—Thomas Perls, Harvard researcher into longevity

When I was a kid, I read just about everything I could get my grubby little fingers on. One of my favourite books, which I read over and over again, was I Am Joe’s Body. It was a collection of short articles which had appeared in Readers’ Digest (shudder), and each one was about a different body part. I Am Joe’s Liver, I Am Joe’s Brain, and so on (the wimminfolk were granted I Am Jane’s Uterus). The articles featured chatty body parts who would discuss, in the first person, who they were and what they did. I particularly loved the throat, who demonstrated an air of affronted dignity over being considered “just a piece of garden hose”.

If our bodies could speak to us, what would they say? For many of us, they would probably say something like, “Stop abusing me, you dumbshit, I’m trying to do my job here!”

Whenever I travel, I experience bodily dissociation. During the process of traveling, the body is a nuisance to be taken care of. One is always thinking about where to be able to pee next, that one has furry teeth from drinking the cruddy airplane coffee, pushing food into one’s eating orifice as fuel, trying to ignore the ache of sitting in an uncomfortable seat, etc. One of my greatest fears involves getting food poisoning on vacation and having to spend eight hours of turbulence locked into an airplane bathroom while my insides explode.

Once I arrive at my destination, it’s like my head suddenly remembers it’s connected to something with needs and a personality of its own, who needs love and attention.

Many of us, however, retain that sense of bodily alienation. Bodies are separated from thoughts, and regarded as something like a clunky old station wagon which is ugly but functional for carrying around children and groceries. When I speak to clients who are struggling with body image and healthy behaviour, the root of it seems to be some kind of body alienation. I don’t want to get all psychobabble here, so I won’t go into my crackpot theories about mind-body duality, but I want to point out one thing which might make us change our views about our bodies.

Our bodies love us, and want us to stay alive and healthy as long as possible.

Our bodies are very functional. They want to do what they think will benefit us the most, even if we don’t like what that solution is. Your body doesn’t hate you because it puts on fat. Your body loves you and wants you to stay alive in the next famine. Your body doesn’t hate you because it hurts when you hunch over a desk for eight hours; it loves you and wants you to know that you are placing stress on it, so it signals you that you are doing something damaging. At all times, the body is trying to do the best it knows how.

What is a good body? It’s not necessarily one that shows up on the best dressed list for the Oscars, or struts down the catwalk, though it can be. All bodies are good bodies in that they contain the potential to perform little miracles every day.

Nobody has yet invented a perpetual motion machine, but your heart is able to beat and beat and beat and beat, millions of times a year, every year of your life. Our bones are stronger than most artificially created materials, including concrete. We can sneeze at over 100 miles per hour. Bodies six feet tall and hundreds of pounds can balance on two relatively tiny little feet, an accomplishment which has yet to be replicated by robot builders. There are many more factoids like this about the human body, which reveal it as a wonder of engineering.

I was in the delivery room for my sister’s labour and had a crotch-cam view of the baby emerging. Nothing you read can prepare you for seeing an actual baby come out of someone’s body. You start off thinking, “Geez, I don’t know if I really want to be looking at my sister’s privates”, and then suddenly you’re thinking, “HOLY FUCKING SHIT, THERE’S A GODDAMNED BABY COMING OUT!!! WHOOOOOOO!!!!!!” And you’re watching that vagina like it’s the freakin’ Super Bowl played by naked clowns on fire. Dig this: some humans can make other humans in their tummies. How freaking outstandingly neato is that?!

I’d like to say my sister was thinking deep thoughts about the miracle of birth at this moment, approximately 2 minutes after my nephew was born, but from the dopey grin on her face, she’s more likely thinking, “Ohhhh painkillers yesshh…”

The best part of it is, all of us get one of these amazing machines (well, not all of us get the baby-growing ones, nor use the baby-growing feature on them, but that’s cool). We might not be able to afford a swanky car or big-screen TeeVee, but all of us get a fascinating, awe-inspiring machine for our very own. Why, then, do so many people balk at properly paying its upkeep? We take the time to put oil in our cars, wipe the food grease off our dishwashers, upgrade our computers. Why is it so hard for us to “find time” to take care of the most important machine of all, a machine which works better the more you use it, a machine which is self-maintaining and self-repairing?

