Exercise & Health: Your Feel Is More Real Than You May Believe

The mirror, in all its exactitude, remains the chief enemy of a healthy body image. Filtered through layers of expectation, desire, ambition, and societal pressure to conform to a one-size-fits-few mold, the reflection reads like failure to many. The effect is so strong that when a typical distraught mirror-gazer huffs and leaves the mirror, dresses for the day, and hears a friend say, “You look great,” the hearer’s first inclination is to disbelieve the sincere compliment.

What, you thought I was gonna show you my abs?

What seems like errors in vanity are really evidence of a true psychic problem in society. Plenty of evidence supports the sad conclusion, particularly where young girls are concerned. But as the father of a son, I see the insidious process at work on my boy as well (albeit less severely than in girls). And we all know that a great many adults never escape this mania. We know because we daily meet that enemy, and it is us.

It is pretty much accepted as a nutritional axiom nowadays, requiring no further proof, that despite our national obsession with weight loss, the United States is the most obese industrialized nation in the world. (I know there may well be some small island-state with a higher per capita number, but among the big ones, we’re the biggest.) I don’t say this with the accusatory finger-wagging that some commentators employ. Nor do I believe, as one Facebook poster implied some months ago, that all 314 million of us are — how did she put it? — “fat, drugged, obsessed and sad.” No, I offer my observation more in the spirit of empathy. Having been there — having paid rent there, even when absent — I know what it’s like.

My Slavic body type tends toward beefiness, even in its best condition. We joke in my family that it’s a good thing my paternal grandfather was a cooper; when stock ran low, we could sell our barrel chests. Willowy is not in our vocabulary; lanky is right out. Add to that a natural affinity for food and cooking, a genetic taste for high-fat Jewish cuisine, and the advent of modern processed foods, and corpulence is the only possible end to the equation.

Or is it? I have been fighting my weight half my life, with varying degrees of success. Never is there a straight line to the promised land. I have learned not to toss my “fat clothes” too soon. Humility is part of the process. But more important, I have demoted the mirror to its proper place in the evaluative hierarchy.

What do I mean by this? Well, I know that at 52, no matter how well I do, the days of washboard — or even completely flat — abdominal muscles are probably gone. There is no question, though, that when I pay proper, sustained attention to diet and exercise, there are nicer things to see in the mirror. But perfection? Nope. Being my own harshest critic, I will always be able to find something that could be better. Some things are convex that I would rather see concave, if you get my drift. Biceps will become stronger and more defined, but they have a more casual relationship with their moorings than they did 30 years ago. So it goes. (My legs are exempt from criticism, though. They’re great. Ask my wife.)

Kidding aside, there has to be a change in perspective if one is to enjoy the success and minimize the imperfections. I’ll help you shortcut right to it: it’s how you feel. I had a coach who, in teaching an athletic motion to me (never an easy task), said in that rhyming way of coaches, “A.B.; your feel ain’t real.” That is, what I felt I was doing in swinging the bat wasn’t what I was actually doing.

Not true for evaluating the results of exercise and proper diet. Your feel is most real. Surely you have noticed, when you exercise and get past any initial-stage discomfort, that you feel like a million bucks. Canadian. You seem to stand up straighter with no extra effort. Your attitude is sunnier. Problems don’t stick to you as easily. You sleep better. And on and on.

Our self-images are so sludged up with societal crap and negative self-talk that I’m not sure any of us know how we really look. By focusing on how good you feel, that matters less. And when you feel good, very often the looking good takes care of itself.♦

© 2013 Adam Barr

I Don’t Even Know How To Be Thin

Anyone who has set, strived for, and achieved a goal probably has had this experience: You work, sweat, improve, backslide, endure disappointment, reenergize, recommit, work, sweat, improve, rinse, repeat….and one day, you prevail. And then…

Someone forgets to cue the choir of angels. The putt for 69 drops, the ball sails over the fence, the A in organic chemistry shines forth from the printout on the wall by the professor’s office…and there is a noticeable void where the fanfare was expected.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s still a nice moment. Smiles, a warmth around the heart, the pleasure of a happy phone call to a trusted friend who was shootin’ in the gym with you the whole time. But there is also the realization that not every achievement, no matter how big it seemed from below, presents an occasion for a wild dance of abandon on the summit. Whatever you have learned about struggle and patience along the way colors the victory, puts it in some kind of perspective that you have yet to understand.

