Also, Duck wants to know: why cabbage soup?

We all have things that scare the pants off of us:  spiders, midterms, vampires, romance novels, long conversations with our odder relatives with extreme views.  “Diets” are one of those things for me.

I admit, I am scarred.  I recently tried grapefruit again for the first time since I was a kid.  It is not going to be my favorite fruit, but I also know that it doesn’t taste like I remembered.  I think that is because I remember it in the context of my mom and my grandmother doing a grapefruit diet one summer.  Half a grapefruit with artificial sweetener and a cup of black coffee in the morning does not make for the happiest mom in the world.  It was best to steer clear until the lunchtime cottage cheese came out.  I am sure that both ladies lost plenty of weight over the time they stuck to the program, but I also know they gained it all back. 

What we need is to build a healthy relationship with our food.  Some of that means meeting our foods for real, not in their boxed-up, salty, sexy marketing versions.  This may take some adjustment, but it also may be joyful for those of us who grew up on canned peas and instant mashed potatoes and fish sticks and who survived college on ramen soup and popcorn.  Some of us may never have considered what the greens in our salads actually taste like because what we taste is creamy, fatty, processed dressing.  I learned a lot when I stopped dressing my salads, and most of it was good.  There are lots of greens out there, so I don’t have to eat the ones I don’t like (that means you, radicchio, even though you are purple and not green, and you, frisée, even if you are pretty).

Another big part of our relationship with food that may need adjusting is quantity.  We can love our whole grain organic macaroni with cheese made from free-range fair-trade shade-grown cows without eating an entire vat of it.  In fact, if it is made with real ingredients and love, a smaller portion might be even more satisfying than a vat, especially since we will still be able to move after dinner.

Also, savoring is important.  There are times when we must eat all of the food in the world right now because we just finished carrying a team of sled dogs on our backs over the Iditarod route, but most of the time we can pause to enjoy and taste.  We may discover that when we slow down, we don’t need to eat as much.

Short version:  let’s eat good food that treats us well and enjoy it rather than making food into an unsustainable, harmful torture, with or without grapefruit.

It might turn out good, like green eggs and ham

I like circuit workouts.  They are efficient, flexible, and challenging.  But if that is all I ever do, my body will get bored.  Bored bodies, like bored children, tune out and stop learning; they may even start whining about how they want to watch television or eat more cookies.

Sometimes I need to choose yoga to calm my mind, stretch my muscles, and challenge my balance.  Sometimes I need to lift the heaviest weights I can to increase my maximum strength.  Sometimes I need to go as fast as possible and sometimes as long as possible.  Sometimes I need to try something totally new to shock the system, allow myself to be bad at something, and laugh.

Routine is a very powerful motivator and I would not want to suggest that anyone give up their Tuesday golf game if that is what gets them moving.  If the habit is to go to the gym on Wednesday nights, maybe a date with the treadmill instead of the bike could spice things up, or the weights instead of the usual zumba.

When I switch it up, I get to grow.  And sometimes I get a great story about that time I fell off that new piece of equipment and got a Superman bandage, too.

There is no comparison

There will always be someone better than we are:  someone who is stronger, faster, cooler, leaner, sleeker, and more flexible.  There will always also be someone who is worse than we are due to genetics, illness, injury, and lack of practice.  Here is the thing.  We are not those people.  We are who we are and, ultimately, even in the middle of a huge class, we are working out alone because no one has our exact body.

This means we have incredible freedom.  We just get to play and exercise and sweat and chill out.  It doesn’t matter that the person next to us is squatting with a piano on her back (although it would be nifty to see, I’m sure) or struggling to bend her knees at all.  It is not relevant.  We are doing our work, chosen for our bodies on one particular day to the best of our ability.

We can tell our catty inner voices to stuff it when they remark that the guy over there has abs like an Abercrombie and Fitch model (you know, they don’t actually sell those naked men in the stores.  False advertising!) and we feel like someone’s Before picture.  We can also remind it to be nice when we remark to ourselves that at least we don’t look like that woman over there with the uncomfortably tight workout pants.  Those people don’t matter to what we are doing.  They are doing the best they can right now and deserve our respect for doing it.  And we deserve to give ourselves the respect we deserve by not wasting our time in needless comparisons.

