Thursday Book Report: The Boys in the Boat

I didn’t really need another reason to like Andrew Luck.  He’s smart, talented, and a good sport.  Now that he has started a book club, I am a real fan.  I wrote about the book he chose for kids a couple of weeks ago.  His first selection for adults (although, depending on your kids, I can see them getting into it also) is The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown.

What a great story.  A bunch of mostly poor kids from Washington overcome all kinds of struggle from dysfunctional families to financial disaster against the background of the Great Depression.  They learn to pull together and win gold in Hitler’s Berlin.

It would have been very easy for this to have been just a sports book.  The athletic achievement of the group has enough heft all by itself, what with guys jackhammering on the construction of Grand Coulee Dam in the summer to raise money for school in the fall and incidentally get even stronger and other similar tales.  What makes it more is that Brown has a sense of history.  He puts all the grit and brawn and inherent struggle to achieve in the context of the Dust Bowl on one hand and the Nazi rise to power on the other. 

Go read it.

Remain

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” – Frank Herbert in Dune

What are we afraid of, when we head to the gym?  (Heading to the gym is not more scary than heading anywhere else, by nature.  I find that what is true about heading to the gym tends to be true about pretty much every other place.  This may be because I am a metaphor junkie.)

Sometimes we are afraid of failure.  Maybe we go to the gym and we don’t end up suddenly fit and wonderful.  Maybe we keep going and we don’t get the results we want and we become sure that it is because we suck and nothing can ever fix it and we should really just go get ice cream instead.

Sometimes we are afraid of success.  If we go to the gym and get stronger and fitter and cuter and smarter, suddenly we might feel able to transform in other ways and in other areas of life.

I think that really it comes down to fear of change.  We are used to How Things Are.  Except that things are always changing.  The question is whether we want to be agents or victims.  I vote for agents.

We can do it

Sometimes we forget.  Life gets busy and we spend our time zooming from one thing to another and we lose track.

We are strong.  We are powerful.  We can change the world.

Let’s remember that today as we work through what is in front of us.

Note to self

Almost everything out there about weight loss suggests that keeping a food journal helps.  Recommendations sometimes include writing down not only what was eaten, but how much, when, and in what emotional state.  There are many theories about why this works.

Of course, keeping data allows tracking.  If we don’t know what we are eating, how can we adjust?  The act of writing down each bite also creates mindfulness.  We may not want to record for posterity that midnight cookie, so we might skip it.  Patterns can emerge:  we overeat at those Sunday brunches with Grandma and on Mondays after that stressful staff meeting; we eat no vegetables on Thursdays because we do the shopping on Fridays and we are already out by Thursday.

Yes, writing down all the foods is a pain in the patella (as my son used to say when he was little).  Some people find the millions of software programs out there helpful.  Others like fancy notebooks.  All I can manage is a series of daily post-it notes.  I won’t do it if it is complicated.  As usual, the take-away is do what works.

Friday Exercise: Upright Row

The Amazing Stickie enjoys working the muscles of her back and arms to keep her posture lovely.  The upright row helps with this goal.

Today, Stickie is using a barbell, but dumbbells also work for this exercise.  She begins holding the bar with an overhand grip with her arms straight at her sides.  As she inhales, she makes sure that her body is aligned in good posture.  When she exhales, she lifts the barbell up toward her shoulders by bending her elbows.  The next inhale returns her to the starting position.

Depending on the weight she is using, she will do about three sets of 10 to 15 repetitions.

Thursday Book Report: Sweetness and Power

Sidney W. Mintz’s book Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History is not, at first glance, anything to do with fitness.  That said, I can find fitness principles almost everywhere and it is easier than usual in a book about the evolution of our society around a food.

Anyone with interest in history, anthropology, or food can find something fascinating in the book.  There are questions of social justice inherent in the historical consumption of sugar and other “drug foods”—tea, coffee, chocolate, and rum as well as in our current consumption.

The book traces how the convenience and cheapness of sugar transformed meals by emphasizing convenience and quick calories.  The stimulant properties of sugar, especially combined with tea and/or coffee, kept the emerging proletarians working.  The once-exclusive luxury became the opiate of the people, so to speak.

It does not take a lot of imagination to apply the history of sugar to all the other convenient, mass-produced foods that surround us.  The place of sugar in our diets exists because of concerted effort to make it so.  We have the opportunity to question whether we want all those processed foods, to subvert the dominant paradigm, to return to fresh whole foods and the process of cooking, to create social meaning through eating together.

If we are what we eat, perhaps we should choose wisely and with the perspective of history.

Easy Peasy

We all know we are supposed to exercise, but what the heck are we supposed to do?  We can go look at what other people at the gym are doing, we can ask the internet, we can replicate those hazy memories from back when we were on the football team.  Ideas are all around us.  Some of them are better than others, but it isn’t that hard.

We all need three kinds of exercise:  cardio, weights, and flexibility.  Cardio works the heart and lungs, improves mood, burns calories, and increases endurance.  Walk, run, bike, dance, swim, roller skate, etc.

Weights make us stronger.  They change our body composition, fire up our metabolism, empower us, and make our butts look cute.  Lift stuff.  Maybe even yourself!

Flexibility keeps us mobile.  It may help prevent injury.  It also, many times, ties in with mindfulness practice.  Stretch.  Go to yoga.  Do some Pilates.  Spend a few minutes on the foam roller.

Go play.