And then there’s psychic habit. When you’ve been short of your goal for so long, you kind of get used to feeling incomplete, or even like a loser. Even the evidence of your victory can’t dissuade you from the feeling you’ve become use to — that you’re deficient in some way. After I started breaking 100 consistently, I still felt like a bad golfer, even though the statistics said I had gotten better and anecdotal reports from friends (grudgingly) attested to the improved efficiency of my swing. Being a bad golfer was all I knew. (I still know it, in a relative way. I’ve only broken 90 four times in my life.)

I have fought my weight all my post-college life. Perhaps I haven’t fought hard enough, because I love to eat. Match that personality with a barrel-shaped eastern European body, and you can understand how even in the best eras of personal fitness, I can never approach the slate-abs narrowness of the modern archetype of male beauty.

This is not me. Scales are for fish.

Check the title of this column again. It says I don’t know how to be thin. I know how to get that way. Done it a dozen times. Most recently I lost weight to secure my career in television (ha–see how well that worked out), and many people I encountered at work noticed, which was encouraging. Now that that necessity is gone, and owing to my affection for cooking and food, I have gained a lot of that weight back, although the net is still down from five years ago, when I began the campaign.

At the same time, I was playing adult baseball in a league for men age 38 and older. I desperately wanted to get below 200 pounds so I would be faster, leaner, stronger. It took awhile, but I did it, briefly. I showed up at hitting practice one day (I worked with a friend who is a good coach) and reported my weight at 201.

“Hell,” he said. “You’re just a good shit away.”

Indeed. But without artificial changes to my intestinal traffic, I was able to work my way down to 197 pounds for awhile. It took a huge organizational effort of will that had me thinking about food — what to eat, what not to eat, and when — as much as someone who obsesses about it on the unhealthy end of the eating spectrum.

Still, 197 was a huge victory. But having felt “fat” for so long, I really didn’t know how else to feel. Counting myself among the thin of the world felt jinxy, like some sort of modern hubris. I sure enjoyed some of the skinnier clothes I could wear, and my baseball and golf improved. But in the grand scheme of the world, of the soul’s duty to love people, seek God in earth’s details, and be kind to children….why should the universe care about my mountaintop? And if the universe didn’t overemphasize it, how could I?

In the end, 197 was a lifestyle I couldn’t support in any natural-feeling way. When I stopped playing baseball, I began to get rounder. Advancing age (I’m 51) made weight loss harder and certain kinds of exercise riskier. My passion for good food did not diminish.

Still, my duty to myself and those who love me made some sort of action necessary. And so I joined a walk-run program sponsored by a local running store. It’s designed to introduce people to running, or to provide formerly active folks like me a way back into the sport while reducing the chances of injury.

It’s fun. The people are nice (although some would rather be left alone to get the work done), the coach is conscientious, and the pace is both responsibly measured and challenging. Already I’m seeing strength gains, and moderate weight loss, just a few weeks in. We walk, run, walk, run some more, eventually running all the time.

But now, at this age and knowing what I know, it’s different. There is no number, no mountaintop. No waist size in sight, no one to attract but my wife of 22 years and whatever ego-puffing momentary glances I imagine may come my way from the moms at my son’s school at dropoff time. Fitness is what I want, a chance to avoid the wheelchair that my poor Dad has been condemned to because he worked so hard for us kids that he couldn’t allow himself permission to pursue anything so selfish as exercise. (Depression-era kids always put themselves last in adulthood.)

My goal now is to make it to my 90s with a sound mind in a reasonably sound body, to walk easily enough, to keep doing yoga until I need a ride to the lessons. This will take some of the grace of God, but I have to do my part. I want to live long enough to prove my theory that God created donuts to be eaten…maybe less often, but they sure aren’t there to be ignored. God is not a sadist.

