I often get asked how I manage to stay fit with the burden of a full-time job plus teaching plus training clients plus not being a total social recluse. Well, I won’t bullshit you: it’s not easy. The temptation to sit on my ass in front of CSI and shove Guylian chocolates into my gob is pretty strong when the days get dark. Nobody pays me to spend a few extra hours on Sunday shopping and cooking lunches for the upcoming week so that I don’t have to rely on the cafeteria swill at work.

But just because staying fit is not easy doesn’t mean it’s not very do-able. After years of training, my number one goal is not a particular achievement, it’s a process: I am committed to regular training and eating well, no matter what that looks like. So if my squat isn’t amazing and I never conquer the world, I don’t care (of course, I would not reject an awesome squat and world domination). I am first and foremost concerned with the process, not the results. Many athletes, if not the majority, have difficulty with a regular fitness program after their competitive career ends. Their training is a means to an end: a faster time, a harder throw, or perfect tens. Their programs are highly structured and frequently controlled by other people such as coaches and nutritionists. Once they’re done, their motivation for training is often done too.

We frequently see fitness as something that is out of reach of the average person. Oh sure, that type A executive can go out running when it’s minus a zillion degrees outside, but that’s because they’re driven and insane and probably repressing some childhood trauma. And our mass media models of fitness are “perfect”: there’s no flab on them, they’d never let a gram of saturated fat pass their lips, and for sure they never sit in front of the TV on a Friday night playing video games on the Xbox, drinking beer, and crunching their way through a bag of chips. Their perky asses filmed through gauze never see the business side of a La-Z-Boy. (Actually, many fitness magazine models look as if they would crumple beneath the onslaught of a manual chore or two. Give me a sweet-faced built-for-comfort-not-for-speed farm girl any day for toughness).

Noted website author busted while engaging in nutritional crimes! Achieves high score on SSX!

Once, when I was invited to talk to a group about fitness, I arrived to meet a skeptical audience. One woman looked at my hobbitesque self with surprise. “So you’re the weightlifter,” she said. “I imagined you as an enormous blonde.” Someone in the audience asked me how often I recommended working out. I said I thought that the average person should have daily activity, but could do fairly well with three to four workouts a week. I could see people in the back shaking their head like three bouts of activity a week involved hiking to Tibet to do it.

Well, news flash. Most of us schmos trying to get and stay in shape aren’t star athletes. We’re just average folks trying to stave off decay and gravity as long as possible. Many of us have an injury or two that we have to work around: perhaps we got a little too overzealous with running, or had to move a couch up a circular staircase. On a December evening, I look around the gym changeroom, and I don’t see a lot of supermodels (although I do see some cool tattoos). I see folks who, despite pressures to do otherwise, hauled their butts to the gym on a cold winter night. We aren’t perfect, and sometimes it’s an effort to get out and do something physical, but we share a common contention that the alternative—inactivity and poor nutrition—sucks worse.

Here’s my average weekday morning.

6 am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.
6:10: Alarm goes off again. Groan. Pull pillow over head. Realize I forgot to set the timer on the coffee machine again. Consider blaming husband for coffee crimes. Crawl out of bed.
6:20: Coffee is brewing, thank Gawd.
6:30: Stumble around a bit, attempt conversation with husband. Glance at the paper, throw down some cottage cheese slurry.
6:40: Fire up a taped episode of my beloved CSI, haul out the weights, set them up on the living room floor, and get ready to spend half an hour pumping iron, shadow boxing, jumping rope, and dusting for fingerprints with Gil Grissom and the night shift crew.
7:15: Leap in the shower.
7:45: Grab a prepacked lunch that includes veggies, protein, and nice whole grains from the fridge, throw the container into my knapsack, and out the door I go.

Throughout the day: squeeze in a walk or a flight of stairs wherever possible. Play “I’m Late”: Run for the bus and train even if I don’t need to — this gets my heart racing, and usually this also scores me a pretty sweet seat.

Stellar? Hardly. Routine of champions? Probably not. But guess what: I do this every day, and that’s what really counts.

The process is more important than the product. The product can be fantastic! But it’s the commitment to the process that truly defines fitness as a lifestyle and a mindset.

Also, if you’ve enjoyed and benefited from this free, noncommercial site (ok, I did whore my book a little bit, but give me a break), consider spreading the good karma by donating something to your favourite charity in return. You can even do it online! Try CanadaHelps.org for ideas.

I also work in another misunderstood field: fitness and nutrition. It’s understandable that people have incorrect ideas about what fitness and nutrition are really about. I recently saw a series of photos from the recent Weider Olympia event that illustrates what a joke that arena of “fitness” is. Yes, the “girls” (for some reason they are rarely “women”) are muscular, lean, and lovely, but somehow, having them demonstrate their good health in cages and cop outfits doesn’t exactly inspire me to pull my face out of the Cheeto bowl. This vision of fitness doesn’t reflect my life or my needs.

Sometimes people want to learn more about what I do as a trainer. I’ve learned from experience, though, that few people are genuinely interested in learning about the subject. Fitness and nutrition is, rather, a site for our social anxieties.

