Hallooo?

Recently, the front page of Canada’s national newspaper (no, not that squarehead harrumphing old regressive piece of crap National Post, the real one) carried a striking story.

An Inuit teenager in the Arctic had survived a frightening ordeal: He’d spent the night trapped on an ice floe with a polar bear and her cubs for companionship.

Here’s a long shot, in case you’d like a bit of context. Supposedly you can see the kid in here somewhere as a small speck in the upper middle, but I sure as heck can’t. (I thought I could, but then I realized it was a spot of balsamic vinegar I’d splotched on the screen from eating salad in front of the computer.) The rescuers must have had seriously good eyesight.

Double hallooo?

Now, for those of you living south of 60 degrees latitude (or not in Churchill, Manitoba), polar bears may look cute and friendly, like in the Coke commercials, but they most certainly are not. They are generally grumpy, hungry creatures who think people are basically upright cocktail weenies. If you think bears are cuddly pets, you’re probably the kind of person who would own a face-eating chimp.

NOM NOM NOM man that Coke washes down the taste of human!!

Take “essentially pissy carnivore personality” and then add “protective mother” to the mix, stir well with “trapped on a tiny floating island of ice” and you have a pretty shitty situation. You’re a yummy seal-flavoured shwarma, thus:

To protect himself, the teenager shot the mother bear.

The day following the story, aggrieved letters to the editor poured in. What kind of heartless bastard would shoot a mother bear? Kids these days! Why was he out hunting in the first place?

Not surprisingly, 100% of these letters were from people who:

1. Lived in Southern Canada. (No, that is not an oxymoron.)
2. Lived in urban areas where the most dangerous creature was a distracted frazzled parent on a cellphone while driving.
3. Actually have grocery stores — and/or grocery stores that are stocked more than once a year when the planes can make it in.
4. Had probably never spent time trapped on miles of frozen wasteland in pitch blackness, wondering which thing was going to kill them first: the minus-20C temperature or the angry maternal meat eater.

Now, this is not a rant about the ethics of hunting, or whether bears need killin’.

The point is this:

It’s really easy to have an opinion if you haven’t done something.

Especially if you haven’t done something difficult.

This story is a metaphor, so don’t waste my time with earnest comments about why people living in the toughest climate in the world should be eating soy burgers instead — I will delete such while whistling a jaunty tune, as evidence of the above point. (However, I welcome thoughts from anyone who has also shacked up with Ursus maritimus in Satan’s icebox.)

Armchair quarterbacks abound, especially in the fitness industry. And those armchairs are very comfortable.

But comfort does not bring insight. It does not bring growth nor understanding. It often brings snap judgements, dismissals, and assumptions.

Losing weight is fucking hard.

Gaining muscle is fucking hard.

Competing in a sport is fucking hard.

Squatting and deadlifting are fucking hard.

Olympic lifts are even fucking harder, especially when you fall on your ass doing them (like I did in front of an audience last month — cool instructor FAIL). (More on that adventure below.)

Getting out of bed and facing the world is fucking hard because right now, the world is not set up to enable your wellness, health, fitness, nor good nutrition.

Is this all worth doing? Absolutely.

Because here’s the thing:

Anything valuable is probably going to be fucking hard.

Parenthood. Getting an education. Growing up into a mature, emotionally successful human being. Not whipping out that awesome, soul-shredding comeback on your spouse and thus ruining 15 years of careful intimacy building. Etc.

Last month I helped out at an Olympic weightlifting workshop. I was supposedly one of the more “advanced” participants. Thus, I was called to demonstrate my snatch form.

(Yes, yes, “snatch form” is funny. Although I’ve been snickering more these days over “high crotch” in wrestling, probably mostly for the novelty since “snatch” has worn out its humour after a decade of OL training.)

So there I was, on the platform, onstage before a wide-eyed audience of beginners, demonstrating my mighty snatch.

(Ha ha! OK, that is funny! Anyway.)

I demonstrated each stage of the lift, step by step, slowly, pausing in key positions. Then it was time to put those pieces together and amaze the crowd with my speed and agility. Pull from the floor, hitch over the knees, slam into the hip drive, drop under majestically for the catch and whoops — miscalculate the bar speed, weight, and timing — aaaa FORE!!

Like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the bar soared aloft in a sternwise direction before plummeting to earth with an earsplitting crash. Propelled by my athletic thrust (ha ha! thrust!), I promptly leaped away from it before falling explosively on to my ass with a thwomp.

A microsecond of silence. Horror. Screams from the crowd.

They were sure I’d dislocated my shoulder or driven my tailbone into my nostrils. Luckily, my shoulders are flexy and my bottom adequately padded. No such skeletal rearrangement had occurred.

A voice from the crowd: “We got that on video!” Sigh.

Another voice from the crowd, this one the reassuring baritone of Bang Fitness’ Geoff Girvitz.

