I've mentioned a pretty dramatic shift in the way that I eat, and now the time is right to go into all the explaining of that. But first... I thought I'd open with a fun little video that will make my life a little easier.
A lot of the concepts in there aren't new-- I've mentioned them here before, but now we'll get a little (wait for the caveman humor...) meat on the bones of the topic.
The Paleo diet-- I often like to start describing this as what I don't eat and then building it back up from there. SO... my list of Don't Eats:
- Dairy
- Grains
- Legumes
- Processed Foods
It's a short list, right? But that short list includes a lot of the typical American fare, so I'll break it out a little more. I don't eat bread, pasta, milk, yogurt, cereals, tofu, peanuts and beans. I don't eat things that start or end life in a box.
If you've known me over the past 20-something years you will recognize how very fundamental that shift is for me. When I took this challenge on in November, I did so knowing that my eating stood to be a lot healthier. In August I made the first fundamental shift in that-- I gave up being a vegetarian-- something I had been for most of my adult life. In November I took up the remainder of that shift-- away from all the grains and dairy I had lived on for most of my life. I was one of those vegetarians that described myself as a "dairy-tarian" or a "grain-atarian." I wasn't too big on green things much less things with mothers and faces. So this was a very big shift for me-- I was literally giving up everything I had spent 35 years eating.
Now what is in the Paleo diet.
- Naturally produced meat (grass fed cows, pastured chickens, wild-caught fish)
- Vegetables
- Fruit
- Nuts
- Fat (yep... it's not a bad word when its the right kind of fat.)
I've talked evolution before, and the video certainly spoke to it, but these are the kinds of things our bodies evolved to eat-- provided we, to put it in the words of Joel Salatin, "respect and honor the pigness of the pig" or any other living thing we take into our bodies. The meat I buy at the local supermarket bears no resemblance to the meat we all evolved to eat and as a result the nutritional content of that meat is radically different. When you hear the "dangers of eating red meat" it is most often tied to the effects of the production of our meat. By respecting and honoring the cowness of the cow and eating grassfed beef, those dangers seem to disappear. The same holds true for chicken and fish. If the chicken can live its life like it evolved to live it, it will grow up healthy and therefore make the people who evolved to eat it healthy. We'll talk more on this topic later-- remember, rabbit hole. We'll also talk more about fat, but in the meantime, let's talk about how this shift went and why I went this way.
For starters, I don't do anything without reading and learning alot. Before I took on the idea of the paleo shift, I had a lot of questions that needed answering. My biggest concern, as a woman in her 30s, was around removing dairy and whether I would be affecting my calcium stores at a time when I needed it most. And I was also concerned that there may be other vitamins I was going to be losing as well-- what would this mean to my overall well being? So I started to read.
If you look at the statistics for Osteoporosis, you'll see something kind of interesting. North America and Europe have the highest rates of osteoporosis in the world, with North America running right in there. When you look at consumption of dairy on a global scale you notice something similar-- Europe and North America account for the highest amounts of dairy consumption. Doesn't it seem strange that the people eating the most dairy are the ones that have the worst osteoporosis?!
As it turns out the typical western diet is highly acidic with all those grains going on. As a result, during digestion, the kidneys are recruited to help balance the acid/alkaline levels (remember that homeostasis thing I talked about). Calcium salt in the body is one of the best alkaline sources there are, so as the body acidifies, that calcium is recruited to restore the balance. Which basically means that even though we are taking in copious amounts of calcium, it's being used for other things than making bones stronger. Sure calcium does that but only when it's not being used first. Milk itself is ever-so-slightly acidic. If you think of 7.0 as acid/alkaline neutral and anything below 7 is acidic and above 7 is alkaline, milk is a 6.7, which is likely helped by the calcium content of it. But when the rest of the diet is highly acidic that calcium is always being used. The chief sources of alkaline are... vegetables! So the more vegetables you eat, the more alkaline your blood. The more alkaline your blood, the more your body can store additional alkaline agents like calcium and therefore the stronger your bones will get. But the typical western diet is so highly acidic that it actually leaches the calcium from your bones themselves and makes westerners among the most prone to osteoporosis.
And what about fiber? The supermarket shelves are loaded with grain-based products promoting themselves as "high fiber" like Fiber One cereal, breads, etc. And with the recent push for whole grains, everyone is eating whole wheat everything... whole wheat pasta to whole wheat pizza dough-- it is everywhere. So it turns out there are 2 kinds of fiber-- soluble and insoluble. Soluble fibers can break down, mix with water and help lower that bad LDL cholesterol that I told you a few days ago builds up in your arteries in case you spring a leak and keep your heart warm through the cold months of fall, winter and spring. Insoluble fibers, on the other hand, cannot be broken down, and provide bulk, but pass through the digestive system largely unprocessed. These are the things you eat to feel full, but because your body cannot break them down, they cannot pull nutrients out of them. Soluble fibers are found in things like vegetables, citrus fruits, oat and rye, strawberries, beans and peas, and apple pulp. Insoluble fiber is found in things like whole-wheat breads, wheat cereals, wheat bran, cabbage, beets, carrots, brussels sprouts, turnips, cauliflower, and apple skin. So while you are correct in the observation that both grains and vegetables cross those lines, adding in the acidification aspect makes things a little more clear. I can eat insoluble vegetables without upping my blood acidity-- I can get the calories and the bulk without the negative consequence. But I can't eat the grains and beans that are soluble without making my blood more acid. As a result, The veggies and fruits come out on top for fiber and the grains aren't giving me a net positive (yes, oats may help with the LDL cholesterol, but they offset the alkalinity).
I went into my Paleo shift in early November after requesting my doctor do a full blood panel on me. We recorded my cholesterol levels, my calcium levels, my triglycerides... all of that. My goal was a month or two of paleo, because it seemed awfully restrictive at first glance, and then we'd look at my blood results again and see how things shook out. My first week, I will confess, was awful. My first 3 days I felt openly hostile and the following few days I felt insatiable-- I wanted to eat everything around. Eventually things began to quiet and I got used to how to eat-- including how to eat without cooking all the time. It was definitely a lifestyle change for me-- I needed to figure out paleo convenience, which becomes a little more challenging. I'll get into more of that later, but eventually something unsual happened. I felt awesome. I felt better than I had ever felt before. And I stopped resisting the diet and feeling like I was being deprived and no longer craved grains and dairy. And then came Thanksgiving.
It's hard to hold Paleo over Thanksgiving, and truth be told, I gave myself the day as a cheat day with no cause for concern. The next 3 days, however, I felt awful-- I felt weak and heavy and bloated and just kinda bummed out. I don't think I ever appreciated the food-mood connection until post Thanksgiving. And since then I have not looked back. As for the blood work, I decided to wait until the one year mark to see how it all shakes out. In general, I live by the 80-20 rule and every now and again don't say no to a big piece of chocolate cake, but I gotta say, I've given myself a few outs that just lacked appeal when it all came down to it. I remember one night in particular when I was too tired to make dinner and gave myself permission to have some pizza. I really thought this would excite me, but it just didn't. And in the end, I went home and quickly cooked up a salmon filet and made a salad and was quite happy and content with myself. It was a day I never expected to see.