As soon as they find out about my second job, one response people have is to begin confessing their sins. Or, they announce triumphantly they are beyond caring about their bodies: they will wrap their cigars with a filet mignon and smoke that sucker while driving, seatbelt-less, 100 in a 50 zone. In that case, they view fitness types as some special breed of self-flagellating ascetics, lean as whippets, waking at 4 am to run while sucking with pursed lips on an alfalfa sprout. Somehow, they interpret chain smoking and eating Ho-Hos as a celebration of life’s joys.

They might say, “I couldn’t do what you do. I like to eat too much.” Honey, I love to eat too. Much of my life is spent thinking about the acquisition, preparation, and consumption of food. A simple recipe for figs in marsala wine can bring me to near-tears. I recall the radicchio-laced gorgonzola I had in Padua like most people recall their first kiss; I grieve for the closure of a particularly wonderful Indian restaurant and their butter chicken specialty with a deep and profound melancholy. And all the while, I remain dedicated towards feeding my body to nourish it. The job of nutrition is not to constrain but to liberate, and to assist people to make better choices. It’s not incompatible with pleasure and enjoyment of food.

In extreme cases, my physical shape and size are taken as a personal insult, as if my mere corporeal existence is a sign of someone else’s failure.

In all of these situations, food and activity acquires a moral character of goodness and badness. Ice cream equals guilt. Sloth equals shame. “Fitness people”, whoever they are, are body fascists who think they know better than everyone else, and want us all to shove more Brussels sprouts down our quivering, resisting gullets.

The funny thing is, few of the complainers actually seem to do anything about their own negative feelings about their bodies. They seem to rather prefer the guilt, shame and self-loathing. Which makes me wonder, what benefit are people deriving from feeling badly about themselves and fitness? Why has fitness and nutrition acquired this quasi-religious status that positions fitness “experts” as inquisitors and allows people to repeat a cycle of sinning, repentance, and penance? Many people feel that pointing out facts of physiology is somehow akin to abandoning them or judging them. Physiology isn’t good or bad, it just is. It follows certain rules, albeit complex. Some elements we have control over. Others we do not. Ideally, we control the things we can control, and don’t worry about the rest. We have control over more processes than we think. But we don’t drive cars into walls while wearing no seatbelts and then bitch about the laws of
physics because we launched ourselves through the windshield.

When I talk about fitness and good nutrition, people hear skinny and starving oneself. They assume that I am trying to convert them to a cult of prim, suffering sylphs. Yet of course, skinny and self-starving is the very antithesis of what fitness and wellness are about, particularly if it’s the type of skinny commonly achieved by young women by living on celery, caffeine, smokes, and self-disgust.

Fitness can be broadly interpreted as the power to do or readiness for a particular activity, or life in general. Fitness is not a size or a shape. It’s a lifestyle and an attitude that is accessible to everyone regardless of ability. Good nutrition means making wise food choices aimed at optimizing the body’s machinery and enabling its self-healing processes. It does not mean living on the diet of a medieval cave-dwelling hermit. It does not mean eating only rice cakes and iceberg lettuce. Man, that shit ain’t even food.

If you feel threatened or defensive about fitness and nutrition, try to figure out why instead of junking the whole better living project altogether. Then figure out ways to solve the problem instead of stewing about how much it sucks.

Do you want to see better, more appropriate role models? Throw out the fitness rags and get inspired by real people instead. Go and visit your local soccer pitch or softball field in the summer–you might find a bunch of like-minded women who’d be happy to let you join them. Check out community centres, boxing gyms, martial arts dojos, skating rinks, rowing clubs, university fitness centres, pools, climbing gyms, parks, anywhere you can find besides a chrome ‘n’ tone gym, and look for women who are into fitness and wellness for its own sake. At my climbing gym there are no pneumatic supermodels, but lots of tough, inspiring, chalk-dusty female physiques scurrying up the walls—and most of them are on the sunset side of 35. When I see a gray-haired woman with bowling-ball deltoids doing a one-handed pullup on a 5.11 overhang, I can’t help but cheer inside.

Do you need help to achieve your goals? Then read this site, or ExRx.net, or go and buy a book such as Walter Willett‘s Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy or Stuart McRobert’s Insider’s Tell All Handbook of Weight Training
Technique.

Do you need support? Find a workout buddy or support community, in person or online, such as in YahooGroups. Start your own group.

Do you feel alone? You aren’t — find someone else who shares your interests or who is willing to listen to your concerns. Smile and say hi to everyone in the gym. It’ll feel like less of a gauntlet of perfect bodies and more like a gathering of folks just like you.

Do you feel bored by your current selection of food and exercise? Take a cooking class and find a fun new activity. Go beyond canned tuna and hamstering on the treadmill.

The only time someone like me should be seen as pushing you around is when you pay me to give you a boot in the ass. The rest of the time, it’s up to you.

My nephew is now just over two years old. Now, I know everyone says this about children they’re related to, but he’s adorable. He is good natured and pretty relaxed, although he does enjoy the usual two-year-old habits of dumping stuff all over the floor, banging things to hear the noise, and getting cranky without a nap. Over dinner, my sister told me that other parents had asked when she was going to get evaluated.