Perhaps one reason is that we have lost the sense of wonder abour our bodies which they deserve. We define good bodies by how they look, not what they do. But think about it-what if you defined your body in terms of its ability and potential? What if you stopped bitching and moaning about how you lost the genetic lottery because you don’t have rippling abs naturally, and started thinking about how you won the genetic lottery by virtue of being alive and able to read this? You know how many mistakes can be made when you’re trying to organize a bunch of things or people all at once. Imagine trying to organize millions, billions of things just right, every time, in order to create a human from bits of inert proteins. Those proteins all had to tango together in order to make you.

If you’re fighting your body, stop. If you’re treating it right, keep doing so. Bring the old girl some flowers every now and again, tell her you love her. Now go and hit the gym. She’ll thank you with stronger bones, better posture and balance, a zippier metabolism, and a host of other things. Enjoy your gift!

“There is, and long has been, a simmering hostility against women in hockey. The more boorish attitude is… that they’re just a bunch of lesbians anyway — a sad prejudice only reinforced when former hockey Olympian Nancy Drolet married her partner, Nathalie, in a Quebec civil ceremony.”

Now, I appreciate (I think) the spirit in which that was written. The writer is commenting on the various types of official and unofficial discouragement women face when trying to play sports, especially sports which aren’t ladylike. However, there is a piece which is missing here, and it has to do with that L-word which everyone seemed to like to say a few years ago when Ellen was big news.

One of my previous workout partners, a former hockey and national-level softball player, told me that as she was growing up in rural Canada, the stigma of lesbianism in sports was one which all the athletes and coaches openly rejected. Which meant that the players and coaches who actually were lesbians (like my friend) had to stay in the closet and keep their dykey mouths shut. Rejecting the stereotype of athletic women as a bunch of lesbians is one thing, but often, doing so with such unequivocal enthusiasm merely serves to perpetuate the homophobia that constrains women’s activities. The righteously indignant battle cry of “We’re not lesbians!” contains the implicit message, “Cause lesbians are bad!”

Think about it a bit more. Why are lesbians seen as bad in this context? Because they are thought to transgress gender norms. They are supposedly masculine, butchy, unfeminine, aggressive, hairy, etc., basically everything good girls are not. So, the message is not only that women who play sports are lesbians, but since lesbians are masculine, then women who play sports are masculine. Good girls, then, do not play sports. QED. Homophobia does a nice little tango with sexist norms, and the end result is that the straight grrls have to practically get married on the field to prove their heterosexuality, and the queer grrls are made to feel ashamed for letting down the team. Who the hell cares if Nancy marries Nathalie? Why is it their responsibility not to “reinforce a sad prejudice”? The people reinforcing the sad prejudice are the ones who are discouraging girls from playing sports, not the dykes who are brave enough to be themselves.

It’s time to stop pushing sportdykes into the closet just to make everyone feel better about their femininity. It’s time to stop protesting too much, to stop worrying about “our image” and our connection to athletes who happen to be queer. Lesbian issues are women’s issues, and intolerance against some hurts all of us. It’s time to start saying, “Hell yes, some of us are lesbians, and that’s okay!”

More reading: Strong Women, Deep Closets by Pat Griffin

In other words, soy is the new SuperIngredient in food products. It’s everywhere: soymilk, soy cream, soy cheese, soy nuts, soy chips, soy bars, tofurkey, soysauges, soyloney, probably soy freaking candies somewhere. Soy is supposedly good for women. Soy is the Messiah. Soy will save us from illness and existential trauma. Soy slices and dices. Soy is the new hemp, which was the new olive oil, which was the new oat bran, which was the new fat free.