“Oh yeah, if you’re going to learn the Olympic lifts, learn how to fail. You are going to drop the bar, so you’d better practice that now.”

(Shout out to Randy Hauer for teaching me this point a few years earlier. You saved me, buddy!)

I shrugged and got up. Picked up the bar.

“Let’s try that one again,” I said dryly. And I meant it. I should have been embarrassed, but oddly enough I wasn’t. Instead of thinking Oh my Gawd I totally bombed in front of a group I was thinking Bar’s lighter than I thought; slow down that second pull.

So I did. I tried it a few more times, in fact, just to be sure. By the third, slower rep, I was in the groove.

“There we go,” I said cheerfully. The crowd smiled hesitantly. (They still figured my shoulders should have exploded.) We chatted for a few minutes about how to jump away safely from a flying bar.

Afterwards, nobody said Boy are you a fuckup. They said Holy shit, you recovered like a champ. Geoff didn’t even make fun of me, which pretty much violates one of the key rules about Bang Fitness’ sense of humour: learning through loving mockery.

Nobody made fun of me, because they’d all been there. They’d all dropped bars, fallen down, hurt themselves, or otherwise screwed up in the gym.

(Subsequently, another “expert” demonstrator — competitive O-lifter Ron Dykstra — clipped his kneecaps with the clean. I felt a slight misery-loves-company warmth.)

Conversely, I hear from a lot of people about how we should be eating and exercising. And you know what? 99% of those people have never done those things they say I should do.

Lifetime-sedentary people tell me that I exercise “too much”. People who wouldn’t know an Olympic weightlifter from Tinkerbell tell me with great authority that deep squats “hurt your knees”. People with blood vessels full of liquidized chicken wings dispense dietary advice like they’re from the Harvard School of Public Health. Guys who’ve never stepped on a mat, never experienced the pant-wetting fear of having another massive human being smother and choke you with your own arm talk about how this or that UFC fighter is a bum/should have flying-armbarred that other guy.

Lots of you are probably getting such well-meaning advice.

My well-meaning advice to you? Ignore it, and seek out the people who have actually had to make the hard choices.

• Find experienced trainers who also train themselves, and they’ll tell you there’s no one-size-fits all program.
• Find experienced nutritionists who also eat well themselves, and they’ll tell you that it’s OK to eat [insert forbidden food] now and again. Just eat some damn broccoli.
• Find the diet coach that used to be heavy themselves. And maybe who still struggles not to eat that ice cream after a bad day.
• Find the instructor who’s cried in the changeroom, just like you.
• Find people who’ve been there, done that, made mistakes, learned the hard lessons, and they’ll support you all the way instead of breaking you down.

Here’s the take-home:

A lot of learning comes through painful experience, but this is necessary.

Even “experts” fuck up.

Get out there and do it anyway. (But have a good backup plan, just in case.)

People may judge your choices, but unless they’ve done that hard thing themselves, or have put in a LOT of evidence-based research concerning the subject, take their opinions with a grain of salt.

Final thoughts by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, currently battling cancer, from the movie Airplane:

Joey: Wait a minute. I know you. You’re Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. You play basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Roger Murdock: I’m sorry son, but you must have me confused with someone else. My name is Roger Murdock. I’m the co-pilot.
Joey: You are Kareem. I’ve seen you play. My dad’s got season tickets.
Roger Murdock: I think you should go back to your seat now Joey. Right Clarence?
Captain Oveur: Nahhhhhh, he’s not bothering anyone, let him stay here.
Roger Murdock: But just remember, my name is [showing his nametag] ROGER MURDOCK. I’m an airline pilot.
Joey: I think you’re the greatest, but my dad says you don’t work hard enough on defense.
[Kareem's getting mad]
Joey: And he says that lots of times, you don’t even run down court. And that you don’t really try… except during the playoffs.
Roger Murdock: The hell I don’t!! Listen kid, I’ve been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA! I’m out there busting my buns every night! Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!

To quote Homer Simpson, “Enjoy your death trap, ladies!”

(Or, perhaps more apropos: “Spider Pig, Spider Pig, does whatever a Spider Pig does. Can he swing, from a web? No, he can’t — he’s a pig. Look out! Here comes the Spider Pig!”)

Recently an acquaintance of mine was interviewed about H1N1 for The National on CBC. She discussed protective measures with an anxious group of hockey parents: sanitize hockey gear, put water bottles in dishwasher, wrap their child in bubble wrap, etc.

(Amusing: One parent said “I never thought of sanitizing hockey gear before!” Seriously? Have you smelled that shit? I’d consider burning it after every practice.)

The solution, as to all of the world’s problems, is an aggressive application of slash-and-burn technology. After all, it worked great on that cockroach I smashed with a hammer. All we need is are nine billion more bigger, smashier, hammers.

Pooh! Get away from that thing!