Evaluated?

Yes, evaluated for drugs. When was she going to look into putting him on Ritalin?

???

This question comes at a time when kids are experiencing inactivity, poor nutrition (in the sense of OVER, not UNDERnutrition), and obesity as never before. Children, some with ages in the single digits, are now showing signs of heart disease, insulin resistance, and diabetes that were previously reserved for middle-aged, sedentary Type A office workers. Thanks to state cutbacks, many schools have to pad their educational budgets with vending machine and crappy cafeteria contracts (to quote the Simpsons’s vision of a future school: “If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you? You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?” “Pepsi?” “Partial credit.”). Recently I saw an article about repetitive strain injuries in children: their hands are becoming damaged from the fine motions of video game consoles.

My sister and I both turned a critical eye to the wee tot, happily scribbling something incomprehensible–perhaps an exploding star nebula, perhaps an homage to Jackson Pollock–mostly on paper, but a little on the table, with his crayons. He seemed chilled out enough by toddler standards.

“He’s great”, said my sister, “as long as he gets an hour of exercise every day.” Hell, I thought, I feel much better with an hour of exercise every day, and I’m not a being of pure energy like a small child. Not to disparage or dismiss the real psychological needs that many children have, but I wonder whether the push for drugs stems largely from the disordered behaviour of over-sugared and under-exercised bodies. When I hear many parents explaining their choice to medicate their child, they cite reasons such as “He couldn’t sit still in class” or “She couldn’t focus”. But I can’t sit still either. I’m good for about thirty minutes of a boring meeting and then I too want to run around, yell, fidget, throw things, jump up and down, and pull someone’s hair. What the hell are kids doing sitting quietly in rows for six hours a day anyway? For one thing, if your school district has been anything like mine, their gym classes, and often their recesses, have been cut.

Now, as you know, I’m no fan of school gym classes. These tend to be ordeals of “team sports” where kids like me, who are losers at catching any projectile, suffer at the naturally coordinated hands of Genetically-Manufactured-for-the-Glory-of-the-Motherland youth. I also remember spending many a traditionally female recess standing around watching the boys do things. Why didn’t we girls take the initiative to kick or throw a ball, run around and scream, or push each other’s faces into the dirt? Well, for one thing, we knew we weren’t supposed to join the boys (how did we know? I have no idea. We just knew, like you know you’re not supposed to pee your pants in public).

But there has to be a better way. Young bodies aren’t meant to be wearing an ass groove into a chair so early. There have to be more choices than physical humiliation or nothing.

By the way, if you live in the northern regions, the leaves are turning. Rediscover the pleasures of walking this month. Go with your sweetie, your doggie, a friend, your mp3 player, or with no other company than your own thoughts.

Site reader Rosemary sent me this response after reading this month’s rant. Three Mistress cheers for Mr.G.!

I’m with you on your October rant. I will say, though, that not every
school has jettisoned activity,. At the elementary school my girls
attend, gym ain’t nothing like it was when I was a kid. My kids have
gym every day. I think for 1/2 an hour, it might be 45 minutes. (Okay,
you can call me a bad mom for not knowing that.) There is some
occasional team sport activity, but Mr. G. generally has them engaging
in the kind of activities that I can imagine them doing for the rest of
their lives. One week it’s scootering. One week it’s tumbling. One
week it’s fencing, or unicycling, etc. etc. Then at least one day a
week there’s what they call “stations,” which sound a little like
various calisthenics or similar activities. I have no idea how he
manages to do all these various activities. We’re an underfunded urban
school system. I have this vision that there is one classroom-sized set
of equipment that the elementary school gym teachers in Seattle pass
around to their schools. I have no idea if this is true or not.

He’s also great about getting the kids active in other ways. One day a
week he opens the gym at 8:00 and kids can come in and unicycle and
tumble. Right now, twice a week during one of the recesses he has a
group of kids running a mile. They are doing this as part of the 24
“honor miles” that kids who participate in the Seattle Kid’s Marathon
do. (They actually just run the final 1.2 miles on “race day.”)

I don’t know what other families think about this, but I think it’s
fantastic. It’s reinforcing my lessons at home that it’s not about being
good at a sport, its about getting out there and trying and having fun
in a way that keeps your body moving around. All the academic time in
the world isn’t going to sink in if the kids are antsy. And we all know
how much smarter we are when we work out for an hour then come back to
whatever was troubling us.

So tell your sister to keep her toddler running, and bouncing balls, and
stepping on his aunt’s toes, and doing everything else that doesn’t
involve a tv set. Don’t let her put him in a school that has cut recess
to emphasize academics. Talk about cutting off a nose to spite a
face!!! And if she has to, then help her figure out a fun way to have
him be active after school.

It’s a fact of life in most jobs. We hear a lot about how busy everyone is now, how time pressured, and most of all, how stressed out.