But wait a minute. Soy ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Soy contains phytoestrogens, plant chemicals that demonstrate the actions of estrogens in humans. This is why it used to be recommended that menopausal women take soy. However, messing with your hormones randomly and without a standardized dose can be dicey. When combined with other sources of estrogens like HRT or oral/injected contraceptives, the total load on the body can be significant. Soy has also been implicated in thyroid problems; it can exacerbate existing thyroid dysfunction symptoms, and trigger an unnoticed thyroid condition. Given that many people have an undiagnosed thyroid problem, this is significant indeed. The mechanism of soy’s action is apparently to inhibit or depress the synthesis of important thyroid hormones. The thyroid plays a major role in helping us maintain a healthy weight; if it goes out of whack, the body may rapidly deposit bodyfat.(Divi RL et al, 1997).

Soy isoflavones, taken in sufficient quantities, will stimulate breast growth in males (I’ve seen do-it-yourself breast growth in male-to-female transsexuals who used soy to do it). An interesting study from Germany looked at soy versus casein protein in rats; the rats who were fed the soy formula had a lower rate of energy expenditure, aka a slower metabolism (bear in mind, though, that humans aren’t rats). The research at this point remains tentative in its inferences, and it appears that moderate consumption of soy may have some benefits for some things, but there appears to be mounting evidence that overconsumption of soy can be detrimental.

Now, I’m not saying that you have one slice of tofu and immediately grow a goiter. The problem is the amount of soy consumed. If you push soy products into your gob in large quantities several times a week, you could be in for problems. If you have the occasional tofu hot pot at your favourite Szechuan restaurant, then you’re probably fine. Soy is not safe simply because it is natural, and it is not a cure for everything that ails you. We tend to clutch superstitiously at food fetishes, and get myopic in our desire to eat well. The point here is that we look to one food to be magical, and what we miss in this well-meaning endeavour is balance and moderation.

Soy will not save you from the boogeyman, so put the soy bacon back and jeez, have something that actually might taste good.

More links on possible dangers of soy:

http://www.thyroid-info.com/articles/soydoerge.htm
http://thyroid.about.com/library/weekly/aa041202a.htm
http://www.mercola.com/article/soy/

In my experience as both a student and instructor, I know that in fact, time is not usually the problem. Time management, and how we experience time, is the problem. One exercise I make my first year students do is log their time use for a week. They discover that although they feel overworked, they actually spend a lot of time doing useless crap like watching TV, playing on AIM or ICQ, standing in line, etc. When they write down their time use, they have a visual representation of how much of their day is truly wasted.

Another thing that people do is spend energy thinking about a time other than now. I’m not saying planning for the future is a bad thing, although probably all of our pension fund portfolios will wind up in the toilet thanks to the recent corporate scandals. But people spend
existence in the past or the future without doing anything productive. They yearn nostalgically for an imagined childhood. They meticulously recall their failures. Or, they look forward to the day when they will magically be thin, rich, and beautiful, and Antonio Banderas will finally notice them.

Why am I jabbering on about this on a fitness site? Well, first, try this. Keep track of how much time in a day you spend on thinking about stuff other than the present. That includes spending time hating your body and wishing it was something else, spending time lying in bed thinking about what you ate that day, planning to start a diet/fitness program on Monday or the first of next month, spending time worrying about all the crap waiting for you at work. Do this for several days or a week. Hell, get a stopwatch if you like. Either you’ll have an accurate record of your time spent or you’ll discover just how much you can lie to an inanimate object.

Look at how much time you’ve spent being mentally elsewhere. Identify points at which this time could be better used. When could you be present more in the moment? When could you connect fully with the present and act, not think? When can you be and do in the right now?

Stop. Pay attention. Look around. Experience your body as it presently is. What are you feeling? What is around you? Is your foot asleep? Is your tummy growling? Do you feel edgy from too much caffeine or low blood sugar?

What can you do for your body right now that would be productive and positive?