Manufacturers of disinfectants — which is to say, large corporations — cannot believe their luck. Executives are doing their happy dance in boardrooms over cases of cucumber-melon-scented alcohol-soaked Kleenex and spray cans of lemon-flavoured napalm. Or perhaps they have also fluffed up a few media stories about the benefits of Lysoling one’s surroundings.

Who’s to say what Big Sanitizer is capable of? Suck it, pathogens of the world! We’ll get you just like we fixed that damn morning sickness!

Dear readers, permit me an imaginative journey. Let us say that we travel with these anxious parents as they ferry their spawn home in gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing buggies.

Perhaps we’ll stop for a treat on the way! How about the drive thru!? YAY!!

Man, that hormone-injected, artificially flavoured, soy-additive/wheat-gluten-extended, meatlike patty on the sugared white-flour bun with red sugar sauce really hit the spot! Hand me some more of those trans-fat-dipped GM starch nuggets willya? Phew, salty… gotta wash it down with some sugar syrup and food colouring.

Pops’ll get a venti coffee too. Hell, with these kids, you need that 550 mg of caffeine. Sorry, lactose intolerant — can you throw some hexane-extracted soymilk in to that? Yeah, Silk, that’s cool — they’re some little hippie company right? And a flavour shot. Eh, gimme a couple. It’s a big coffee.

Oh yeah, Dylan’s been working out. Give him some blue Gatorade in the plastic bottle with extra bisphenol A. A thirteen-year-old boy shouldn’t be using his testicles anyway.

Faaack this traffic on the freeway is nuts. Hey! Nice turn signal, asshole! God DAMN IT lady hurry up! Shit, we’re going to be a while. Who can I call on my cell phone to distract myself? Man, my back is killing me. Must be all that sitting.

Alright, we’re home. What’s for dinner? Let’s pop open the cupboard and the fridge. Let’s see…

Well, we’ve got frozen corn dogs… chicken nuggets… some leftover burritos… some king-sized bags of potato chips… Diet Pepsi… caramel-flavoured popcorn (what? it’s low fat!)…

Oh shit, don’t forget, Dylan needs to take his ADHD meds. Dad, take your statins. Yeah, I think it’s OK to take them with Budweiser. Beer’s mostly water right?

Gah! It’s totally hectic; let’s just do takeout. You guys want that deep dish cheese stuffed crust again? Yeah, that’s cool; mom can take her Alli when we eat (she’s looking stressed though; why not throw down an Effexor?).

Wash your hands, boys. Use that new antibacterial soap that causes birth defects.

And throw your hockey gear into the wash. Use that extra scented soap and fabric softener. Man, that stuff stinks. Spray some Febreze around. I’m gonna stick another Glade Plug-In into the outlet.

Don’t touch that delivery guy! He might be carrying something dangerous!

One American family's weekly food consumption. From What the World Eats

Top 6 causes of death, US, 2004

• Heart disease: 631,636
• Cancer: 559,888
• Stroke: 137,119
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases (e.g. emphysema): 124,583
• Accidents: 121,599
• Diabetes (85-90% of cases are adult-onset, type 2): 72,449

Most of the time I live close to sea level, swathed in a comfy blanket of lakeborne humidity and smog. It’s like being snuggled by a slightly smelly, just-out-of-the-water, gaseous walrus. But for my vacation I opted to leave behind creature comforts such as vaporized particulates and 21% oxygen to visit the Colorado mountains that South Park made famous.

As someone with lifelong allergies and a former asthmatic (yes, I truly was that kid with Coke-bottle glasses, braces, and asthma), breathing has rarely felt 100%. Although a Paleo-style diet that eliminates dairy and grains manages the sniffles nicely, I still travel with a tissue shoved in my pockets — as my long-suffering, wet-shredded-lint-accumulating washer can attest. Hayrides and cleaning dusty attics are not on my priority list. My fondness for spicy Korean and Szechuan cuisine generally results in some kind of inopportune sinus-clearing during the hot and sour soup course. I still avoid cats as if they were truly the demons our medieval forebears so feared. (Of course, the horrid beasts invariably target allergy sufferers, and make a point of spitefully coating us in fur and dander under the pretense of affection, leaving us watery-eyed and hivey.)

Nevertheless, I’ll run intervals or hit the boxing gym on a humid day like a champ. (A whiney champ, but a champ.) My lungs are like a beloved old Datsun: sure, they might need a kick-start or sound like a herd of cows being slowly sucked into a vacuum cleaner, but they work pretty well anyway.

Things change real fast when you stuff yourself into an aluminum tube, redolent with the combined musk of coffee, diesel, and farts, and spend a few hours at 30,000 feet. Things change even more when you land in the so-called Mile-High City, then proceed to the 8150 foot hamlet, before traipsing up the 10,350 mountain.

There is nary a drop of moisture to be found in this air. The mountains slice with surgical intensity into the brilliant blue sky. This is not the fuzzy, hazy, foggy, slightly sulfur-tinged land of my home, where visibility in July is commonly described in metres rather than miles — and not just because we’re metric Canadians.