To some degree the pace of life has increased. However, our ability to seek leisure time has also vastly increased. The other day I saw a bumper sticker that read, “Unions: The People Who Brought You the Weekend.” 150 years ago, you could easily expect to work fourteen or sixteen hour days, six or maybe even seven days a week. The number of children in a family could commonly go into the double digits. If you lived on a farm you would work from the moment you opened your eyes in the morning till when you dropped into bed at night. People didn’t really die so much as they expired from exhaustion. In the time you weren’t working for pay, you would be putting a whole lot more effort into basic tasks: getting and preparing food, getting water, cleaning your living space, maintaining your home and self, keeping warm, etc. Much of our workload now is due to expectations, not necessity. We can provide ourselves with the fundamentals of life in a much shorter time; and they’re of better quality, too.

And yet we are all stressed right the hell out.

Some of these demands on us are real. We can’t do much about a sick child at 3 am, or a trauma situation in an emergency room if we are the attending physician. But much of this is of our own doing. My friend L tells me that she had a coworker once who was so manic and perfectionist that she phoned L late on a Friday night, from a back room during a family party, to argue about fonts in a newsletter. L says that she was the same way before she smartened up: she would wake up to check email in the middle of the night, or screech into a 7-11 on the way to work to send a fax.

I hear stories of colleagues going apoplectic over small perceived slights: a beaurocratic delay in paperwork, a typo in a letter, the price of coffee at the cafeteria downstairs. They shorten their vacations, stay in touch with the office from some remote location, and labour frantically on the weekends and late into the evenings.

I listen to parents talking. They are burned out from chauffering their kids to karate, to piano lessons, to soccer, to extracurricular remedial math classes so Junior can get the extra edge before university. They are micromanaging the lives of seven year olds, and as a result, they don’t take time for themselves, and everyone ends up completely freaked. My mother in law tells me that the woman down the street drives her children to school… two blocks away. There is so much structured fun I don’t believe many kids these days know how to jump in a mud puddle and lose themselves in the process of decapitating Barbies. I got an email from a mother who was trying to find time to exercise in between driving her children from formal activity to formal activity. I gently suggested that she scale back her children’s activities and exercise as a family. Every evening, why not throw a ball or frisbee around, or go for a walk with the dog? On the weekends, instead of running madly from class to class, why not go hiking, rollerblading, or bicycling as a group?

My sister had her baby at the same time as another female acquaintance, P. My sister’s toddler, who just turned two, enjoys lots of unstructured fun: making mud pies, ramming his toy trucks into other toy trucks, running amok in circles in the backyard, shaking his booty to music, banging wooden spoons on pots for the sheer joy of the noise it generates, scribbling on the couch (that last one was not such a hit with mom and dad). P’s toddler is going to classes and suffering through anxious episodes of instructional flash cards with his parents. P’s child is so flipped out from the pressure that for a period of time he took to banging his head rhythmically on any hard surface he could find.

It’s pretty sad when one can’t even be relaxed at age two. I assume that he’ll be one of the Ritalin’d and Prozac’d teenagers that show up in my undergraduate classroom, high strung and not really sure what the hell they’re doing there but my god they have to rush rush rush otherwise they will miss everything and not get ahead of the pack and not get a good career and then they will die penniless and alone. Personally I’d much rather these kids go hiking in Tibet or Greece for six months, make several screwups, have bad love affairs and some good adventures, and then worry about getting their act together. Gazing out over the tense faces of people who very recently cared deeply about Pokémon, but who are now desperately trying to handle a grownup workload, I feel a sense of profound unease.

Among all these hard, hard workers, I also catch a whiff of what could almost be termed dick waving in terms of comparing stress.

“I was up late last night fixing this.”
“Yeah, well I worked through Labour Day.”
“I haven’t seen my family in sixteen straight days.”
“I brought a sleeping bag to the office.”

Well whoopee shit for all of you.

Guess what you get at the end of it? Nothing. If you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, you nurse a nice little heart attack, repetitive strain injury, neck spasm, or nervous breakdown. Your lover, with whom you should be eating pints of Haagen Dazs in bed, holding hands, and giggling like idiotic schoolchildren, leaves you because you’re cheating on him or her with work. Your kid forgets your name and just refers to you as “Boss”. You chew your nails so badly that you end up with bloodied finger stumps.

A colleague of mine tells me that she tried taking up meditation to chill out. “Three hours of meditation. We just sat there. God, it was so stressful.”

Something is seriously fucking wrong here.

This past Friday, I finished work at 5:30. There were tasks waiting to be done but tough luck, they were going to wait till Monday morning. My best girlfriend, OMGBFFA, had cycled up to see me, and we were going to cycle home together. As I changed into my cycling gear, my neck was stiff and my shoulders hovered up around my earlobes. All I could think about was the letters I’d prepared for Professor So-and-So about the Such-and-Such. And don’t forget to pay the research assistants. Oh yeah, you’ll need to call Whatshisname about the Blahblahblah. My computer yowled, “Feed me, Seymour!”

On the way out the sun peeked through the clouds. A light breeze was blowing. With its every breath as I sped faster, a little piece of stress ripped away from my brain and spiralled away in the wind. When we could, we rode side by side and laughed about Stupid Work Tricks, funny things that friends had said, and the goofy looking dog we’d just passed.