It’s about you and the work.  That is all.

Inclined to press some more?

Last week, Stickie demonstrated the bench press.  This week, she has decided to work slightly different muscles, so she chose to model incline presses.  It may not be apparent in the picture, but she, like many people, finds that she needs to use slightly lighter weights when doing incline presses.

Before sitting down, Stickie adjusts the back of the bench to an appropriate angle.  Some benches have lots of choices and some have one or two.  Either way, it is very difficult to adjust the bench once one is sitting on it.

As always, Stickie uses her best posture.  Her lower back retains its natural curve, neither smashing itself into the bench nor creating a tunnel for the transcontinental railroad.  Her shoulders are relaxed away from her ears and her head is centered between her shoulders, not tilted to one side or the other.  She begins the movement with her arms at her shoulders.  As she exhales, she presses the weights straight up in the air by straightening her elbows.  On the inhale, she lowers them slowly back to her chest.

As with the bench press, she does not let the dumbbells touch at the top of the movement because she is all about getting the most out of her workout.  She often does three sets of ten repetitions at a weight that is heavy enough that the last rep of each set is challenging to complete.  (Sometimes she is not sure what that weight is, so she may adjust the weight between sets to keep to the rubric.)

Between sets, she drinks water, gives herself a hug stretch, or extends her arms out to the sides of the bench to stretch her chest.

Thursday Book Report: Nourish

Nourish, by Amber Rose, Sadie Frost, and Holly Davidson, is lovely.  And that is just about the pictures and design of the book.  The content is also pretty amazing.

The book has three sections, one about food with recipes, one about mindfulness, and one about exercise.  I’ve cooked several things from the food section and they have all been delicious.  I expect to cook many more of them.  All of them involve fresh, healthy food prepared with love and attention.  The resulting dishes are also beautiful to look at, an aspect of food that I tend to forget is important but which does add something important to the experience.

The mindfulness section provides lots of information about breathing, yoga, mediation, and the like.  We all can use more mindfulness and this is a good jumping off point.

I felt right at home in the exercise section because the focus is on doing what is fun.  There are clear directions for various exercises (I learned a new kind of jack!  Beware!) and some interesting workouts.  Most exercises require nothing more than the body.

While the book is focused and directed toward women, men should not be afraid to use it (except maybe for the beauty aids, but those scare me, too).  After all, we all need to eat and breathe and move.

Ultimately, I did find the book to be nourishing, in many senses of the word.

Truly, you are wonderful

Fitness, like any other discipline, compels us to tell the truth if we really want to follow its ways.  We learn at a very deep level that we do, in fact, love brownies more than bikinis, or that we love swimming more than television marathons, or that if fitness has to involve burpees, we would rather just buy bigger clothes.  It cuts both ways:  sometimes we find out things that help us and sometimes we want to stick our fingers in our ears and scream Green Day lyrics.

If we want to be healthy, we have to be honest about it.  We have to be willing to look at the scale.  We have to face the fear that we will no longer have an excuse to be weak or small or puny; then there is the deeper fear that we may not have all that much potential to live up to after all.

Decluttering, tidying, getting rid of things have become cultural themes.  Let’s throw out the lies we tell ourselves, whether it is as small as “It didn’t do much damage to eat those seven cookies” or as big as “I will never be strong.”  It is amazing how spacious our heads and our jeans become when we tell the truth about things.

In and Out (No Burger)

When we do Pilates or yoga or tai chi, we find mindfulness built into the process as we breathe and pay careful attention to the placement of our bodies.  Sometimes we feel like we have way too many body parts with minds of their own in the process!  Remembering to breathe helps us along.

Cardio has its own kind of mindfulness.  Most cardio exercises take on a rhythm that can help to focus our thoughts.  (Focusing on the mantra “Is it over yet?” might not have the appropriate effect, but we can try it out to see.)  The repetitive nature of most cardio can help still the crazy whirl of our thoughts.

In strength training, a focus on the breath can improve performance as it increases mindfulness.  When we do the “hardest” part of the exercise (getting up from the squat, pressing the barbell away from the chest on a bench press, etc.), we can exhale to help the movement along.  Inhaling during the other portion of the exercise allows us to reset and gather our forces for the next repetition.

No matter what, we have to keep breathing.