Suddenly there is a rhino on my chest, stuffing hairballs into my trachea. My hands immediately turn into aged tissue paper. My nails crumble like yesterday’s sand castle. I run for the heavy-duty moisturizer, slathering myself with oily, gobby handfuls. I chug water like a frat boy guzzles beer from a plastic tube. I curse forgetting my bottle of fish oil.

Fun discovery! Did you know that small capillaries can pop at high altitudes like wee blood-filled balloons? And that those capillaries can be in in cool places like your eyeball? And then you can walk around looking like a stoned zombie? I bet you didn’t! 82% of Everest climbers experience eyeball explosions, aka high-altitude retinal hemorrhage, so I’m in good company. Lookit me, I’m cool like those crazy people who can’t leave a perfectly good death trap alone!

Wherever the so-called obesity epidemic is, I can tell you where it ain’t: Colorado. In fact, this state is so poor in adipose resources that it must import fat from elsewhere. (Luckily there is no shortage of lipid-blessed tourists from other, more sedentary and sugar-laced states selflessly helping to rectify this imbalance.)

Huffing up a mountain with my tiny, spoiled lungs on day 2, I was passed by a couple of upward-jogging grannies in sports bras, tan and lean as whippets, cheerfully toting water bottles. Then a woman on a bike. Then a few more bikes. Thankfully, after three hours of continuous gasping like a beached whale, I made it to the top before a small Colorado child humiliated me.

By day 5 I was feeling cocky, and tackled a steep trail down the mountain. About 100 steps into my descent, I was passed, again, by an outdoorsily beautiful woman running UP the trail like a Swedish milkmaid in an Adidas commercial. Which meant she had been running UP the trail for about 2100 feet of altitude and 5 k of distance already. She said “Hi,” pleasantly, as she passed. Yes, she had enough lung capacity to singsong a happy greeting rather than a sullen wheeze.

The shaming! It is abundant!

In the past I’ve been taken to task by aggrieved Yanks who claim I’m unfairly stereotyping their country’s atrocious grocery offerings. Well, 90% of food available in US grocery stores is still garbage that should not be consumed by anyone except perhaps an alien life form that lives on petroleum derivatives. But hats off to at least one US state — Colorado — for showing us all how to live.

Hi there! Here are your trails, sorted alphabetically and by difficulty! Watch your step! Can I get you anything else? Would you like a hot towel?

In my travels through the northwest of CO, I discovered:

• a broadly based environmental consciousness, which included not only the obligatory recycling and often green binning/composting (!) but also biodegradable bags and plastic dinnerware, even in many fast food places, plus state and county tax credits for installing solar panels!
• an extensive bus network, and subsidized bus passes for many workers
• an even more extensive cycling network, even in remote areas — it’s like the friggin Tour de France here no matter how far up into God’s armpit geographically you go
• astoundingly well maintained and marked hiking trails
• each small town appeared to have a farmer’s market
• locally sourced whole foods including humanely raised and appropriately fed meat and in season produce
• a vast infrastructure and community mindset that supported walking, cycling, and general outdoor pursuits: people are physical for fun and function, and have a big toolbox of strategies and opportunities to do it

And guess what: everyone looks great. Most natives are a normal, healthy weight and appear capable of tackling a few flights of stairs, or even the occasional mountain. People are outside doing stuff, being active in their daily lives. Bike trailers are parked in front of the grocery store along with the cars, and then loaded with the products of regular errands.

In fact, at times I felt actively wussified in comparison, which is saying a lot.

But on the plus side, I imagined how much worse I’d have felt if I weren’t in shape.

And it struck me, about 2 hours in to my epic initial crawl up the mountain, during which my tummy growled and I briefly worried about not bringing anything to eat: This is what millions of years of evolution have prepared me for. Not to sit on my ass in front of a screen 10 inches from my eyes. Not to be stressed out constantly about stupid shit.

But rather, to live on nature’s scale of generational time and geologic time. Do the striated rocks give a rat’s ass if that deadline is met? No — they just keep layering their layers, one grain at a time. The seasons come and go. Wildflowers bloom and die. Fires go through and then things regrow. My body doesn’t need to be obsessively stuffed with food minute by minute; it could easily make it through a week of climbing with only a few gathered leaves in my belly. (Unpleasantly, but it could.) So it goes.

Nature’s visual scale is in miles. I should not be living my life close up. My poor aggrieved retina was meant to look into the far-off distance, and then slowly, consciously, approach my destination.

Tangential anecdote, which I think illustrates this divide: At the top of the mountain, like the Holy Grail, there is a BBQ restaurant. Brothers and sisters, I testify unto you: there is no more ecstatic discovery than fresh corn on the cob and smoked pork after 3 hours of vertical toil. As I sat gratefully gnawing on my cavewoman’s bounty* after my morning’s trudge, I overheard a conversation thus:

“Wow, you finished up that sandwich really fast!”