Could you throw away that sugary, chemical-laden shit you’re snacking on? Could you get up out of your chair and walk around? Could you stop hunching your shoulders up around your ears because of how tense you feel about an imagined future? Could you drink a glass of water? Could you give your body the nutrients it’s craving? Could you dump that knapsack full of past and future emotional baggage?

For your body, there is no other time than the present. It responds dynamically to what you are experiencing, moment to moment. While your body bears the scars of the past and perhaps something lurks in the future, for the most part your body is occupied with the here and now. As a result, it doesn’t get persnickety. It’s not a bean counter. It just tries its best to deal to whatever you give it, and goes with the flow. If it wants something, it says so. Either you listen or you ignore it, though it often gets its own way in the end.

Slight tangent, bear with me. One significant contribution of Marx to our ideas about work (and by the way, I believe Marx’s contributions were primarily philosophical, not economic) was the notion of alienation. Marx argued that the worker had become alienated from his or her work. Because the worker was unable to begin and end a project and see the production of an object to completion, s/he had no sense of what s/he was actually doing. For example, let’s say you work in a factory and your job is to make a widget. You don’t craft the widget from scratch, taking it from raw materials to final product. You just do one little tiny part of that process; maybe you’re the person who adds a gear or spring to it. It comes to you incomplete, you do your job, then you send it away again, still incomplete. You never see it again. At the end of the workday, do you feel good about what you’ve done? Well, says Marx, probably you don’t. Because you haven’t been fully involved in the production of that object. You have nothing at the end of the day that you can look at and say, “I made that”.

(By the way, I expounded on this theory of meaning through activity to a stranger on a bus once. It was late at night and we were the only two people on board. He hated his job as a call centre worker. The work was meaningless, pointless, and had little value. It was inconceivable to him that I loved my job, because everyone around him hated their jobs. I mentioned this theory of alienation from work. He had an epiphany. By the end of our conversation he had decided to quit his job and pursue his dream of being a photographer. I wonder if he ever went through with it.)

Anyway.

We are often like that factory worker. We are often alienated from our bodies. Though we see our bodies from beginning to end, we often have no sense of achievement. We merely maintain them with the barest minimum of attention. And we cheat them psychically by wishing they were something they are not. We don’t inhabit them fully. We just drive them around with our brains, hoping that maybe our body will get into an accident and we can use the insurance money to buy a snappier model.

As a result we live in a physical time frame which cheats us from fully experiencing our bodies. We deny them what they need and give them what they don’t want. Our goal, then, is to live more fully in our physical present, in the here and now.

What can you do for your body right now?

Try to imagine, if you will, this conversation with different genders. A Spokesboy excitedly relates to the Pilates Dude: “I looked in the mirror and there was a ribby pigeon chest! I haven’t seen that since I was eleven!” First, we’d think: euw. Then, we’d think: what is wrong with this man that he wants to emulate a body he had before he hit puberty? Some of us might even wonder at the sexual proclivities of a male that attempts to retain an eternal childhood (think Michael Jackson).

This Pilates exchange reminds me of a scene from my undergraduate class this year. We are discussing body image and the media. My students, who are mostly aged 19-21, and almost all female, are expressing their discomfiture with socially imposed standards of body norms. While on the subject of clothing to fit a variety of bodies, it comes up that a few students are bummed that they can no longer fit into clothing from the children’s department.

Again, I try to imagine an adult man standing in the children’s department, clutching a pair of Superman Underoos sadly, melancholy over his lost puny urchinhood.

Why are adult women giggling like morons over achieving a child’s body, or trying desperately to find a slinky evening dress in GapKids? Would we be so excited about retaining other aspects of childhood? Oh sure, it’s fun to throw the frisbee around, laugh at fart noises, eat birthday cake chocolate-icing-first, and play hide-and-seek with the dog, but would we be quite as thrilled about wetting the bed, having our parents give us an allowance/ground us/tell us when to go to sleep, and other adults patting us on the head patronizingly and lying to us about reality (“Rover’s just sleeping, honey!”)? Why do we seek to emulate an ideal which is inappropriate?