When I got home after an hour of navigating the city streets with the kind of glee that only uncontrolled speed and the euphoria of physical work can produce, I was sweaty and tired but had completely forgotten about work. In honour of the passing of the great Julia Child, I poured a glass of red wine, and made a toast to the grande dame of cuisine. WWJD? She would pour a glass of wine, kick back, eat kalamata olives on her pizza, throw a little bit of butter into something, and never let us forget that life, like good food, is meant to be savoured and enjoyed.

“The funny thing is,” said Phil, “all the scientific research goes to the same place. No matter what angle the researchers take, it all ends up at the same destination: eat your fruits and vegetables and get off your ass.”

That destination, in other words, is frequent, regular activity and good nutrition. Yep, the same stuff you’ve been reading all over this site, and the same stuff that your grandma probably told you that you should be doing.

Monty Python fans in the reading audience may recall the final scene of the film The Meaning of Life, when the meaning of life is revealed in all its glorious banality: “Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations…” Research into fitness and nutrition is more or less the same thing.

People often feel confused by the plethora of well-meaning advice available. Scientific studies, when popularized, are often inflated and their results applied inappropriately. I mean, who wants to read a moderate, cautious recommendation? Who wants to read that the food or program studied is but a small piece of the puzzle? Who wants to read that wellness and health come from a lifestyle and a commitment to ongoing maintenance and improvement, not a bottle or a pill or a special piece of exercise equipment?

We want the next miracle drug, workout regimen, or food! And we want it to be easy, cheap, and not involve too much commitment on our part. We want it to be something that we can do in our La-Z-Boy between a ciggie and a beer. We want to pretend that our physiology and our metabolisms are unique, special things that defy the laws of nature and thermodynamics, and require some fancy combination of foods eaten while standing on our heads and then, only then will we have the thin thighs we dream of.

Well tough shit. It doesn’t work that way.

However, here are some basic rules to live by that are supported by just about every piece of scientific evidence from the last 20 years.

Eat:

• lots of fruit and vegetables, preferably colourful ones
• whole, unrefined grains
• good fats from nuts, seeds, avocados, oily fish
• plenty of soluble and insoluble fibre
• adequate lean protein that is low in saturated fat

Exercise:

• regularly, preferably daily, as part of an active lifestyle
• choose activity wherever possible in everyday life: walk to the store rather than drive, take the stairs rather than the elevator
• with a variety of activities including resistance training and a cardiovascular fitness component

Live:

• to be well, happy, and healthy (mentally, emotionally, and physically)
• to have fun
• to keep learning
• to care for yourself and for others

You’ll notice that none of this advice contains crap about eating right for your blood type, eating only cabbage soup or no carbs after 8 pm, training to harness the cosmic vibrations so that your fat vibrates away magically, or any other dumb ideas.

But there is one little piece of research that you might enjoy. Antioxidant consumption is a major component of good nutrition. And one of the foods that is highest in antioxidants? Dark chocolate. See, science isn’t so bad after all, is it?

By Jennifer Morrison, The Hamilton Spectator

Looking to get in shape, boost your self-confidence, and get that body you’ve been dreaming about? Better think twice about what exercise video you choose to pop into your VCR or DVD player.

Believe it or not, according to a new McMaster study, Jenny Craig’s Personal Fitness video might be a better motivator then the latest, best-seller featuring a supermodel, or ultra-toned actress. McMaster University researchers Julie Fleming and Kathleen Martin Ginis discovered that commercial exercise videos featuring super-fit, hard-bodied women may actually make women feel less motivated to exercise, and have less overall psychological benefit.

“It’s really sad because all these women are buying these videos thinking they’re going to motivate them to get fit and then they don’t feel so great afterwards,” said Dr. Martin Ginis, an associate professor of heath and exercise psychology at McMaster. “They felt less confident, and if they were less confident, they were less motivated.” Surprised?

Sure, super-skinny runway models and glammed-up Hollywood celebrities have long been blamed for crushing women’s self-esteem by promoting an unrealistic, unattainable body image.

But exercise videos? Aren’t they supposed to help?

The study, set to be published in next month’s Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, involved 101 McMaster female university students aged 18 to 24 who were asked to complete a survey about their exercise intentions, fitness commitment, and level of activity.

From there, subjects were divided into two groups, and broken down into exercisers and non-exercisers. The first group was shown video clips of “perfect-looking” exercisers who epitomize the cultural body ideal.

The second group watched video clips featuring “normal-looking” exercisers.

Researchers were expecting that the non-exercisers who watched the attractive women in the videos would feel worse about themselves then the non-exercisers who watched the regular videos.

What they didn’t expect, however, was to see an adverse effect on women who exercise regularly.

“The biggest surprise was that the regular exercisers had a loss in confidence. We really thought that if they’re regular exercisers, seeing these women isn’t going to bother them, but that wasn’t the case. Even these women were affected,” she said.

While the study’s results go against the cultural expectation that women will be motivated and inspired by others who fit into the cultural ideal of beauty, others weren’t too surprised.

Shirley Eden, owner of six Hamilton-area Curves Fitness studios, said women join Curves to get away from intimidating, super-fit women.