“That’s because I’m not checking my email, Dad.”

I turned to look in my polite, carefully discreet Canadian way. A father sat with his three teenaged boys. He was hunched over his iPhone, fixated on the tiny screen, fingers obsessively scrolling, tapping, poking at the electronic device, oblivious to the jaw-dropping natural beauty that surrounded us. E-Addict Dad continued:

“Didja know I get five bars up here? I checked it over there too. [here, he gestured to the scenic outlook deck perched atop the cliff with a stunning, existence-rattling view of nature's geologic theatre] Five bars. Amazing.”

Yes, dear readers. This man was CHECKING HIS FUCKING EMAIL ON TOP OF A MOUNTAIN. Surrounded by the very best show that nature had to offer, along with his loving family and rapidly growing children who no doubt would have loved to feel some shred of affection from their emotionally distant parental unit, this asshat was reading his sports scores or checking his stocks or whatever pointless bullshit five bars afforded him.

"You know what would really improve this? Being able to check my email. And maybe print a Q3 report. Yeah."

I digress. Return to my realization of approximately 1 hour prior to the encounter with Fucked-Up Priorities Man.

My body was handling its bidness perfectly well, despite the occasional eyeball detonation. At that very moment, my body was happily mobilizing stored fat to fuel me. My type I muscle fibres were managing the climb with ease, grateful for the opportunity to strut their stuff (literally).

See, here’s one of my definitions of fitness:

Fitness makes your body work better.

Plain and simple.

Being fit makes your body use nutrients better. It makes it adapt more quickly to changing conditions. It makes your body do what it was designed to do better.

This is the point that is entirely lost on the modern fitness-industrial complex. Fitness has nothing to do with seeing your abs. It has nothing to do with stuffing yourself into a bikini. These types of things are decorative hobbies along the lines of building a ship in a bottle: amusing pastimes for those so inclined, but ultimately pointless.

Fitness makes your body do its job. And with some help from enlightened social infrastructure, we could all be those uber-woman grannies bouncing up the mountain.

My Rocky pose after (barely) kicking that mountain's ass

*Yes, I know corn is technically a domesticated Neolithic byproduct. Don’t be a jagoff and mention it.

Actually it was my first second birthday. One year since I quit my job.

I came up with the concept of a “second birthday” after a friend of mine made a major, life-changing transition that ultimately left her much happier than before. The second birthday is the day you’re reborn. You decide when that will be. It’s your birthday, after all.

Now, most life transitions don’t happen in a single exciting day. Often they sneak up on us, and we suddenly realize that in some way, we’re six months better than we were before.

But sometimes, there is a brief period of time during which we decide no more or I’m going to try that. And we take some big step that ultimately leads us down a path we never could have anticipated. Looking back, we realize that at that moment the universe kicked us in the ass. We’ve ended up as new people.

Hence, second birthday.

The idea of rebirth and renewal is as old as the seasons. (As Monty Python explained in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “Autumn changed into winter… winter changed into spring… spring changed back into autumn and autumn gave winter and spring a miss and went straight on into summer.”)

Culturally, we mark some life passages but not others. As the etiquette doyennes advised, “A lady should not appear in the newspaper except on three occasions: when she’s born, when she’s married, and when she dies.” Running for world leader is obviously not part of this scenario. (On the other hand, perhaps following this advice would have prevented the human car crashes of Lindsay Lohan and Tara Reid.)

However, there isn’t yet a greeting card for things like:

• Getting your shit together
• Getting your first period
• Paying off your credit card and getting out of soul-crushing debt
• Kicking your jackass leech partner to the curb
• Your first real squat (I’m working on this)

I think this reflects some short-sightedness on behalf of Hallmark.

Life provides us with abundant opportunities for self-reinvention. How often have you caught yourself saying things like:

• I’m too old.
• I’m not the kind of person who ____
• I’m not good enough to ____
• I’m a ____ (and thus ____)
• I’m someone who ____

The way we describe ourselves determines our realities.

For example, I’ve noticed that for some people, there is a time that they decide they are “old”. It’s almost literally an overnight process. For some reason they decide, definitively, that they are “old”. And now that they are “old” their world becomes significantly smaller.

For one man, this happened when he lost his driver’s license. (And for that, the rest of the world was grateful.) Within the space of a few weeks, his body started to droop. He got a kind of glazed look on his face and sat depressed and sullen in his chair. Basically, he just stopped giving a shit about life in general.

For another woman, this happened when she fell down while skating. She wasn’t really hurt, but it scared her. She became fearful and apprehensive. She convinced herself she was frail. She could barely summon the courage to leave the house to get groceries.