I can understand that many people, male and female, are hesitant to accept many of the responsibilities that come with the Carlsberg Years. Mutual funds and mortgages make boring party conversation, body hair can develop a sentient consciousness and migratory instincts, and having to pay taxes and get up in the morning (or evening) for work is a drag. Undoubtedly many folks long for the apparently carefree lifestyle of youth (although personally I think it’s way more fun to be an adult who makes enough money to have fun in the way I couldn’t afford as a teenager).

But pleasantly reminiscing about the joys of youth is different from fetishizing the physical incarnation of a child. Adult women are adult women, with breasts and hips and butts and bellies, with saggy bits and wrinkly bits and bits that you can’t bounce a quarter off (just for the record, though, I’m not condoning throwing change at children to test their tensile properties). Adults have jobs (or they go to grad school and hit the snooze button on a career, like me) and they pay bills and they are often in charge of other peoples’ lives and they do stuff and know stuff, and that’s what being a grownup is all about. You are not a child; you are not a teenage girl (uh, unless you are a teenage girl, and then that’s cool, and you more than anyone else know how darn gross and icky it is when your mom tries to fit into your clothes). It’s creepy and sad to idolize children’s bodies as the ideal. Why not enjoy fulfilling your adult potential instead of spending all your time and energy on arrested development?

Besides, it’s important to be bigger and stronger than a child so you can kick their butts for the first piece of chocolate-frosted cake.

The thing that bothers me about this is not that people are manipulating their bodies. I like the idea of body modification and I’m not bothered by things that are frankly fake. I dream of being a cyborg as I age with all kinds of weird mechanical shit attached to me. What I object to is the following:

1. That the “you go, girl” message of “shopping and fucking” feminism has a logical conclusion here.

Don’t like your body? Then buy something to change it. Don’t get messy and talk about how this “choice” feels more like coercion, honey. It’s your choice, choice, glorious choice!! Get out that VISA card! Shyeah, right! I guess that vaginal plastic surgery to make us look like we have teenage pornstar twats really does increase our potential for orgasm and makes it easier for men to find the clitoris. Ooh, it just makes me want to sick Betty Dodson on all their sorry behinds.

And we really will find ourselves being more expressive once we have our face frozen with botulism toxin. I can see the Woman of 2003, lips puffy from collagen and facial muscles paralyzed, on the steps of Parliament now: “As Prime Minister, I vow to mmphf gurgle mumble…” North American feminists of the 1960s and 70s were all about taking control of our bodies, about talking openly about sexuality, breastfeeding, menstruation, and other body experiences, in an age which tried to deodorize and sanitize their female messiness out of existence. In the year 2002, that control can only be achieved through consumption. Choice, of course, is a limited one. In the same way that I could buy any colour of Model T Ford as long as it was black, or that I have a choice between Coke or Pepsi, I can have any kind of surgery I want as long as it conforms to a particular ideal. What if I visited one of those vaginal surgeons to get some “upgrades”, say, another one (it’s good to have a spare)? Maybe a little extra detailing, racing stripes perhaps, attachments of ambiguous gender origin? You know, something custom made? Would there be a surgeon who would do that for me? Unless I had as much coolness and cash as Orlan, probably not. I should also add that strikingly absent from this entire discussion is the issue of body mutilation that happens without the woman’s consent, in a variety of countries worldwide.

