Friday Reading Report: Vitamins and Minerals

I’m presently studying vitamins and minerals.  Something like four chapters’ worth of material.  Here’s the executive summary, for executives who don’t always use businesslike language:

It’s important to get enough of all the vitamins and minerals, but not too much.  If you don’t get enough, your nerves will, literally, fray, your teeth will fall out, your skin will itch and bleed, and you will feel lousy and die.  If you get too much, your teeth are probably all right, but the rest of you is toast.  And not even whole-grain toast.

In seeking that Goldilocks amount of vitamins and minerals, most of us should avoid the temptation to pop a bunch of supplements.  In general, the forms of vitamins and minerals found in foods absorb better into our bodies.  There are, of course, exceptions, but most of those involve scary metabolic disorders, chronic disease, or various prescription drugs.

No one food has all of what we need.  Eat lots of different things, including our friends the fruits and vegetables.

Often there is another way

I wrote yesterday about getting the worst thing on the list done first.  There is a caveat:  the worst thing must actually need doing.

My focus, as a fitness professional, is on making fitness as much fun as possible.  Almost everyone can find a kind of exercise they enjoy.  For those who can’t, we strive to find a way to make it less horrible, whether that means making it quick or social or loud or whatever.

We all need to do cardio, weights, and flexibility/balance work, but that offers a wide range of possibilities.  We can swim, bike, run, dance.  We can do weights with a class or a trainer or mano-a-mano with the dumbbells.  Yoga, Pilates, stretching, circus, gymnastics can provide that supple agility we require to navigate all the unstable surfaces of life.

Even burpees can be avoided if we work it right.

Do Your Worst

Several careers ago, I had a longish commute (although not by today’s standards; the same drive now is Much Worse).  My job had a lending library of educational tapes and I listened to a lot of them in the car because driving is not my favorite thing ever.  The tapes all focused on various business skills.  We got some kind of Brownie points for writing up what we learned.  (I wrote a stinging assessment on the one about professional dress for women as being particularly sexist and stupid.  The culture may not have caught up with my thinking, but at least I now have a career where sweats are, in fact, totally appropriate in the workplace.)

Anyway, one of these many tape series discussed various time management techniques.  There was one that I found transformative:  Worst First.  In the context of time management, what it means is that we do the most horrible thing on our lists before all the other things because once that is done, it’s all easier going.  We, in theory, procrastinate less because that awful thing is over.  I find, as bonus, it reduces my stress level to know that particular monster is slain.

This theory applies to fitness.  For some of us, it makes us work out very first thing because workouts are our Worst.  Those of us who hate cardio can check it off before we hit the weights.  Weight-haters can do a brief warm up, pump the iron, and relax (relatively speaking) into the cardio haze.  Even within a weight workout, if there is one exercise that makes us want to invent new swear words, we can put it up front.  It all gets better after that’s over.

We can get the Worst done.