“It’s all women. No men. No makeup. No mirrors,” she said of the Curves philosophy.

David Patchell-Evans, the founder of Good Life Fitness, said it should be all about attitude. “In my experience, neither males or females are intimidated by a person in shape if the person in shape does not overplay it, does not exaggerate it, does not flaunt it,” he said.

In part this is because I realize it’s a falsehood. Being healthy and active always makes a person look their best. But best for that person is still real. It still involves the indelicacies of daily existence: going to the bathroom, staying up all night with a barfing baby, paying bills, indulging in a little too much red wine, sitting at a desk, locking one’s keys in the car, etc. etc. Daily life imprints us indelibly with its legacy: scars, wrinkles, gravity, bad hair days, and the caprices of genetics. Being fit and active is also often a less than glamourous pastime. After riding my bike 20 km to work I am a lovely mess of sweaty helmet hair, bike chain grease on my leg, and mud splatters (thank heaven for gym showers!). I am decked out in an extremely dorky safety vest because I would rather look like a dweeb and avoid being hit by a car than look sleek and fabulous under the wheels of an SUV. Exercise Video World is about as far from physical reality, and frankly, the reality of actual exercise, as most of us can get.

The “exercise video” I prefer to watch is the struggles and successes of real people along with my own. What inspires me are the two portly gray-haired guys who shuffle-jog past my place every morning, chattering to one another in Italian, or the little kid with a look of glee on her face as she hauls ass on her Big Wheel, or the tiny old Greek woman in her garden next door, weeding as she leans on her cane. It’s the young guys at the gym who, despite their meatheadedness and focus on chest and biceps, are nevertheless there like clockwork every week. It’s my friend who falls off her bike and takes three layers of skin off her knee, cries while she picks gravel out of the bloody injury, but then gets right back up there.

I remember being glued to the TV for the Eco-Challenge in Borneo. Screw reality TV, this was the real deal. This was sleep deprivation, risking life and limb, mountain climbing, extreme cycling, rappelling down hundred foot rock faces, giant leeches up the urethra (yes, this actually happened to some poor contestant–eeuw) kind of action. This was about as far from cosmetic perfection as one could get, unless you consider being covered in oozing foot blisters to be appealing. One Sunday during a rainstorm, I was watching the coverage. I decided that I too was extreme! I too was hardcore! I was going to go to the gym and more importantly I was going to ride my bike in the watery apocalypse!

What I was not, as I discovered fairly quickly, and reflected upon as I squelched into the gym leaving a trail of slimy water like the little girl from The Ring, was intelligent. But nevertheless, anything that gets me riding my bike in a rainstorm on a Sunday afternoon has to have something to it.

Find your spark. Find your drive. Perfection numbs us and paralyzes us. It catches our attention briefly but rarely inspires us. What inspires us, and keeps us coming back for more, is the underdog, the challenge, the ugly duckling. Maybe the ugly duckling will never become a swan, but he’ll kick ass trying.

I’m not a tremendously good one: I have a mean streak and have been known to murder plants that piss me off by being fussy, by stabbing me with a cactus spine, or just by being plain old fugly. My husband, a gentle soul who loves all living things, is always horrified when another piece of greenery bites the dust to the soundtrack of my evil cackling. I’m also fairly laissez-faire in my approach. Native, hardy plants only for my garden; I refuse to coddle exotic species or create a microclimate for some chlorophyll drama queen. Oh, the crybaby wants to be misted again? How would you like to end your days in the compost heap, whiner?! *smush* I even purposely developed a “thugs garden” in the front of my house, which is an arid, shady spot beneath a giant moisture-sucking tree. I planted specimens known to be goonish, tough, invasive, and aggressive, just to see how they would duke it out. (Mint was a clear winner, but musk mallow a strong contender, and daylilies held their own. Bugleweed bought it.)

With my trial by fire ethos, after years of practice, I’m not doing too badly. Every year I have successes and failures, and thankfully the ratio of yea to nay is looking better and better. Oh sure, some of the failures have been spectacular ones, such as the lovely Japanese maple that checked out during a very hot and dry summer. I probably could have watered it more attentively, but yknow, sometimes it’s just sink or swim. On the other hand, three plants I’d written off as deader than the acting in Troy managed to survive the winter and are happily growing like gangbusters.

Despite my love for playing in the mud, last year I didn’t touch my back garden at all. You see, that was the site of the Great Deck Building Project of 2003. There was no point in paying any attention to the garden because it was quite likely that whatever I tended would get stepped on, covered in concrete, or dug up.

This spring I went out to survey the scene. A nest of weeds greeted me. Most of the old standbys were looking pretty good, thanks to some careful mulching, but the rest was a shambles.

As I hauled bags of mulch, dug up weeds, and reconstructed the compost heap after the raccoons had munched holes in the black plastic container, I thought about the application of a gardening metaphor to the rest of our lives.