I am entering into my 7th month of this diet now, and I have to tell you, I will be eating this way for the rest of my life-- no question about it. I feel energized all the time. And dare I say it, I feel happier. I've gone from vegetarian to cave-dweller-- my diet could not be more night and day from where it was a year ago. It has given me lots of interesting thoughts on the topic of vegetarianism that I will share with you another day. I believe my diet has largely accounted for the dramatic shift in body composition I blogged about recently. I look and feel a lot better and for the first time in my life, I am developing muscles, which is not easy for a relative ectomorph. In a couple more months we will see what the blood work shows once and for all, but back to the very question that opened this chapter 2 blog... Am I Healthy?? The answer comes back a lot more firmly in the yes category with this new shift in eating.
Read more!
Showing posts with label Health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health. Show all posts
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Sleeping, Hormones and More of that Evolution Thingy
So my last entry introduced some of my thoughts on evolutionary eating. I have a lot more on that topic and promise to introduce more details, but I wanted to also dive in to the second prong of that change and it was around sleep.
When I was a kid, I had a nice early bedtime that I hated. In general, we'd go to bed around 8pm during the school year, and many nights I'd turn on my radio and hope for the luck of tuning in some radio station from Quebec so I could listen to French talk radio. If I couldn't tune that in, my fall back was always the Doctor Demento show that played every night on a local station outside Boston. I'd lie in the dark of my room and fall asleep to the radio I kept quiet enough that my parents never knew I was staying up late-- but it never worked, I'd always fall asleep anyway.
As an adult, sleep started to transition almost to a luxury-- I'd sleep when I could (and relish in it), but it could be traded for extra hours to get work done, hang out with friends, clean the house, or just plain stress out about daytime hours. Right around the point where I was getting ready to run the Boston Marathon I was at one of my most sleep deprived states in my 35 years. Work was crazy and most weekday nights my team was working until 1am and back at our desks at 7am. In the downtime, I'd try to untangle my brain but more and more often I had this sense of panic that bordered on paranoia. The sleep exhaustion was taking a toll on me I didn't know how to explain. Now I do.
Human bodies exist in a state of balance or an equilibrium we call "homeostasis." Our bodies, whether we are aware of it or not, are constantly playing this regulating game to keep us in this state of equilibrium. That game involves lots of hormones and biochemicals inside the body that respond to changes in environment. Probably the most familiar pair of these regulators are insulin and glucagon that regulate blood glucose. When blood has too much glucose floating around the hormone insulin springs into action and starts storing the excess glucose. When blood has too little glucose, the glucagon visits those same storage sites and pulls some glucose back out and puts it back into the blood. So these two hormones work in conjunction with each other to keep blood sugar in homeostasis. Follow? Cool.
Turns out there are a bunch of these hormone (or biochemical) pairs, that regulate a bunch of functions in similar ways. The ones that I started to really poke at were serotonin and melatonin. The reason I started really coming back to this one was an observation I had made-- the more tired I was, the more depressed and paranoid, right? Already told you that... not news. But the observation was that if these two hormones were in a homeostatic pair, maybe there was something to that biochemically-- I mean, the defacto treatment for depression and paranoia these days are called "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)" that include brands like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft. So if the drug companies were treating depression and paranoia by futzing with the balancing pair to the sleep hormone melatonin (and the natural supplement all the tired folks are buying at the local drugstore), maybe this really was something real. I dug deeper (remember we are in a rabbit hole).
What the heck is serotonin anyway, and why are people inhibiting its reuptake. Um, and what about the initial uptake-- why are we doing it a second time?! My head was swimming, so let's start from the top.
Serotonin comes from the gastrointestinal tract and its main role is to control things like appetite, mood and anger. But serotonin also plays a role in managing memory, aggression, sexual behavior, cardiovascular activity, respiratory activity, motor output, sensory and neuroendocrine function and perception.
Melatonin, on the other hand, is synthesized in the pineal gland of the brain and its job is to regulate the body's circadian rhythm, as well as do a few other fancy things like protect mitochondrial DNA. The protection mechanism of melatonin is often referred to as a "powerful antioxidant" when you try to buy it at the drugstore. (Antioxidants are what protect us against those "free radicals" that apparently come into our bodies and cause mutations. So protecting cellular DNA is good stuff.)
So now you are wondering the obvious-- what makes these two things related? What homeostatic balancing act goes on between these two things-- they seem so totally different from each other. The link is that serotonin eventually gets converted into melatonin. Both serotonin and melatonin (along with all the other hormones in the body) work with their respective "receptors." The receptor binds to the hormone and allows it to be expressed. In the example I talked about SSRIs, drugs like Paxil are introduced to prevent the serotonin from being bound to their receptors and therefore expressed. In essence, this leaves someone taking an SSRI awash in excess serotonin that is never able to be expressed.
There are a few reactions your body has to a high serotonin level-- most notably is an increase in cortisol and adrenaline. These two hormones are the basis of the "fight or flight" instinct. The more serotonin floats around, the higher your fight or flight chemicals. The way to prevent this reaction is to allow for the expression of serotonin that eventually leads to conversion to melatonin and allows for the expression of that circadian rhythm and sleep. An interesting side note here-- unmedicated depressed people often talk about wanting to sleep-- this is a side-effect of this very process-- the serotonin present in that mood-state is looking for conversion to melatonin via its receptors. In turn this conversion to melatonin and therefore natural sleep lessens the serotonin and makes the person, literally, happier.
So here I am prepping for the Boston Marathon. I am exhausted, literally. Which leaves me with a lot more serotonin than my body can convert. See, it takes about 2 hours of darkness before the body can start to produce melatonin, so when I was getting around 4-5 hours of sleep, I was really only getting some 2-3 hours of serotonin to melatonin conversion. By hanging out at my desk at the soft glow of my laptop, I was preventing that process from starting. Which in turn was allowing my serotonin to elevate over time, which was kicking on my cortisol and adrenaline responses and I was getting agitated and paranoid and depressed. Throw in the long runs on the weekend which naturally produce a stress-response of cortisol and adrenaline and things were looking kind of messy.
I needed to sleep.
Fast forward to now. I've been playing around lately with timing sleep. If you think about it, it really wasn't until recently that society as a whole stopped living life by the rise and fall of the sun. In essence, even if we wanted to, we couldn't affect that serotonin-melatonin game all that much-- it got dark at night whether we chose to give into it or not. We could sit by a candle or a camp fire, but we weren't able to bring day into night like we can today. At night, when the sun went down, that conversion just sort of happened and like it or not we all got sleepy and crashed and the next morning when the sun came up our serotonin was low, our cortisol was low, our adrenaline was low and we were ready for a new day.
