is a dark side, a dangerous side.  Not a really dangerous side, mind you, just the aura.  There should be T-shirts with flaming skulls that say "AMBLIN' MAN" and "BORN TO STROLL."  Instead of cheery, supportive walking groups, we should form tough-looking gangs with names like, THE JOHNNIE WALKERS, THE HOT FEET, and STEPS OUTTA LINE.  Essentially, we're looking for the kind of threatening image which makes adoring women murmur, "Wow! Look at that guy walk!"

I firmly believe in the health value of walking, but I also believe there is a huge financial incentive for athletic companies to reorient this bland form of exercise to better reflect and inflate the vacuous male ego.  In short, let's make walking less pedestrian

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1 World Cancer Research Fund / American Institute for Cancer Research,   “Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective.” Washington DC: AICR, 2007 and     “Cause-Specific Excess Deaths Associated With Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity,” Katherine M. Flegal, PhD;  Barry I. Graubard, PhD;  David F. Williamson, PhD;  Mitchell H. Gail, MD, PhD, JAMA. 2007;298(17):2028-2037.

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

We interrupt this blog to bring you a special message of parental pride.

Congratulations, Lexi.  

Love,

Dad

BEGINNINGS

Having found the motivation to diet, one would think that the next logical step is to start dieting.  One would be delusional.

It is a rare person who walks out of the Doctor’s office and onto a weight-loss program.  For most of us, the transition requires weeks of research followed by a cabinet-level decision-making process, and then a series of arcane rituals more elaborate than the coronation of a British Monarch.

While several of these stages are regarded as mere delaying tactics, the first part of the process is unavoidable – you have to figure out what diet to use.  For the neophyte, this is a process based on practical considerations.  He will look through the available literature, discuss the options with his doctor and family, and make a choice.  Most of us look back at this stage with fond if distant memories.

For the cynical, hard-bitten loser, the existential angst generated by this decision would put Hamlet to shame.  In fact, it’s too bad the whole concept of dieting wasn’t bigger in Elizabethan England – it would have made a great Shakespearean tragedy.

“Whether ‘tis nobler to suffer the base deprivations of Ornish, or to follow Atkins and fore’er forsake carbs…carbs, aye there’s the rub.”

Variety may be the spice of life, but it’s the death of dietary momentum. 

First, you consider all the methods you’ve tried before.  This is an eerily similar process to revisiting past romances.  It’s impossible to look back in total honesty, since the facts have faded with time and memories are distorted by bitterness and regret.  You are confronted by feelings and failings you would just as soon leave buried.  It didn’t work out and yet…

Was it “her” or “me?”  That is, was the ultimate failure due to some inherent weakness in the plan or some inherent weakness in you?  During one diet, you gave up when only a few pounds from your goal and binged your way back quickly.  It sounds like you were the cad, but maybe the system led to unreal expectations. Another time, you lost the weight easily, kept it off for a while but regained it over time.  Perhaps the relationship became too confining or you were commitment-phobic.  The spark was there for a while though; maybe you could rekindle the passion.

In general, I’ve found it’s wiser to start fresh with a new partner.  The less emotional baggage you drag along with your physical baggage, the better.

But at least we have some personal basis for judgment with the routines that have failed us; finding a new diet is often a trek through the jungle armed with a butter knife.  Unless you hold a degree in nutrition, it’s often hard to tell the real from the bunk, the sincere and informed practitioners from the hucksters and charlatans.  For those of us easily blinded by technical and academic patinas, a string of degrees, a bunch of incomprehensible charts and graphs, and a blizzard of footnotes will catch our eye.  For others, a glitzy cover and celebrity endorsement are the lures.  And although we are loath to admit it, we are all susceptible to the promise of quick results with minimal effort and discomfort.

As an example of the sheer weirdness that confronts the potential dieter, let us examine one of the more interesting hooks of recent years; the appeal to the eating habits of our prehistoric forebears, Og and Jane Doe.

"From that time [700,000 years ago] until the beginnings of agriculture (about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago), man lived on a diet composed predominantly of meat of one sort or another...The fossil remains tell us that in preagricultural times, human health was excellent.  People were lean, tall...[and had] little evidence of disease.