Meanwhile, my octogenarian grandmother, she of the osteoporotic spine, dead husband, and atrocious childhood, defiantly hauls her spongy, crumbling bones out into the garden to tend her roses, or out into a Kenora winter for her daily walk. She likes to tell the story of how she met a bear on the road while walking with a baby carriage. (To be clear, dear reader, Grandma had the baby carriage, not the bear.) When I call her, she is sharp as a tack even though I have to yell a bit down the phone. No fucking way she is sitting around in God’s waiting room. She has shit to do!

In all cases, it’s evident that “old” isn’t about objective measurements of age or health. It’s about a conscious decision to define oneself in a particular way, which then changes one’s reality.

Think about the words and metaphors you use to define yourself. Think also about the words and metaphors you use to define your life. For instance:

• I’m on a treadmill.
• I’m a go-getter.
• I’m on a career path.

We’re symbolic beings. We think in ideas and metaphors. Ever been to another country and been baffled by their vernacular expressions? Lie in Russian and you’re “hanging noodles on your ears”. Irritate an Armenian and you’re “ironing their head”.

Remember that episode of Star Trek TNG where they went to the metaphor planet? People talked only in reference to folk stories and proverbs. It’d be like saying “Goldilocks’ porridge” instead of “just right”. If you didn’t know the stories you’d have no idea what the hell anyone was talking about.

If you did know the stories, your reality would be full of images and concepts that then affected how you thought about the world. You’d quite likely imagine noodle ears every time you thought someone was making a fib.

When we butt up against a reality that doesn’t match the one we’ve constructed for ourselves, we respond in a few ways.

• We may remove ourselves from it entirely. “That’s not me.”
• We may defend ourselves against its potential entry into our brains. “I guess I could, but I won’t.”
• We may feel guilt for not incorporating it into our world. “I should…”
• We may, in rare cases, decide to accept it into our universe. In that case, we change.

We carry around a “toolbox” of ideas and images about ourselves. When we find a new situation, we pull out our tools, and see which ones we can use. And if all we have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So much of what we do actually comes from our identity constructions. We do things (or not) because of who we think we are, not because of what we can truly do.

Don’t believe me? Try an experiment. For the next week, say to yourself, “I’m an athlete.” Imagine yourself to be in training for something. You are an athlete who must eat, train, and recover properly for your sport. Your body must be strong, fast, and powerful. It must be nourished. You are an athlete. Forget about whether you’re “really” that person. Just pretend. Call yourself an athlete and play dress-up for the world.

Guess what happens? Suddenly, your workouts become a lot more meaningful. You imagine yourself striding in front of a cheering crowd as you tramp down the street. You think twice about that chili dog. A lot of stuff changes — and all you did was change a few words in your brain.

When I was a kid, one of my chores was to clean up the kitchen after dinner. I always found unloading the dishwasher to be a drag. So I imagined that I was in a dishwasher-unloading competition. I imagined an arena full of people, gathered to watch mighty feats of dishwasher-clearing. I became preoccupied with different techniques — which one was faster? More efficient? Would I be speedier if I did things categorically (all spoons at once) or spatially (right to left? back to front?). Suddenly I got a real kick out of unloading the dishwasher. To this day, that image still pops into my mind.

Again, nothing changed, except the way I thought about myself. The dishwasher was still there, same as always, full of clean dishes awaiting attention.

My old coach used to have a great piece of advice before competitions. Two words: highlight reel. We were to imagine a “highlight reel” of some of the crazy shit we tried to pull off. We imagined that movie in our heads, with some wicked music, before we competed. Regardless of whether we won or lost, we’d put in a good show that would then make an awesome montage. Imagining how the movie of your life would look is another way to get “outside yourself”.

Which brings me back to the second birthday. The day I walked out of my job, then got on to a plane to compete at the NAGA Worlds, I decided I was different. Sure, some things were “really” different. For one thing, I was unemployed. But I could easily have gone back to find another job in the same domain. I decided that I was a new person, and that new person would not accept the old constraints.

Nothing changed. Except my mind.

I marked the calendar for April 4.

This year I celebrated the second birthday with a cake. I made a fuss over myself. I renewed my commitment to living differently.

Not long after, I did an interview with a website called LeavingAcademia.com.

Podcast #1: There are places that would walk over their own mother to hire you

Podcast #2: Hey! If you get tenure, you’ll feel this bad for 30 years!

Podcast #3: There is no provision in academia to care for or nurture the physical self.

If you read this site and think to yourself, “I could never do that”, ask yourself why.

Are you truly limited by physical reality? For example, if you don’t have any arms, you probably won’t be very good at pullups. I suspect, however, that applies to 0.001% of you.

Or are you limited by your toolbox?

Catch yourself saying:

• I’m ____
• I can’t
• I won’t
• I should / should not

Ask yourself: What’s in my toolbox? Is it time to hit the mental Home Depot?

Ask yourself: What happens if today is different?

And if today becomes different for you, think ahead a year from now. You will get cake.