Now I am totally simplifying all of this. I am calling this an introduction, because this stuff actually ties into the whole insulin-glucagon homeostasis game too, but we'll get there over time, I promise. The point of this post is to introduce the whole idea that evolutionarily we have a nightly reset switch-- when it gets dark, your body naturally wants to start that conversion process. It's why 8 year old me lying in the dark listening to Doctor Demento hoping my parents didn't realize I was still awake never stayed awake very long-- the darkness kicked all this stuff off and eventually I went to sleep. When I grew up, since I didn't just hang out all sneakily in the dark anymore and could keep the lights on, the sleep never came and the paranoia, anger, sadness, stress, what-have-you mounted. By re-establishing that lights-out when it got dark, I got, biochemically, happier and less stressed. Sure I was feeling more rested, but it wasn't about feeling rested, it was about that reset switch that my body had evolved to use finally being thrown. And yes, I still sneak my radio (or my ipod) into bed with me and listen a little while the whole darkness thing kicks off. One day maybe Doctor Demento will start streaming audio or podcasting or something so I can listen again and drift off to sleep singing songs about frontal lobotomies.
Read more!
When I was a kid, I had a nice early bedtime that I hated. In general, we'd go to bed around 8pm during the school year, and many nights I'd turn on my radio and hope for the luck of tuning in some radio station from Quebec so I could listen to French talk radio. If I couldn't tune that in, my fall back was always the Doctor Demento show that played every night on a local station outside Boston. I'd lie in the dark of my room and fall asleep to the radio I kept quiet enough that my parents never knew I was staying up late-- but it never worked, I'd always fall asleep anyway.
As an adult, sleep started to transition almost to a luxury-- I'd sleep when I could (and relish in it), but it could be traded for extra hours to get work done, hang out with friends, clean the house, or just plain stress out about daytime hours. Right around the point where I was getting ready to run the Boston Marathon I was at one of my most sleep deprived states in my 35 years. Work was crazy and most weekday nights my team was working until 1am and back at our desks at 7am. In the downtime, I'd try to untangle my brain but more and more often I had this sense of panic that bordered on paranoia. The sleep exhaustion was taking a toll on me I didn't know how to explain. Now I do.
Human bodies exist in a state of balance or an equilibrium we call "homeostasis." Our bodies, whether we are aware of it or not, are constantly playing this regulating game to keep us in this state of equilibrium. That game involves lots of hormones and biochemicals inside the body that respond to changes in environment. Probably the most familiar pair of these regulators are insulin and glucagon that regulate blood glucose. When blood has too much glucose floating around the hormone insulin springs into action and starts storing the excess glucose. When blood has too little glucose, the glucagon visits those same storage sites and pulls some glucose back out and puts it back into the blood. So these two hormones work in conjunction with each other to keep blood sugar in homeostasis. Follow? Cool.
Turns out there are a bunch of these hormone (or biochemical) pairs, that regulate a bunch of functions in similar ways. The ones that I started to really poke at were serotonin and melatonin. The reason I started really coming back to this one was an observation I had made-- the more tired I was, the more depressed and paranoid, right? Already told you that... not news. But the observation was that if these two hormones were in a homeostatic pair, maybe there was something to that biochemically-- I mean, the defacto treatment for depression and paranoia these days are called "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)" that include brands like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft. So if the drug companies were treating depression and paranoia by futzing with the balancing pair to the sleep hormone melatonin (and the natural supplement all the tired folks are buying at the local drugstore), maybe this really was something real. I dug deeper (remember we are in a rabbit hole).
What the heck is serotonin anyway, and why are people inhibiting its reuptake. Um, and what about the initial uptake-- why are we doing it a second time?! My head was swimming, so let's start from the top.
Serotonin comes from the gastrointestinal tract and its main role is to control things like appetite, mood and anger. But serotonin also plays a role in managing memory, aggression, sexual behavior, cardiovascular activity, respiratory activity, motor output, sensory and neuroendocrine function and perception.
Melatonin, on the other hand, is synthesized in the pineal gland of the brain and its job is to regulate the body's circadian rhythm, as well as do a few other fancy things like protect mitochondrial DNA. The protection mechanism of melatonin is often referred to as a "powerful antioxidant" when you try to buy it at the drugstore. (Antioxidants are what protect us against those "free radicals" that apparently come into our bodies and cause mutations. So protecting cellular DNA is good stuff.)
So now you are wondering the obvious-- what makes these two things related? What homeostatic balancing act goes on between these two things-- they seem so totally different from each other. The link is that serotonin eventually gets converted into melatonin. Both serotonin and melatonin (along with all the other hormones in the body) work with their respective "receptors." The receptor binds to the hormone and allows it to be expressed. In the example I talked about SSRIs, drugs like Paxil are introduced to prevent the serotonin from being bound to their receptors and therefore expressed. In essence, this leaves someone taking an SSRI awash in excess serotonin that is never able to be expressed.
There are a few reactions your body has to a high serotonin level-- most notably is an increase in cortisol and adrenaline. These two hormones are the basis of the "fight or flight" instinct. The more serotonin floats around, the higher your fight or flight chemicals. The way to prevent this reaction is to allow for the expression of serotonin that eventually leads to conversion to melatonin and allows for the expression of that circadian rhythm and sleep. An interesting side note here-- unmedicated depressed people often talk about wanting to sleep-- this is a side-effect of this very process-- the serotonin present in that mood-state is looking for conversion to melatonin via its receptors. In turn this conversion to melatonin and therefore natural sleep lessens the serotonin and makes the person, literally, happier.
So here I am prepping for the Boston Marathon. I am exhausted, literally. Which leaves me with a lot more serotonin than my body can convert. See, it takes about 2 hours of darkness before the body can start to produce melatonin, so when I was getting around 4-5 hours of sleep, I was really only getting some 2-3 hours of serotonin to melatonin conversion. By hanging out at my desk at the soft glow of my laptop, I was preventing that process from starting. Which in turn was allowing my serotonin to elevate over time, which was kicking on my cortisol and adrenaline responses and I was getting agitated and paranoid and depressed. Throw in the long runs on the weekend which naturally produce a stress-response of cortisol and adrenaline and things were looking kind of messy.
I needed to sleep.
Fast forward to now. I've been playing around lately with timing sleep. If you think about it, it really wasn't until recently that society as a whole stopped living life by the rise and fall of the sun. In essence, even if we wanted to, we couldn't affect that serotonin-melatonin game all that much-- it got dark at night whether we chose to give into it or not. We could sit by a candle or a camp fire, but we weren't able to bring day into night like we can today. At night, when the sun went down, that conversion just sort of happened and like it or not we all got sleepy and crashed and the next morning when the sun came up our serotonin was low, our cortisol was low, our adrenaline was low and we were ready for a new day.