So whatever goal(s) I reach, there will be no fanfare. I’ll be too busy learning how to be thin. — Adam Barr

Copyright 2012 Adam Barr

Get Up, Stand Up…Stand Up for Your (Desk) Rights…

True, Bob Marley had weightier matters in mind. But weight and other matters could become less of a problem if more of us stood up to work.

Recent research suggests that office workers who use a standing desk for at least part of the day have fewer health problems and may be more productive. (Here’s another good story about it from the website of Marketplace, the American Public Media radio show.) I had heard for years that it’s a good idea — and as the Business Week article linked above says, Churchill and others knew all about it. So why not give it a try?

I stood up from my nice conventional desk and walked around as I thought it over. Good standing desks are expensive, even though they are handsome and well-made — sometimes up to $2,000. IKEA has an solid inexpensive computer workstation that’s height-adjustable, but it doesn’t really match the decor of my home office. (It’s a lot of masculine brown and hardwoods, with terra cotta red on two walls.) As I pondered, my eye lit on my overflow bookcase.

Don’t worry; this is just a prototype. The golf clubs and sun hat stay, though.

I quickly grabbed a tape measure from my wife’s design studio. Thirty-six inches high. Let’s see, for a nearly-six-foot man, they recommend a 44-inch-high surface. Hm. A breakfast-in-bed-style tray? Turns out they’re a little low. Small ironing board? Same deal.

Necessity is the mother of corrugated cardboard. I rooted around in the garage until I found some old boxes in a few likely heights. Tossing a towel over them to guard against scratches and computer heat, I set about experimenting.

For me, a 7 1/2 inch-high box plus the height of the keyboard resulted in a comfortable typing position for my wrists, which can sit flat on the spaces made for them in front of the keyboard on my MacBook. But how about the standing part? I don’t usually wear shoes indoors, so it’s just me and the hardwood floor. After awhile, I felt the back of my calves begin to tighten up. O.K.; there’s an area that could benefit from some standing, or at least changing things up occasionally.

The conventional wisdom recommends alternate periods of standing and sitting until your frame gets used to full-time verticality at work. Meanwhile, I make-shifted another temporary solution regarding the floor. A yoga mat folded double, or even at single thickness, makes barefoot or stocking-foot standing much more comfortable.

Relief of that little pressure enabled me to explore other parts of my body while standing, and also to use body awareness techniques I have learned in yoga to get into good positions. Once the hand height on the keyboard was good, I could evaluate the shoulders. Hunched or relaxed? When the elbows drop down into position comfortably, the shoulders tend to relax too.

A follow-on benefit of good shoulder position is the opening — more like a relaxed spreading — of the chest. Sitting at conventional desks, working on computers, many of us have a tendency to pull our arms forward, closing the chest between the parentheses of the biceps. This is O.K. if you get up and stretch your chest open from time to time. But every so often, we all get busy, gets a head of productive steam on, and then look up and, oops, three solid hours of chest-crushing computer-sitting time has gone by. For me, that also comes with a tendency to turtle my neck forward, as if leaning toward the screen somehow jacks up my Calvin Trillin Factor and makes me a better writer.

But standing allows the muscles of your chest to spread out a bit, encouraging good, muscle-stacked posture with your spine in a comfortably straight position. You can feel a pleasant stretch between your pectoral muscles, and in your collarbone area. My neck tends to stay pillared in the proper place over my shoulders, instead of leaning forward too much.

With the upper half comfy, you can be aware of your knees: straight but not locked, feet flat on the floor or mat, about a foot apart inside-to-inside…and there you go.

I was surprised, once I stood easy, how long I could stay up and stay alert. Once in awhile, before any muscles fatigued, I would pick up something I needed to read and sit down at my “main” desk, or in the armchair near the bookshelf wall.  A break from standing — and looking at the monitor — was energizing.

All that remains is the question of whether to build a small table to elevate my keyboard as a permanent solution to the problem temporarily solved my cardboard box prototype, or buy something. Either way, I think I’m up, or mostly up, to stay. — Adam Barr

 

Copyright 2012 Adam Barr