I hear a lot from well-meaning sources about how dieting is really bad for you and that 95% of people regain back weight that they’ve lost through dieting. Thus attempting to maintain a healthy level of bodyfat through nutrition and caloric restriction if required is a waste of time, quod erat demonstratum. Of course I think we can all agree that doing dumb stuff like popping amphetamines and subsisting on broccoli or rice cakes or grapefruit or whatever momentary fad is in style is not a good lifestyle choice. Short term solutions are just that, short term. The piece that’s missing in this advice is the fact that just like gardening, health and wellbeing is a lifetime project.

Getting in shape isn’t something you do to look good in a bridesmaid’s dress or impress that cute boy at the beach. That’s like weeding and watering the garden once before company comes over, then leaving it for the rest of the summer. In the garden, poor quality, stopgap solutions usually fall apart. Raccoons eat plastic compost bins. Shallow watering results in stunted root growth. Wood retaining walls rot. Stomping a dandelion instead of pulling it out by the root ensures that it’ll just come back bigger and meaner.

We don’t say that teeth brushing fails because 95% of people regain tooth plaque once they stop brushing. The point is that fitness and nutrition are good habits that have to be repeated, over and over and over. Gardens look best once they’ve had time to mature over several years, as the consistent care of the gardener becomes evident in healthy, vibrant plants.

Though it has a good foundation, my garden needs maintenance or it will return to chaos. It’s not enough to just pull a few weeds. I have to give the green space the TLC it needs to thrive. And as a result of this attention, my garden rewards me by being a wonderful space to inhabit and look at. While I take care to choose the right plants for the climate, exposure, and soil, I don’t rely on my garden to find its “natural” self, because its natural state is anarchy and a choking forest of garlic mustard and wild mint. Rather, by judicious pruning and maintenance, I enable a lovely variety of things to thrive.

Isn’t it time to get out and weed?

Oh sure, they’re cute and fuzzy and we’re supposed to care about them and save them, and biodiversity is rapidly being eliminated worldwide, and this is genuinely a global concern, and blah blah. But come on. Unlike other bears, who are clever enough to be opportunist omnivores, pandas pretty much only live on bamboo. Talk about high maintenance. It’s sort of like the kid who will only eat Cheerios. Eventually, reality sets in. The world is not made of Cheerios, nor do Cheerios provide 100% of human nutritional needs.

I’m not saying pandas deserve to be eliminated, but this is a clear lesson for all of us whose natural environment is rapidly changing. Evolution hasn’t kept pace with human development. Physiologically speaking, we are only a few degrees post-simian, and our DNA is still wondering what the hell happened to all those lovely caves we were sitting in just one geologic eyeblink ago.

Humans are rather like the cockroaches or goldfishes of their kind: indestructible and omnipresent. They can eat just about anything, have sex with just about anyone, and live just about anywhere on the globe where there is a patch of dry land to call home. They’re not perfect of course; they have this idiotic tendency to shit in their own nests and hit each other in the head with rocks. However, in general, the success of humans as a species is a lesson in the value of adaptation.

Until now.

The human body wasn’t designed for life in the 21st century. It was meant to move and forage, scavenge food through significant effort, store food in times of plenty and hoard it in times of famine. Sweet food usually meant good food in the form of fruit and ripe vegetables. The human jaw, with its powerful ability to exert immense pressure, could grind up nearly anything besides gravel to eat.

The human ass, its gluteus maximii the largest muscles in the body, was intended to enable bipedal locomotion and upright posture, not wearing a groove into the couch or computer chair. Bodyfat was intended for warmth, an indicator of fertility (at least in women), and to provide a steady supply of energy in times of scarcity. It was not intended to be cultivated into armies of artery-clogging globules.

What this means is that we have two choices. We can adapt to our new surroundings, accept the limitations of our Cro-Magnon physiology, and learn to thrive. We can find ways to work with, rather than against, our natural tendencies of requiring regular activity and a varied diet.

Or, we can keep eating pink cupcakes, pretending they’re berries picked from bushes on the savannah. We can blame “genetics” for everything including our La-Z-Boys, escalators, Twinkies, and car-dominant suburbia. Eventually, the WWF will slap an “endangered species” sticker on us.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be afraid of such a tumble.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first time I got punched in the face, I was shocked. But not as shocked as the guy who did it. We were in a beginner boxing class, and practicing throwing shots and defending. Since there weren’t very many women, and our instructor took pleasure in deliberately mismatching opponents, I got paired up with a sweet-faced young guy who looked as if he’d taken up boxing to avoid getting bullied on the playground. We stopped and sort of looked at each other. My cheek was simultaneously numb and warm. He looked horrified. He began to apologize profusely. After all, he’d just hit a girl (right in the kisser, no less), and among most men who aren’t complete assholes, “Don’t hit girls” is a cardinal rule.

But I’d deserved it. After all, I’d dropped my hands and given him an opening. A good opponent nails you in the face if you are dumb enough to let them. One of the fastest ways to learn not to drop your hands is to get a little surprise smooch from some padded leather. So I shrugged, and said not to worry, I had earned that shot in the face by not defending properly. He kept apologizing. Later on I got him nicely in the ribs. Hoohah!

I think the guy is probably still traumatized from that incident. But I found it a valuable experience. Every time I got hit after that it became easier and less scary. I used to be afraid of getting in close to my opponent for fear of getting hurt. It’s natural and normal to avoid conflict and pain. Much of the time, it’s an excellent and desirable survival mechanism.