Now I am totally simplifying all of this. I am calling this an introduction, because this stuff actually ties into the whole insulin-glucagon homeostasis game too, but we'll get there over time, I promise. The point of this post is to introduce the whole idea that evolutionarily we have a nightly reset switch-- when it gets dark, your body naturally wants to start that conversion process. It's why 8 year old me lying in the dark listening to Doctor Demento hoping my parents didn't realize I was still awake never stayed awake very long-- the darkness kicked all this stuff off and eventually I went to sleep. When I grew up, since I didn't just hang out all sneakily in the dark anymore and could keep the lights on, the sleep never came and the paranoia, anger, sadness, stress, what-have-you mounted. By re-establishing that lights-out when it got dark, I got, biochemically, happier and less stressed. Sure I was feeling more rested, but it wasn't about feeling rested, it was about that reset switch that my body had evolved to use finally being thrown. And yes, I still sneak my radio (or my ipod) into bed with me and listen a little while the whole darkness thing kicks off. One day maybe Doctor Demento will start streaming audio or podcasting or something so I can listen again and drift off to sleep singing songs about frontal lobotomies.
Read more!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
A History Primer of Food and Survival
Cause its a right good place to start. And the journey is kinda long and wonky and crazy-- it will take me a few days to get this one through.
So I left you with this weird kind of epiphany that I was the obese size 4 person. I was small but I was, for lack of a better way of saying it, soft. My body doesn't distribute fat well at all. Much like my father, I have what I like to call chicken legs. It doesn't matter how big or small I am, my legs don't change-- they are sticks. Same with my arms. And so you take out those key pieces of real estate and I have very few places to store fat-- my torso is the main one and my face and neck a little less-- but enough that when I lose weight people always comment on my face-- my jawline being more prominant, etc.
Belly fat is scary fat. It didn't used to be. Our bodies evolved to store fat in our bellies because it protected our vital organs against exposure to the cold-- so back before we had central heating and good lighting to all those long dark winter nights when freezing to death was a real concern for human survival. (think back to cave times... we'll be talking alot about cave times in this blog, rest assured.) So imagine a gorgeous summer day-- everywhere you look in the hours of abundant sunlight are plants and vegetables that are sources of carbohydrate (you know... the real carbs... not the bread carbs that came much later in human evolution). Summer is all about carbohydrates-- fruits and vegetables are abundant. And carbohydrates do two things for you-- one, they get converted into 'right now' energy and whatever else gets stored in body fat-- around your vital organs in your core. See, the body evolved to do that because when carbs are plentiful-- its summer time... which means that the cold of winter is just around the corner and you need every bit of help you can get. (Interesting side note about all this evolutionary stuff... your body also evolved to get cholesterol... that artery clogging stuff, because it fuels your heart and can keep your blood warm and flowing throughout the winter and patch your arteries any time of the year if you "spring a leak." But come spring time you are supposed to be pretty much depleted of cholesterol from the long cold winter.)
Some people distribute fat a little better than others-- storing deposits in their legs, their butt, their arms, etc. and the point is still the same-- its a reserve your body evolved to call on during the harsh conditions when food wasn't available. And now we don't have to contend with that lack of food and harsh cold. So we never have a period of utilizing that fat store for survival. In the grand scheme of things the evolution of not needing to protect ourselves against the harsh winter is infinitesimally short in comparison to how long we did need it. Homo sapiens first showed up as the new kid in town approximately 250,000 years ago, the first real evidence of a hearth fire some 125,000 years ago and the lightbulb in 1879 (130 years ago). All this is to say that the whole protection from the elements and abundance we expect now isn't in our DNA. And our DNA has not changed since homo sapiens came along. We got the same stuff going on that our cave-dwelling brethren did some 250,000 years back.
So we evolved to need fat. And cholesterol. But we only had exposure to it during one season and the storage was to fuel life for the remaining 3. We've kind of fallen off that bit.
So now let's think about today's food choices-- and what better a place to look than the trust food pyramid that the US Department of Agriculture puts out. Here... we need a fun graphic.
Here's what I find really interesting about this picture. See the base of our pyramid-- the grains? Those grains really only appeared, like, yesterday in the grand scheme of evolution... and grains cannot be eaten raw, so we know that in order for our cave brethren to use them, they needed true control of one more thing-- cooking. Ever try eating a raw corn cob? Notsomuch. Grains required cooking in order to make them edible to homo sapiens... by themselves many grains are actually toxic until the bad stuff is cooked off. Actual agriculture and the cultivation of this new food source didn't really show up until some 10,000 years ago when early people caught on to this idea of cooking off the toxins so that they could really eat some of these weird grain things. All things considered, in terms of homo sapiens the species, that's like... yesterday. So while there was the convenience factor of growing our own stuff, our ability to process and consume grains is a new realization.
(Quick jarring leap forward in time-- there is the whole weirdness about conflicts of interest with that funny pyramid thing. Who here is a lawyer? Doesn't it seem weird that the US Department of Agriculture is telling you to eat more grains? Of course they want you to eat more grains-- they're marketing their wares. But let's not go there for now...)
It gets interesting when you start comparing the amount of carbs people take in as a result of that emergence of agriculture. Just for fun I pulled out some interesting comparisons-- on the order of number of carbs per 100 grams of food:
brussels sprouts: 8.95 grams
carrots: 9.58 grams
mushrooms: 3.42 grams
apples: 13.81 grams
figs: 19.18 grams
you get the point. Now let's look at the same measure for grain-based food:
whole grain wheat flour: 71.58 grams
corn: 74.26 grams
long grain brown rice 77:24 grams
so here's my point-- I'm not a big "don't eat carbs" person and often find myself quietly laughing at the irony of Dr. Atkins himself dying of the impact of his own diet, but at the same time, there's a startling differential there. When agriculture came along a fundamental balance shifted such that we are absorbing more carbs faster than ever. And if you follow the wisdom of the food guide, you are eating 6-11 servings of that stuff. Which, as I mentioned earlier, evolved to be used for short term energy and then stored for the long haul. It's dense and sciency and all, but you can get a decent overview and details on wikipedia if you want to understand it a little more.
My point here is this-- we are, metabolicly speaking, the same as we were the day some 250,000 years ago when a switch was thrown that made homo sapiens emerge. We still employ all the strategies that got her through survival and haven't really adapted to this abundance we have right now. Our bodies either need to catch up or we need to start aligning our food with what helped us evolve and survive in the first place.
Ultimately, I chose the later. The results of that decision have been powerful. And therein lies a large part of the journey.
Read more!
So I left you with this weird kind of epiphany that I was the obese size 4 person. I was small but I was, for lack of a better way of saying it, soft. My body doesn't distribute fat well at all. Much like my father, I have what I like to call chicken legs. It doesn't matter how big or small I am, my legs don't change-- they are sticks. Same with my arms. And so you take out those key pieces of real estate and I have very few places to store fat-- my torso is the main one and my face and neck a little less-- but enough that when I lose weight people always comment on my face-- my jawline being more prominant, etc.