2. That people who should know better are preying on the most vulnerable market of all: teenage girls.

It’s one thing for an adult woman to make the choice to have surgery. It’s another thing for a girl passing through one of the most traumatic times in life to do so. Sure, we hear about how teen girls are savvy consumers. We also hear about how much they hate themselves, their bodies, and their lives. Sexual harassment and sexual coercion of young women in school, workplace, and personal relationships are well documented. Too few young people have families that are dedicated to their positive nurturance and emotional wellbeing. Teenage girls are still being taught that they’re the gatekeepers of sexual morality, and that the only will they should care about is someone else’s, either their parents’ or their boyfriends’ (let’s leave baby dykes, bi grrls, and girls who think they might be boys out of this for a moment because as far as mass consumer culture is concerned they’re supposed to be invisible anyway). Girls who were strong and confident at age 9 are saying, “I don’t know”, “I don’t have any opinions”, and “I feel stupid/ugly/fat” at age 14. Making these girls a focus group for expensive surgery feels to me like kicking them when they’re down.

I can hear y’all saying, “Gee Krista, you sound, y’know, angry and bitter and all that.” Well fuck yes I’m angry! People are making money off of other people who are vulnerable, which is pretty much a few steps removed from pimping. Lovely teenage girls (and increasingly, boys) are locking themselves in their bathrooms to puke up dinner and stare in horror at their imagined hideousness. No doubt many surgeons have qualms about giving breast implants to youngsters, but apparently some don’t. In any case, marketers of mass culture schlock don’t seem to feel pangs of guilt about creating zombiefied, self-loathing young consumers.

3. That we hear about how boys are suffering too, so that makes it okay.

Of course they are. We’re all suffering in this stupid culture which forces girls into one claustrophobic box labeled “Femininity”, and boys into another labeled “Masculinity”. I’d say girls are worse off in a society which is still patriarchal. But aside from that, it’s not all right to then prey on a new group of victims. No questions are being asked about the system which fuels the insecurity and self-hatred of young people, why girls are made to feel too fat, unshapely, small-breasted (or large-breasted), bignosed, bad-haired, and undesirable in a myriad of ways; why boys are made to feel too sissy, too pigeon-chested, skinny-legged, chinless, and convinced about their overall lack of Marboro manliness. And that’s not even beginning to talk about the layers of shame imposed by mass culture on young people of colour, queers, disabled, gender transgressers, etc. etc. etc.

Just because everyone is fucked up to a different degree still does not make it right.

4. The emergence of medical language to describe imaginary “deformities” so that they can then be operated on.

It’s one thing to make a change, like rearranging furniture. It’s another thing to be told one’s natural body is inherently diseased. Saggy breasts are a “condition” called ptosis. The fat deposits on our hips and thighs are called a “violin deformity”. DEFORMITY! And I won’t even go there about the lines in our faces from speaking, laughing, expressing.

Apparently living in a body causes deformity. It reminds me a lot of those feminine deodorant spray ads that told us our crotches were swampy, horrible, pungent places where men feared to tread unless they smelled like gardenias (our crotches, not the men). Oddly enough we don’t hear too much about how men’s bodies are diseased and their features deformed. We see tshirts like, “This isn’t a gut, it’s a gas tank for a sex machine!” instead (I actually saw a guy wearing this at my gym last week). However, see #3. Male insecurities could be an untapped market for “discovering” new physical “pathologies”. Perhaps SSS (Scrotal Sagginess Syndrome, which can be tightened to suggest erectile potential and youthful vigour)? Or Dorsal Gravitational Migration Alopecia (that weird thing where aging male head hair seems to migrate downwards to ears and back)?

So what does this mean for those of us who lift weights, especially since body transformation is a big part of the process? Well, for one thing, it’s a transformation that I really am in control of. It doesn’t require me give that control to someone else so that they can pronounce my body acceptable.

Second, it shifts my focus about my body. Sure, I still think about how I look, but how I look is now on my terms. Also, I care a whole lot more about what I can do.

I finish my coffee and look down at my body. I haven’t shaved my legs for a few days. My toenail polish is peeling. My breasts, hiding behind the baggy folds of my bathrobe, haven’t seen a C cup since 30 pounds ago. My hands are small with stubby fingers and short nails. And I smile, because I know that those hands wrapped themselves around a bar, and those legs pulled that bar off the floor. I give my knee an amiable pat. My body, my friend.