My instructor kept pushing me to get in close to him and just hit him, dammit. He was a former Golden Gloves champ who’d doubtless taken shots in the head from people far larger and meaner than me, a small beginner woman who was still learning how to coordinate right and left hand along with moving legs around. I was afraid of doing this at first even though he promised he would not hit back. I had to learn to get aggressive and define my space, to use my jab to get his attention and my right hand to finish the job. I had to think carefully and look for openings. I had to put aside my fear of hurting another person.

When I was a kid I let another group of kids beat me up. They weren’t any bigger nor tougher. I wasn’t afraid of them. I just didn’t want to hurt them. So I let them hit me and harass me. I’ve thought about that incident as an adult. As women, we tend to avoid asserting ourselves for fear of hurting others and being hurt ourselves. We worry about self esteem, ours and others. We don’t want to make a fuss. Some of us do get hit, for real, and not in a context of honest sporting competition (and I’m definitely not suggesting that we seek out that kind of abuse).

But both dishing it out and taking it is an excellent education. One emerges stronger, not weaker, from difficult life experiences. Some years ago I had a very hostile job interview. I walked into a shitstorm at an academic department and wound up becoming the punching bag for everything that a bunch of clenched-sphincter academics hated about feminism and the perceived decline of academic standards. I walked out of there thinking that even if they offered me the job right then, I would tell them all to jam it up their dusty old-boy asses. Negative as that experience was, I emerged from it stronger. I’m not afraid of future situations like that, because I’ve taken some of the worst that can be given out, and I survived.

My failures and fuckups have been learning experiences (and believe me, based on the number of these, I should have a second PhD in dumbassedness). I’ve learned to keep my cool under an onslaught of pressure and barrage of negativity. And I’ve learned to give it right back, to size up my opponent and strategize. I’ve learned that getting hit, at least in certain situations, can hurt but it’s not going to kill me. Taking the risk of getting hit means that I can more effectively assert my own position, instead of constantly scuttling backwards into the corner.

I got my first bloody nose the other day. It wasn’t much, just a few snuffly drops. But I was elated. One more hurdle! One more thing that didn’t kill me! Take that, childhood socialization! Take that, fear of failure! Take my right hook to your gut, Miz Opponent who thinks she is so big! Wheeee!

For Canadians (except those lucky bastards living in Vancouver), the pain of Valentine’s Day is compounded by the winter weather. One year, feeling particularly self-pitying about Valentine’s Day, I trudged home through a snowstorm, grumbling about the sucky weather, sucky holiday, poor me, blah blah blah. I stopped into the local grocery store to pick up food for dinner. And there in the front of the store was a beautiful bunch of red carnations. On impulse, I bought them all. I brought them home to my housemates as a Valentine’s Day gift.

Suddenly, I felt great!

The act of taking my bummer feeling and turning it into action, especially positive action directed at the benefit of others, completely transformed my perspective. What I learned from that experience was that the best way to deal with a negative mindset is to externalize, to just do it, to take thought and transform it into action.

I get a lot of email from people who are caught spending too much time in their own head. And while they’re in their heads they’re wandering about like a cat lady in her attic apartment, bumping into piles of old newspapers and cat poop. That is to say, they’re fixating on how much they hate their asses and their thighs and their mothers and their mothers’ thighs.

I know many people who are very wise about other people’s problems, or who are good at finding solutions for their jobs, but when it comes to themselves they are paralyzed by their over-intellectualization. They can tell me in great detail exactly what they are feeling and what is wrong with them, but they do not act to change it. It’s like they’re holding a road map and sitting on a well-marked road, but they can’t make themselves turn on the car’s ignition. They just keep going over the map again and again.

So they’ll say, gee, I really want to get into shape but I have food issues. I really want to get into shape but I’m funny looking or too fat or too skinny or my knees hurt. I really want to eat better but I am powerless against chocolate ice cream. Then they’ll devote countless hours to self-loathing and internal discourse, letting their brain jabber at them until they have been reduced to an inert gelationous blob of negativity.

If this is you, then stop thinking. Start doing. Start doing for yourself and others. Stop self-hating and start moving. Get out of your head. Externalize. Move. Act.

A good place to start is doing something for others. I don’t mean turning into some kind of saintly martyr, like some 1950s Stepford Wife all zonked on Valium and whatever preceded Prozac. I mean stop focusing on your own problems for one minute and take that minute to do something nice or useful for someone else. Chances are, that will start to make you feel a whole lot better about yourself. I bet your dog would be thrilled if you took him or her for a walk right now. Call a family member just to say hi. Give the waitress at the local greasy spoon a $20 tip. Give flowers to someone for no reason. Volunteer some place that needs you.

Next, do something for yourself. Get off the couch and do something—anything—other than sitting in your own filth. Or hell, stay on the couch but at least put a good movie into the DVD player. Try a new activity. Move around. Eat some fruit. Sing off tune in the shower. JUST DO SOMETHING!!

By the way, if you need inspiration, I love red carnations.