Belly fat is scary fat. It didn't used to be. Our bodies evolved to store fat in our bellies because it protected our vital organs against exposure to the cold-- so back before we had central heating and good lighting to all those long dark winter nights when freezing to death was a real concern for human survival. (think back to cave times... we'll be talking alot about cave times in this blog, rest assured.) So imagine a gorgeous summer day-- everywhere you look in the hours of abundant sunlight are plants and vegetables that are sources of carbohydrate (you know... the real carbs... not the bread carbs that came much later in human evolution). Summer is all about carbohydrates-- fruits and vegetables are abundant. And carbohydrates do two things for you-- one, they get converted into 'right now' energy and whatever else gets stored in body fat-- around your vital organs in your core. See, the body evolved to do that because when carbs are plentiful-- its summer time... which means that the cold of winter is just around the corner and you need every bit of help you can get. (Interesting side note about all this evolutionary stuff... your body also evolved to get cholesterol... that artery clogging stuff, because it fuels your heart and can keep your blood warm and flowing throughout the winter and patch your arteries any time of the year if you "spring a leak." But come spring time you are supposed to be pretty much depleted of cholesterol from the long cold winter.)
Some people distribute fat a little better than others-- storing deposits in their legs, their butt, their arms, etc. and the point is still the same-- its a reserve your body evolved to call on during the harsh conditions when food wasn't available. And now we don't have to contend with that lack of food and harsh cold. So we never have a period of utilizing that fat store for survival. In the grand scheme of things the evolution of not needing to protect ourselves against the harsh winter is infinitesimally short in comparison to how long we did need it. Homo sapiens first showed up as the new kid in town approximately 250,000 years ago, the first real evidence of a hearth fire some 125,000 years ago and the lightbulb in 1879 (130 years ago). All this is to say that the whole protection from the elements and abundance we expect now isn't in our DNA. And our DNA has not changed since homo sapiens came along. We got the same stuff going on that our cave-dwelling brethren did some 250,000 years back.
So we evolved to need fat. And cholesterol. But we only had exposure to it during one season and the storage was to fuel life for the remaining 3. We've kind of fallen off that bit.
So now let's think about today's food choices-- and what better a place to look than the trust food pyramid that the US Department of Agriculture puts out. Here... we need a fun graphic.
Here's what I find really interesting about this picture. See the base of our pyramid-- the grains? Those grains really only appeared, like, yesterday in the grand scheme of evolution... and grains cannot be eaten raw, so we know that in order for our cave brethren to use them, they needed true control of one more thing-- cooking. Ever try eating a raw corn cob? Notsomuch. Grains required cooking in order to make them edible to homo sapiens... by themselves many grains are actually toxic until the bad stuff is cooked off. Actual agriculture and the cultivation of this new food source didn't really show up until some 10,000 years ago when early people caught on to this idea of cooking off the toxins so that they could really eat some of these weird grain things. All things considered, in terms of homo sapiens the species, that's like... yesterday. So while there was the convenience factor of growing our own stuff, our ability to process and consume grains is a new realization.(Quick jarring leap forward in time-- there is the whole weirdness about conflicts of interest with that funny pyramid thing. Who here is a lawyer? Doesn't it seem weird that the US Department of Agriculture is telling you to eat more grains? Of course they want you to eat more grains-- they're marketing their wares. But let's not go there for now...)
It gets interesting when you start comparing the amount of carbs people take in as a result of that emergence of agriculture. Just for fun I pulled out some interesting comparisons-- on the order of number of carbs per 100 grams of food:
brussels sprouts: 8.95 grams
carrots: 9.58 grams
mushrooms: 3.42 grams
apples: 13.81 grams
figs: 19.18 grams
you get the point. Now let's look at the same measure for grain-based food:
whole grain wheat flour: 71.58 grams
corn: 74.26 grams
long grain brown rice 77:24 grams
so here's my point-- I'm not a big "don't eat carbs" person and often find myself quietly laughing at the irony of Dr. Atkins himself dying of the impact of his own diet, but at the same time, there's a startling differential there. When agriculture came along a fundamental balance shifted such that we are absorbing more carbs faster than ever. And if you follow the wisdom of the food guide, you are eating 6-11 servings of that stuff. Which, as I mentioned earlier, evolved to be used for short term energy and then stored for the long haul. It's dense and sciency and all, but you can get a decent overview and details on wikipedia if you want to understand it a little more.
My point here is this-- we are, metabolicly speaking, the same as we were the day some 250,000 years ago when a switch was thrown that made homo sapiens emerge. We still employ all the strategies that got her through survival and haven't really adapted to this abundance we have right now. Our bodies either need to catch up or we need to start aligning our food with what helped us evolve and survive in the first place.
Ultimately, I chose the later. The results of that decision have been powerful. And therein lies a large part of the journey.
Read more!
Monday, April 27, 2009
You'd Think We'd Learn By Now
One of my newfound passions in the last year has been on food and food production. It's become one of the most important under-pinnings to the changes I have made in my life and in my diet. I eat healthy. And much to the surprise of those of you who have known me for a long time, that healthy eating now includes meat. But one of the things I refuse to do, as a meat eater, is take that responsibility lightly.
As omnivores and ethical people we need to be willing to challenge the current food economy that is, literally, sickening us all. The food that you put on your plate and ultimately into your body not only makes you healthy or unhealthy, it does the same for the whole planet. I have a lot to say on this topic. And truthfully, I am not going to do it justice in a quick post on a Monday morning as work is mounting, so I am putting a placeholder here that says Get Ready-- I'm going to be taking this one on shortly-- the journey from self-applauding yet ignorant vegetarian to ethical eater-- and all the nuances, the half-truths and A Ha moments along that road.
But in the meantime, let me start you here-- because it's current and it provides a good plunge into the rabbit hole of the politics and the choices of eating.
Read more!
As omnivores and ethical people we need to be willing to challenge the current food economy that is, literally, sickening us all. The food that you put on your plate and ultimately into your body not only makes you healthy or unhealthy, it does the same for the whole planet. I have a lot to say on this topic. And truthfully, I am not going to do it justice in a quick post on a Monday morning as work is mounting, so I am putting a placeholder here that says Get Ready-- I'm going to be taking this one on shortly-- the journey from self-applauding yet ignorant vegetarian to ethical eater-- and all the nuances, the half-truths and A Ha moments along that road.
But in the meantime, let me start you here-- because it's current and it provides a good plunge into the rabbit hole of the politics and the choices of eating.
Read more!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Adult Onset Athleticism, Chapter 2
I coined the term "adult onset athlete" a couple of years ago as my way of describing the stumble I took into the world of fitness. It was literally a day when I picked myself up off the couch and put out a cigarette and decided to try my hand at running. Chapter 2 starts out with yours truly now fully what one would describe as an athlete... post marathon, day 1.
Here's me on the morning of the marathon, trying to stay warm in the athletes village. This photo was taken about an hour before the race. What do you notice. Marathoner? Fancy utility belt? Goofy anticipatory smirk? Randomly stretching her shoulders when her legs are gonna be getting the workout? Check. Contributing factor to the obesity epidemic? Um, notsomuch. And yet...