A recent article in the New Scientist examines what’s known as the “nocebo” effect — where a sham therapy makes things worse. It’s the opposite of the placebo effect, wherein a pretend medication or therapy makes things better. In both cases, people believe that something will occur, so it does.

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame — yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. “He didn’t die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer,” says Meador. “If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying”… In clinical trials, around a quarter of patients in control groups — those given supposedly inert therapies — experience negative side effects. The severity of these side effects sometimes matches those associated with real drugs…

The ultimate cause of the nocebo effect, however, is not neurochemistry but belief. According to Hahn, surgeons are often wary of operating on people who think they will die — because such patients often do. And the mere belief that one is susceptible to a heart attack is itself a risk factor. One study found that women who believed they are particularly prone to heart attack are nearly four times as likely to die from coronary conditions than other women with the same risk factors.

Despite the growing evidence that the nocebo effect is all too real, it is hard in this rational age to accept that people’s beliefs can kill them. After all, most of us would laugh if a strangely attired man leapt about waving a bone and told us we were going to die. But imagine how you would feel if you were told the same thing by a smartly dressed doctor with a wallful of medical degrees and a computerful of your scans and test results…

Depressed after splitting up with his girlfriend, Derek Adams took all his pills, then regretted it. Fearing he might die, he asked a neighbour to take him to hospital, where he collapsed. Shaky, pale and drowsy, his blood pressure dropped and his breaths came quickly.

Yet lab tests and toxicology screening came back clear. Over the next 4 hours Adams received 6 litres of saline, but improved little.

Then a doctor arrived from the clinical trial of an antidepressant in which Adams had been taking part. Adams had enrolled in the study about a month earlier. Initially he had felt his mood buoyed, but an argument with his ex-girlfriend saw him swallow the 29 remaining tablets.

The doctor revealed that Adams was in the control group. The pills he had “overdosed” on were harmless. Hearing this, Adams was surprised and tearfully relieved. Within 15 minutes he was fully alert, and his blood pressure and heart rate had returned to normal.

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.

–US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1914, later quoted by Barack Obama

Thankfully, I’ve never had a fear of public speaking. Unlike many people who are presently suffering through sales presentations and seventh-grade speech contests (either as senders or receivers, I imagine), the part of my brain that inspires the protohuman fight-or-flight reaction lies quiescent over the notion of running my mouth in front of an audience. I’ll get up in front of anyone to talk about anything. I can’t promise it will be interesting, relevant, or amusing, but hey, you get what you pay for. At least I’m up there and not losing sphincter control.

So it was a rather interesting experience to find myself crying in front of an audience. And not just a nice little politician’s crocodile tear. I mean full-on, let ‘er rip, snorking complete with the DTs and PTSD. WTF?

To be fair, I was one of the final speakers on a panel at a women’s roundtable where some pretty personal shit was going down. The purpose of the discussion was to share our experiences, and talk about some of the lessons we’d learned. Thus far from the panelists there’d been some A++ tear jerking material: self destruction, sexual assault, mean parents, abusive partners, and various other events inspiring a sulphuric-acid-strength corrosion of personal esteem. We were surfing a massive tsunami of estrogen, and the waterworks were on full strength. It was like some kind of hormonal wave pool. You know that feeling the day after a crazy squat workout, when you’re waddling like a penguin and getting stuck on the can? I feared that would happen to my tear ducts. There is something horrendously contagious about bodily catharsis: observing yawning, puking, and crying all inspire us to join the fun.

Aside from being generally sucky stuff, these confessions had two key things in common:

• by the standards of normative social interaction they were deemed shameful; and thus
• people tended to keep them secret. Unless you’re one of those desperately socially awkward people who doesn’t have an internal editor, you don’t lead with your wife beating story at a cocktail party.

In comparison to the high-quality suckitude described by many others there, my story was pretty weak. I began with a discussion of my experiences in academia, with the modest intent to describe how although I had loved the university, it had not loved me back. I wanted to share the principle of finding a situation that fit, and escaping ones that did not. I wanted to say it’s OK if you don’t fit in — that it’s probably the situation that’s fucked up, not you. I wanted to tell people to be their whole, fully developed selves in all their glorious idiosycrasy, not partial, half-formed fakes trying to fit an image. I wanted to tell people to trust themselves and their guts, and to listen when those guts are screaming GET OUT like the Amityville Horror.

I kinda managed that, in an intelligent and rational way, for about twenty seconds. And then, some sort of Snot Demon took over my body, wracking it with deep croaky sobs. My body was shaking. Years of emotions that had obviously been buried somewhere just south of my liver had just found the escape hatch, and they were leaping into lifeboats and blasting off like rats from a flaming ship.

I soldiered on, though, managing to describe my experiences and insights in sputtered, half-formed words. I think they got the idea, even if half of it was more or less Neanderthal-quality utterances punctuated by honking. (Imagine a strangled trumpeter swan trying to give a wedding speech.)