Pp. 16-17, Protein Power, Michael R. Eades, M.D. and Mary Dan Eades, M.D.

"Paleolithic people were fit, slender, and active, and free from heart disease, cancer, and many other modern diseases.  Our ancestors were genetically programmed to live on the lean meats...and so are you."

Front cover, The Paleo Diet, Loren Cordain

Let us begin with some minor quibbles.  Exactly how many fossil folks are these conclusions based on?  Ten?  A hundred?  A thousand?  That's a pretty small sample for such weeping generalizations.  Isn't it possible that these specific specimens were found precisely because they were the healthiest and most active among their peers?  How do we know that the majority of cave people didn't die in anonymity because, instead of hunting and gathering, they spent their days eating Paleo-doodles® and leering at racy cave drawings?  And for those lucky enough to have their bones unearthed, why is it assumed that diet was the main factor in keeping them healthy?  Maybe it was the countless hours engaged in their favorite sport, “Run like hell for your life!”

More to the point, why would anyone in his or her right mind make any decision based on how those brainless oafs behaved? TV cartoons notwithstanding, we're not exactly talking about Nobel laureates and Oxford Dons.  These are creatures for whom cleanliness was an unknown and unimagined luxury.  What they ate was pretty much what they found, and I mean lying dead on the ground, not stacked on the shelves of the Olduvai Gorge Piggly Wiggly.  In the absence of the Emeril Legasse, cooking was at best rudimentary, depending on the intermittent availability of fire.  Let us also remember there was no FDA back then; they ate…well, more than food with their food.  Do you really want to use these dunderheads as nutritional role models?

I can’t imagine that “diet” as such had any meaning for them whatsoever.  They lived in an age prior to Elle and GQ, and thus were too ignorant to realize that plague-like emaciation was a "look" to be painstakingly achieved rather than merely a harbinger of hideous death.

We live in odd times indeed when Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California and Madonna is a spokeswoman for Jewish mysticism.  Now I’m supposed to delegate my health decisions to Fred Flintstone.

I seem to have digressed.  Sorry.

For the sake of argument and brevity, let's say that for whatever reasons and criteria we hold dear, we have decided on a diet.  We have the motivation and the plan, so it's time to begin, yes?  No.

For myself and I suspect numerous others, it isn’t enough to simply throw away the cookies and start following the righteous path.  Throughout history, humans have marked all the major and minor milestones of life with ritual and ceremony, and I see no reason why a diet should be any different.

Alas, I have yet to find a culture with a “Start Your Diet” festival or holiday.  In the Western tradition, we have Passover and Lent, but the forbidden foods associated with these times are not proscribed for the purpose of slimming down. There is our pathetic New Years Day when well-meaning but hungover penitents make resolutions of abstinence that are abandoned by halftime of the Rose Bowl, but this day lacks the solemnity and pomposity to be an effective touchstone.  You are therefore free to determine a start date in consultation with any lunatic superstition you wish short of the Delphi Oracle which closed down a few years back. Since there is no shortage of these, you may end up choosing the first day of the week, the first day of the calendar month, the first day of the Summarian month, Columbus Day, Guy Fawkes Day, Tet, Halloween, or Herbert Hoover’s birthday.

The rites observed on “Start Your Diet” day vary from person to person.  I prefer something on the order of the May Day celebrations in the old Soviet Union but without the Politburo and ICBM’s on parade.  There is, however, one ceremony that seems common to all – “The Last Supper.”

On the eve of your start date, an elaborate feast is eaten consisting primarily of those foods that will be verboten during your diet.  These over-abundant meals, tending toward the fatty and the fried, the rich and the sweet, typically result in world-class nausea and heartburn strong enough for spot welding.  The “Last Supper” is less a celebratory repast than a mini-morality play, which allows the penitential dieter to begin his odyssey in the proper frame of mind and stomach.

One problem with this ritual is the near impossibility of satisfying every craving in a single meal.  As a result, “Last Suppers” often evolve into “Farewell Tours” involving month-long treks to every beloved pizza joint, hot dog stand, clam shack, and barbecue pit along the Eastern Seaboard.  It is wise to factor this into your schedule.

Finally, on the appointed day at the appointed hour, with the stars and our fridge in proper alignment, we can begin.