See that number I am wearing? On the back of it you are supposed to write down all your emergency information should something happen to you out on the course... you know, like keeling over from the exhaustion. One of the pieces of information they encourage you to put on there is the weight on the morning of the race-- the thought being that if you gain weight while running its likely due to excessive consumption of water and therefore related to hyponatremia-- where your blood becomes thinned and has too few electrolytes. It's a bad condition, so people are highly encouraged to track that information. Me being the generally law abiding citizen that I am, I wrote it down. And that's where things got weird.
See, as I started debating health and wellness and knowing I wasn't feeling optimally well, I started looking at how other well respected people and organizations define fitness, and I stumbled into the American Council on Exercise. There are a lot of organizations that profess to be the authority on fitness, but these guys are one of the most prevalent and well respected and many a trainer carries an ACE certification proving a certain standard depth of knowledge in the field of fitness and training. And when I stumbled into one of their articles I found a notation on what is considered a healthy body composition. Thinking not much of it, I proceeded to compute my own Body Mass Index. Imagine my surprise when it came back that I had a BMI score of ..33-- I had a 33.05% body fat composition, in the day that I ran the marathon, and anything above a 30 is considered obese. Yep, you heard me right, or I guess read me right... on the day in question I was obese.
Now before you start thinking I am slipping into some crazy body dismorphic disorder, rest assured, I find this as crazy as anyone. I wore a size 4 when I was running the marathon. Sure there had been times in my life where that label was appropriate... but clearly not at this point in my life. I mean, come on!
Imagine.
So I learned about the phenomena of being "skinny fat." Yep, its a real thing. With a name. And there are a lot of people out there who are skinny fat. It's even made it into the Urban Dictionary. We've jumped the shark before I even knew what was going on.
So my point here (and yes, I actually have one) is that skinny does not equal healthy. or fit. or well. it means skinny. And if you follow that chain of logic, it also means that size and weight isn't the right determinant at all. It's body composition. And mine put me solidly into the obesity category.
Adult Onset Athleticism, Chapter 2 for me really has been a trip down a rabbit hole. I mark a year later having radically altered that body composition. As of today, I am now well into the normal category, with a .22 BMI, or roughly 22% body fat. I can tell that that shift isn't complete and I still have some work to do, so I am thinking that healthy for me is going to be more along the 17-19% body fat ratio, but we'll see how that plays out. In the meantime, some numbers for comparison.
I don't think that weight is a good measure of health, so thinking about body composition requires a few additional measures to really tease it all out. I thought these 4 really paint the best picture. So some definitions, again:
Lean Mass is basically the weight of the non-fat parts of your body. This includes muscle, bone and bone density, fluid, etc. It is one of a better series of measures of health. The higher your lean body mass, the healthier you are and the better you look.
Fat Weight. It's exactly what it sounds like-- the pounds of fat you have on your body. For women, in general, the essential fat weight is usually around 12%. This accounts for the basics... bone marrow, the fat necessary for proper organ function, female reproductive systems, etc. So keeping body fat above 12% is critical to keep the body running smoothly. Any my current weight, that's about 15 lbs of essential fat.
Given all these numbers you can see something fairly interesting-- while I have lost only about 6% of my overall weight, I've lost more than 10% body fat, gained more than 11% lean mass and lost more than 35% of my fat weight. That's big. So my 9.8 lbs lost may not seem like a very big deal until you account for the radical shift in my overall composition.
The process of creating that change has been multi-fold. It's meant radically altering my diet, radically altering my exercise methods, radically altering my thinking and learning and engaging in the world. It's still a work in progress, for sure-- I still have a long way to go, but I am sure you can see, I'm moving in the right direction.
Call this the framework for many an entry to come-- I promise to get into the details of how I've made some of these shifts. Like I said... make sure you are ready for a fall down the rabbit hole.
Read more!
Here's me on the morning of the marathon, trying to stay warm in the athletes village. This photo was taken about an hour before the race. What do you notice. Marathoner? Fancy utility belt? Goofy anticipatory smirk? Randomly stretching her shoulders when her legs are gonna be getting the workout? Check. Contributing factor to the obesity epidemic? Um, notsomuch. And yet...See that number I am wearing? On the back of it you are supposed to write down all your emergency information should something happen to you out on the course... you know, like keeling over from the exhaustion. One of the pieces of information they encourage you to put on there is the weight on the morning of the race-- the thought being that if you gain weight while running its likely due to excessive consumption of water and therefore related to hyponatremia-- where your blood becomes thinned and has too few electrolytes. It's a bad condition, so people are highly encouraged to track that information. Me being the generally law abiding citizen that I am, I wrote it down. And that's where things got weird.
See, as I started debating health and wellness and knowing I wasn't feeling optimally well, I started looking at how other well respected people and organizations define fitness, and I stumbled into the American Council on Exercise. There are a lot of organizations that profess to be the authority on fitness, but these guys are one of the most prevalent and well respected and many a trainer carries an ACE certification proving a certain standard depth of knowledge in the field of fitness and training. And when I stumbled into one of their articles I found a notation on what is considered a healthy body composition. Thinking not much of it, I proceeded to compute my own Body Mass Index. Imagine my surprise when it came back that I had a BMI score of ..33-- I had a 33.05% body fat composition, in the day that I ran the marathon, and anything above a 30 is considered obese. Yep, you heard me right, or I guess read me right... on the day in question I was obese.
Now before you start thinking I am slipping into some crazy body dismorphic disorder, rest assured, I find this as crazy as anyone. I wore a size 4 when I was running the marathon. Sure there had been times in my life where that label was appropriate... but clearly not at this point in my life. I mean, come on!
Imagine.
So I learned about the phenomena of being "skinny fat." Yep, its a real thing. With a name. And there are a lot of people out there who are skinny fat. It's even made it into the Urban Dictionary. We've jumped the shark before I even knew what was going on.
So my point here (and yes, I actually have one) is that skinny does not equal healthy. or fit. or well. it means skinny. And if you follow that chain of logic, it also means that size and weight isn't the right determinant at all. It's body composition. And mine put me solidly into the obesity category.
Adult Onset Athleticism, Chapter 2 for me really has been a trip down a rabbit hole. I mark a year later having radically altered that body composition. As of today, I am now well into the normal category, with a .22 BMI, or roughly 22% body fat. I can tell that that shift isn't complete and I still have some work to do, so I am thinking that healthy for me is going to be more along the 17-19% body fat ratio, but we'll see how that plays out. In the meantime, some numbers for comparison.
| Month | April 2008 | April 2009 |
| Weight | 133.4 | 123.6 |
| Body Fat | 33.05% | 22.93% |
| Lean Mass | 85.7 lbs | 95.3 lbs |
| Fat Weight | 43.7 lbs | 28.3 lbs |
I don't think that weight is a good measure of health, so thinking about body composition requires a few additional measures to really tease it all out. I thought these 4 really paint the best picture. So some definitions, again:
Lean Mass is basically the weight of the non-fat parts of your body. This includes muscle, bone and bone density, fluid, etc. It is one of a better series of measures of health. The higher your lean body mass, the healthier you are and the better you look.