Oddly enough, although I felt mildly embarrassed by the whole thing, I didn’t feel ashamed. Here’s why.

1. Everyone else was bawling by that point anyway. Strength in numbers! Ha!
2. More importantly, though, shame and stigma thrive in silence. Difficult as these things may be to articulate, they derive their strength and power from our silence and fears: What if nobody else shares this? What if nobody else is like me? What if they think I’m crazy, or a freak? When you speak openly about your shame, it’s as though you’ve reared up a big black-booted steel toe and nailed that shame right in the nards.

After I had used up about 20 tissues and calmed down, and after the spell was broken by an errant male wandering into the room by mistake to discover approximately 40 weeping women (poor guy), I felt better. Way better.

Then I got to thinking about it, how much we hold inside ourselves because of shame and stigma, and how incredibly freeing it is to speak the unspeakable things.  When we name our bad things, we give them an identity. Just like finally seeing the monster in a horror movie, the unimaginable becomes real. What is real is almost never as terrifying as what is imagined. (Exhibit A: Blair Witch vs Godzilla.)

Once something has a name you can begin to take away its power. Speaking the bad thing into being begins the process of its erosion.

Once something has a name, and is spoken to others, we discover that others share our bad things… or things very much like them. We find we are not alone. In fact we find that we are less alone than we could have ever imagined. (See? Real vs imaginary.)

I started thinking more about this when I had a tablespoon in a jar of nut butter.

At that point I had probably consumed about a half-cup of the stuff, with no sign of abatement. My left brain was quietly, pathetically begging me to quit. It was presenting a variety of logical reasons to stop slathering the oily goodness all over my tongue but, like a nebbish ninth-grader attempting to rationally yet meekly debate himself out of getting a wedgie from the senior football goon, to no avail. My right brain was like Rodney Dangerfield on a bullhorn screaming FAT FAT FAT FAT BOOYAH FAT FAT FAT. Something in my body wanted dietary fat, and it wanted it real, real bad.

Some folks will say that cravings represent some real bodily need, that somehow the body knows what it wants and is always very reasonable about it. Shyeah right. Probably all my body knows is that glucose comes in many tasty formats, and it would happily enjoy them all.

But here’s the weird part: Right now, for me, the cravings are about fat. I wouldn’t care if suddenly all sugar in the world ceased to exist, although it would probably make fruit somewhat less enjoyable, not unlike those horrid Styrofoamy GMO out of season peaches that food producers inflict upon us. Salt is OK but I could take it or leave it. No, I want fat. I mean FAT, like coconut oil. I could seriously eat a block of lard or drink a jug of olive oil.

I have no idea what this is about. It started over the last several weeks. I’m still figuring it all out. What scares me is the compulsion. Suddenly, at age 35, with a healthy, happy body image, no major stress, and no definable food issues beyond just loving all of it, I’m acting like an eating disorder candidate. My nut butter noms are furtive. I’m having thoughts like “I could go out for a run and grab some tahini on the way home.” Even my liquid fish oil is looking kind of foxy. And once that rollercoaster crests the hill, there’s no stopping it until somehow I tear myself away from the kitchen with the last tattered shred of self control.

For a while I felt really strange and silly. I read up on eating disorders and nothing really seemed to fit me. I have no “issues”: no controlling father, no anxious desire to please others, no instinct towards self-obliteration. I don’t want to be skinny. I want to be a ninja but would settle for “normal person in good shape”. I can’t upchuck on purpose even when I desperately want to — which sucks when I have the flu or food poisoning and nothing would feel better than a good ol’ barf to let that dodgy shrimp salad run free.

And I didn’t tell anyone. Until one day I decided that the kookoobananas had to stop. I told OMGBFFA. Here’s the crazy shit: She said “ME TOO!”

Gah?! Did we somehow give each other a virus that makes a person devour cashews and avocado? She carries more bodyfat than me, so it’s not because I’m lean. She is apple shaped and I’m pear shaped, so it’s not because of some strange fat storage hormone situation. Spring is on the way and I’m getting outside to enjoy the strengthening sun, so it’s not the nesting instinct that seems to set in during late fall when the days shorten and the suprachiasmatic nucleus near the optic nerve says “It’s dark! Let’s eat!”

Despite my puzzlement, I felt an incredible, immediate sense of relief. I’m not crazy. (Uh, well, maybe I am crazy and she’s also crazy, which is totally possible.) Sharing the fear and shame instantaneously, dramatically reduced its power over me. Whammo! Right in the goolies with the boot!

Anyway, I’m binging on clinical studies at the moment, which are probably much better for me than a cup of almond butter. I want to get to the bottom of this before it gets to my bottom.

And I’m telling you now, to bust that stigma out in the open, to encourage you to share insights and experiences, and to remind you that none of us are alone in what we suffer. Sure, I have to endure a little nose-wiping in public, but it’s better than being alone with the Blair Witch.