Friday Book Report: Sugar Impact Diet

One of my clients passed J.J. Virgin’s book Sugar Impact Diet on to me.  In general, I am not a fan of diet books, or of diets.  I dislike motivational stories.  I distrust claims involving losing x amount of weight painlessly in y days.

This book has all the things I don’t like in it, plus the kind of women’s magazine prose that makes me want to go out and stab people, except that I don’t believe in stabbing people.

In spite of this, it is not really a bad book.  Sugar is definitely the major problem in most of our diets.  It contributes to every health problem we face personally and culturally.  Virgin lays out the evidence and calls out labels.  She provides useful lists of swaps we can make.  I tried one of the recipes (many of the recipes are non-vegetarian, so that took a lot of them right out for me) and found it delicious and the other people around here liked it, too.

Those of us who know we benefit from structure could use the system.  Those of us who like to be presented with information to figure out how to apply on our own can parse out some helpful things from this book.

And still more on goals

Sometimes when we get started on new goals, we get over-excited.  We decide to do All The Things right now.  That can be very empowering and we can often take out a large chunk of the to-do list by massive effort.  And then we get tired.

Getting tired is all right.  We are allowed to get tired.  We are allowed to rest.  We are not allowed to quit.

Let’s listen to our lives a little.  When we need a break, we can take one.  And then we can get moving again.

More on goals

Fitness goals come in many guises.  We all know the obvious ones:  lose weight, run fast, go far, lift heavy, collect compliments.  I would like to suggest that there are some other areas that contribute to our fitness goals.  Here are some questions to consider:

What do we want to learn this year?  Our brains are crucial to our fitness goals.  If we are not learning and growing, we are dying.  Let’s think about skills we want to develop, books we want to read, experiences we want to create.

How do we want to connect?  What sort of relationship weight lifting do we need to do this year?  When we strengthen the bonds between people, we create healthy communities and happy humans.

What feeds our souls?  We spend lots of time thinking about what to eat.  What do our hearts crave?  Maybe we need to go outside, or go to church, or hug a dog, or laugh really hard.  Whatever it is, we need to do it to avoid soul anorexia.

Fitness is holistic (I am allowed to use that word; I lived in Berkeley for 20 years.).  Let’s make fitness goals that address our whole selves.

On goals

We can set new goals any time we want, but at the new year, it seems especially appropriate.  My unscientific guess pegs the number of articles about how to set good goals at about ten gazillion million.  I will offer only two suggestions.

First, make a process goal.  Process goals are the kind where we decide to show up.  We make it a goal to do cardio every day, or to lift weights twice a week, or to floss our teeth on Tuesdays (got to start small, right?).  Maybe the thing we want is better endurance, or more shapely muscles, or gingivitis avoidance, but our goal is to do the activity that will produce the result, not the result itself.  Process goals have the advantage of being concrete and incremental.  It is easy to tell whether we have done them or not.  And, if it turns out that the process goal does not move us toward our desired outcome, we have at least built our ability to accomplish things.

Second, make a big goal.  A big goal in conjunction with a process goal can create great things.  If, for example, we set a process goal of riding our bike every week, we can set a big goal of doing a century ride.  (Guess what I want to do this year!)

We will, God willing, all experience this next year together, whether we set goals or not.  Let’s try to make it the best year ever.

Monday Workout: Balance challenge!

It’s a new year!  Guess what?  We still get to work out!  This is a shorter circuit, so we get to do four or five rounds.  If no medicine ball is available, substitute kettle bell swings or dumbbell swings. 

The single leg squat to touchdown works like this:  Do a single leg squat holding a dumbbell in the same arm as your standing leg with your arm held as if you have just completed a curl (elbow bent, weight at your shoulder).  Then bend at the waist and extend your elbow to lower the dumbbell toward the floor.  As you straighten your knee, raise the dumbbell overhead.  This should be an entertaining balance challenge!

1 min cardio
med ball slams	20
goblet squats	20
flies	20
1 leg squat to touchdown	10
bench rows	20
round lunges	10

Friday Book Report: This Is Where You Belong

Earlier this week, I wrote a little bit about the contents of This Is Where You Belong:  The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live by Melody Warnick.  I did, in fact, finish the book, and the rest of it was just as good.

The main premise of the book is that connection to where we live helps us build happier lives.  It is an upward spiral in which our connection to home makes us happier, which makes us feel more connected to our home, which makes us happier, and so on.  Happy people, in general, are healthy people.

In addition to going outside and building our maps of our neighborhoods by walking as I mentioned in my other post, Warnick suggests buying local, meeting the neighbors, enjoying the things we would show visitors, getting politically involved, and volunteering as ways to enmesh ourselves in the web of our communities.

The book is full of references to other books and studies and the like, but what makes it work for me is that it also chronicles the writer’s actual experiment in loving the place where she happened to end up.  She tried it all out on herself, which is my favorite method of experimentation.  Some parts worked better than others; your results may vary.

In any case, Warnick provides a helpful recipe for plugging in rather than dropping out.

Breathing

My kids have a distant relative who was known for semi-oracular statements.  The story, as handed down through the family, is that Uncle Paul (don’t remember whose uncle he was or in which generation or even if he was an actual relative and not one of those family-friends-who-are-family) asked their grandmother, who was a small child at the time, if she wanted to know the secret to avoid death.  She did.  He leaned toward her and said, “Just keep breathing.”

He was right.

Breathe consciously in yoga or Pilates.

Breathe hard in running or swimming or cycling or skiing or sex or dancing or roller skating.

Breathe out as you lift weights and in as you lower them.

Hang out with people who take your breath away and then let it come rushing back as you rejoice in them.

Keep breathing.