Fat Weight. It's exactly what it sounds like-- the pounds of fat you have on your body. For women, in general, the essential fat weight is usually around 12%. This accounts for the basics... bone marrow, the fat necessary for proper organ function, female reproductive systems, etc. So keeping body fat above 12% is critical to keep the body running smoothly. Any my current weight, that's about 15 lbs of essential fat.
Given all these numbers you can see something fairly interesting-- while I have lost only about 6% of my overall weight, I've lost more than 10% body fat, gained more than 11% lean mass and lost more than 35% of my fat weight. That's big. So my 9.8 lbs lost may not seem like a very big deal until you account for the radical shift in my overall composition.
The process of creating that change has been multi-fold. It's meant radically altering my diet, radically altering my exercise methods, radically altering my thinking and learning and engaging in the world. It's still a work in progress, for sure-- I still have a long way to go, but I am sure you can see, I'm moving in the right direction.
Call this the framework for many an entry to come-- I promise to get into the details of how I've made some of these shifts. Like I said... make sure you are ready for a fall down the rabbit hole.
Read more!
Monday, April 20, 2009
The 113th Running of the Boston Marathon
The Boston Marathon took place today. It's hard to believe that its been one year, and yet only one year, since I crossed that finish line myself.
It's funny how much has changed in that year and what a place that day holds for me-- one that I never expected it to hold. On the one hand that day gives me so much pride in myself-- I ran my first marathon (to date my only marathon, but that's a temporary thing). I accomplished a goal I had written on my proverbial bucket list on one of the worst days in my life. It took me years to get there, but I toed the line of the Boston Marathon, and inspite of a fluke of an injury, I saw that to completion. I am now and will always be incredibly proud of myself for that achievement.
On a very different hand, that day changed me in ways I never predicted. I had always told myself that the day I got into the kind of shape that made running a marathon achievable, I was going to keep it up because that was the kind of shape I determined to be ideal. I'll go into more of why that mindset shifted later, but suffice it to say I got there and realized it wasn't ideal shape at all-- in fact it was quite far from it. The Boston Marathon wound up being a catalyst for all of these thoughts on health and fitness and wellness that have consumed the last year for me-- and by consumed, I mean precisely that.
The epiphany I had that began that day was that, as a runner, I was trapped in a cycle of running injury to injury and that had started to feel normal... and in keeping with all the other runners and triathletes around me. As runners we ran when we could and when we couldn't, we were in physical therapy, getting MRIs, getting enhanced shoes, orthotics, etc. to keep us going. While the foot cramp I experienced during the actual race itself was just a blip on the radar, this was my first race back from months of PT for IT Band syndrome. Almost every runner I know has been sidelined by IT Band issues. It was followed shortly by a pain in my hip flexor that was likely a strain or microtear of my psoas. In addition to those two bookmarks, I knew to expect any of a number of pains and debilitations-- tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, quad tears, hamstring tears, ACL tears, stress fractures, you name it... the list is long.
I love to run. I always want to run. I did PT and remember all too well being told I might not be able to run again and when injury set in again I knew I was going to do whatever I had to do to stop that cycle in its tracks. And so began Chapter 2 that this blog will chronicle.
So Happy Boston Marathon day.
And happy Chapter 2, finding health and wellness day.
And tomorrow, I promise to share with you how that journey unfolds.
Read more!
It's funny how much has changed in that year and what a place that day holds for me-- one that I never expected it to hold. On the one hand that day gives me so much pride in myself-- I ran my first marathon (to date my only marathon, but that's a temporary thing). I accomplished a goal I had written on my proverbial bucket list on one of the worst days in my life. It took me years to get there, but I toed the line of the Boston Marathon, and inspite of a fluke of an injury, I saw that to completion. I am now and will always be incredibly proud of myself for that achievement.
On a very different hand, that day changed me in ways I never predicted. I had always told myself that the day I got into the kind of shape that made running a marathon achievable, I was going to keep it up because that was the kind of shape I determined to be ideal. I'll go into more of why that mindset shifted later, but suffice it to say I got there and realized it wasn't ideal shape at all-- in fact it was quite far from it. The Boston Marathon wound up being a catalyst for all of these thoughts on health and fitness and wellness that have consumed the last year for me-- and by consumed, I mean precisely that.
The epiphany I had that began that day was that, as a runner, I was trapped in a cycle of running injury to injury and that had started to feel normal... and in keeping with all the other runners and triathletes around me. As runners we ran when we could and when we couldn't, we were in physical therapy, getting MRIs, getting enhanced shoes, orthotics, etc. to keep us going. While the foot cramp I experienced during the actual race itself was just a blip on the radar, this was my first race back from months of PT for IT Band syndrome. Almost every runner I know has been sidelined by IT Band issues. It was followed shortly by a pain in my hip flexor that was likely a strain or microtear of my psoas. In addition to those two bookmarks, I knew to expect any of a number of pains and debilitations-- tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, quad tears, hamstring tears, ACL tears, stress fractures, you name it... the list is long.
I love to run. I always want to run. I did PT and remember all too well being told I might not be able to run again and when injury set in again I knew I was going to do whatever I had to do to stop that cycle in its tracks. And so began Chapter 2 that this blog will chronicle.
So Happy Boston Marathon day.
And happy Chapter 2, finding health and wellness day.
And tomorrow, I promise to share with you how that journey unfolds.
Read more!
Friday, April 10, 2009
Am I Healthy?
That's really where it all started. A simple question. My loose thread. Am I healthy? 3 words-- and they aren't complex words... they are the kinds of words you learn when you are in elementary school.
So I started to think about trying to define the word healthy. How hard could that be? I went to the dictionary.
Healthy
ADJECTIVE: Inflected forms: health·i·er, health·i·est
1. Possessing good health.
2. Conducive to good health; healthful: healthy air.
3. Indicative of sound, rational thinking or frame of mind: a healthy attitude.
4. Sizable; considerable: a healthy portion of potatoes; a healthy raise in salary.
I hate it when words define themselves using themselves. Take 2:
Health
NOUN:
1. The overall condition of an organism at a given time.
2. Soundness, especially of body or mind; freedom from disease or abnormality.
3. A condition of optimal well-being: concerned about the ecological health of the area.
4. A wish for someone's good health, often expressed as a toast.
Two basic things stood out for me here. "Optimal well-being" and "freedom from disease or abnormality." Let me start out with optimal well-being. How do we know what optimal well-being even is? So I poked around more:
Well-being
SYLLABICATION: well-be·ing
PRONUNCIATION: wlbng
NOUN: The state of being healthy, happy, or prosperous; welfare.
Again, more of that defining things in a circle. And now in my circle of well-being=health=well-being I needed to figure out how to optimize that.
So I went back to the "freedom of disease or abnormality." I wasn't too keen on the idea of defining health as the absence of disease because disease in and of itself is so elusive. Think about diseases that show no symptoms-- are we saying the person is healthy? No. If cancer is brewing but not symptomatic yet, a person isn't healthy. And sometimes you can just feel that you aren't healthy but there aren't a lot of symptoms of a disease there-- like mornings when getting out of bed just plain sucks and your body aches. Clearly not "optimal well-being" but yet by this definition, healthy until symptomatic of a disease. And god help you if you have any abnormality-- again, let's think about who is defining normal here. Surface level abnormalities are easy... but how much of health is a surface level recognition? Sometimes it just a feel. So I knew I didn't have any diseases (tho I am the consummate virgo and therefore often contemplate whether I am suffering from Parkinson's, brain aneurisms or something equally implausible), but I wasn't ready to affix the gold seal of health just yet.
So there I was back sometime in June and with this lingering feel that while I was in some of the best fitness shape of my life, I didn't feel healthy but couldn't find any real explanation of how I could determine what health was to figure out where my gaps were. As I said a number of times in blog posts "I feel off." Clearly not in the state of "optimal well-being" and I needed to figure out why.
So my question to those of you who will wind up one day reading this-- Are you healthy? Do you even know what that means?
Read more!
So I started to think about trying to define the word healthy. How hard could that be? I went to the dictionary.
Healthy
ADJECTIVE: Inflected forms: health·i·er, health·i·est
1. Possessing good health.
2. Conducive to good health; healthful: healthy air.
3. Indicative of sound, rational thinking or frame of mind: a healthy attitude.
4. Sizable; considerable: a healthy portion of potatoes; a healthy raise in salary.
I hate it when words define themselves using themselves. Take 2:
Health
NOUN:
1. The overall condition of an organism at a given time.
2. Soundness, especially of body or mind; freedom from disease or abnormality.
3. A condition of optimal well-being: concerned about the ecological health of the area.
4. A wish for someone's good health, often expressed as a toast.
Two basic things stood out for me here. "Optimal well-being" and "freedom from disease or abnormality." Let me start out with optimal well-being. How do we know what optimal well-being even is? So I poked around more:
Well-being
SYLLABICATION: well-be·ing
PRONUNCIATION: wlbng
NOUN: The state of being healthy, happy, or prosperous; welfare.
Again, more of that defining things in a circle. And now in my circle of well-being=health=well-being I needed to figure out how to optimize that.
So I went back to the "freedom of disease or abnormality." I wasn't too keen on the idea of defining health as the absence of disease because disease in and of itself is so elusive. Think about diseases that show no symptoms-- are we saying the person is healthy? No. If cancer is brewing but not symptomatic yet, a person isn't healthy. And sometimes you can just feel that you aren't healthy but there aren't a lot of symptoms of a disease there-- like mornings when getting out of bed just plain sucks and your body aches. Clearly not "optimal well-being" but yet by this definition, healthy until symptomatic of a disease. And god help you if you have any abnormality-- again, let's think about who is defining normal here. Surface level abnormalities are easy... but how much of health is a surface level recognition? Sometimes it just a feel. So I knew I didn't have any diseases (tho I am the consummate virgo and therefore often contemplate whether I am suffering from Parkinson's, brain aneurisms or something equally implausible), but I wasn't ready to affix the gold seal of health just yet.
So there I was back sometime in June and with this lingering feel that while I was in some of the best fitness shape of my life, I didn't feel healthy but couldn't find any real explanation of how I could determine what health was to figure out where my gaps were. As I said a number of times in blog posts "I feel off." Clearly not in the state of "optimal well-being" and I needed to figure out why.
So my question to those of you who will wind up one day reading this-- Are you healthy? Do you even know what that means?
Read more!
Starting Over
Sometimes it just makes more sense to throw out and begin anew. Let's call this that effort. A clean slate. While finding the time to blog has been difficult at best lately, a large part of the challenge has been that the things I was thinking about and changing in my world just no longer fit the "back of the pack" mentality anymore, so it was hard to fit it in. It needed an overhaul. So here we are.
I have a feeling this will take me a while and the groove will be very different than NSBotP, but so be it. Here's my best attempt at 'splaining the start of a very different chapter in my life.
When last I left off blogging (there were several draft entries that never got published) I had started on something called Crossfit. If you followed the old blog you know it a little. What you may not know is that Crossfit was a part of a much larger mental shift I was making. I realized right around the marathon last year that I had achieved a level of fitness to make running a marathon achievable, but that fitness wasn't really meshing with the wellness and real definition of health I wanted. In essence, something was missing and I had a sense that achieving that goal should have felt more epiphanous than it did. I was fit but I wasn't healthy and for the first moment in time I realized how wildly different those two things are, despite our culture thinking of them as synonymous.
Thinking about that was like pulling at a thread and next thing you knew, I was throwing out a lot of my world and reinventing it. I started challenging my reasoning, my habits, my diet, my very biomechanics. It's been very eye opening to say the least. The more I've poked, the more I've realized that our culture as a whole treats wellness in this largely reductionist and self-defeating way. It's like we've all forgotten the principles of equilibrium and live in some collective haze-- myself included. So without meaning to, I started pulling on that thread and things just started to go from there.
So I think this blog is going to be quite a hodgepog of thoughts... likely very different than my last blog (hopefully shorter), but more about the insights of the unravel and the connections I am starting to put together in my own head. I also realized I should start tagging this because it was going to cover a lot of different topics, so I'm tagging this with just some of the topics I know are going to come up... cause its sort of where my brain has been since June(ish). Call it a preview of the brain dump that is likely to ensue.
Read more!
I have a feeling this will take me a while and the groove will be very different than NSBotP, but so be it. Here's my best attempt at 'splaining the start of a very different chapter in my life.
When last I left off blogging (there were several draft entries that never got published) I had started on something called Crossfit. If you followed the old blog you know it a little. What you may not know is that Crossfit was a part of a much larger mental shift I was making. I realized right around the marathon last year that I had achieved a level of fitness to make running a marathon achievable, but that fitness wasn't really meshing with the wellness and real definition of health I wanted. In essence, something was missing and I had a sense that achieving that goal should have felt more epiphanous than it did. I was fit but I wasn't healthy and for the first moment in time I realized how wildly different those two things are, despite our culture thinking of them as synonymous.
Thinking about that was like pulling at a thread and next thing you knew, I was throwing out a lot of my world and reinventing it. I started challenging my reasoning, my habits, my diet, my very biomechanics. It's been very eye opening to say the least. The more I've poked, the more I've realized that our culture as a whole treats wellness in this largely reductionist and self-defeating way. It's like we've all forgotten the principles of equilibrium and live in some collective haze-- myself included. So without meaning to, I started pulling on that thread and things just started to go from there.
So I think this blog is going to be quite a hodgepog of thoughts... likely very different than my last blog (hopefully shorter), but more about the insights of the unravel and the connections I am starting to put together in my own head. I also realized I should start tagging this because it was going to cover a lot of different topics, so I'm tagging this with just some of the topics I know are going to come up... cause its sort of where my brain has been since June(ish). Call it a preview of the brain dump that is likely to ensue.
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