But unlike the chronophobic youth fetishizers who have an existential crisis when they hit 25, or the media who think that adolescents with partially formed frontal cortexes should drive the bus of cultural currents, I’m cool with aging. After all, as challenging as aging can be, it sure beats the hell out of the alternative.

For one thing, many of us are getting smarter.

Forget all that bullshit about how infants are learning geniuses while old people cling to their timeworn ruts like paranoid cat ladies of cognition. Have you seen babies lately? C’mon, they still crap their pants and think Barney is cool. I can beat a baby at chess at least 50% of the time.

Yes, we do lose brain cells as we age. But here’s the cool thing: when it comes to brains, size doesn’t always matter. OMGBFFA used to have a couple of tiny Yorkshire terriers. Each one weighed about 4 lb. Now, these things have brains the size of a chickpea. Yet somehow, everything dog-like was condensed into these little cranial legumes. Those dogs, fruity as they were (especially when wearing little sweaters), could still execute all the dog-required tasks that, say, a German shepherd could.

Let me go one better. Consider the octopus. That thing doesn’t even have a “brain” in the way we think of it; it’s really more like Jello and rubber formed into an amusingly creepy prehensile shape. But octopuses are freaky smart. And those cephalopod fuckers beat me and the baby at chess 100% the time.

Hell, even fungi can be brilliant. Check this weird shit out.

I digress. The point is that thanks to neuroplasticity and the ability of our brains to form new connections, we’re getting smarter despite fewer neurons. And often, cleverness and cunning mixed with a good ol’ age-related dose of cynicism beats vigour and brute force.

Just like every boxing gym has that old dude with the porkpie hat that speaks in vulgarity-laced proverbs, nearly every traditional martial arts school has that ancient guy who looks and talks like Yoda, and claims his knees are no good, but who can still kick you in the face from every possible angle.

I remember when I first started judo. I did some classes with an instructor who got his black belt in 1958. By now he’s like a zillionth-degree black belt, so black belt he’s gone right into red belt. In person, he’s not very scary. He’s a kindly, affable short guy who moves slowly and creakily, and talks about how he’s not very good at throwing these days. Yeah right. All he does is stand next to you, and you fall down. He scratches his ear, and your face slams the mat. He wiggles his toe, and you end up with your kidneys smashed into your nose, wondering why you didn’t take up competitive shuffleboard instead of judo.

That’s the power of age-related skill and smarts.

Aging gives us context and the big picture. Ideally, you start to realize that little things don’t matter.

• Got a cold and can’t train for a few days? Meh. It’s a drop of water in the ocean.
• Gained a pound? Meh. In a body that has, say, 150 of those pounds, does one more here or there really matter?
• Didn’t make my squat PR today? Meh. There’s always next week.
• Crap workout? Meh. I’ve got a thousand workouts under my belt; this isn’t the workout that makes or breaks me. I know what matters most is that I just kept showing up to the gym.

Having context makes victories that much sweeter. And smaller. Which means there are more of them.

• Knees don’t hurt today? Great!
• Got upright and achieved bipedalism? Super!
• Shoulders moving happily in their sockets instead of creaking like old hinges? Awesome!
• Able to sneak a few pieces of artisan cheese or a glass of vintage malbec past my digestive system sensors? Hoohah!
• Didn’t squeak out a fart while deadlifting? The world applauds!

Shit, every day is the friggin’ Olympics when you start realizing what’s truly important and get smacked around a little bit by the universe. Aging gives you perspective and cuts your grandiosity down to size. You build healthy humility and life becomes a wonderful little charm bracelet of tiny magical moments and banal pleasures. You stop being in such a goddamned hurry.

100-year-old shot putter Ruth Frith

Aging also helps us grow into ourselves. We start to know what we like and don’t like. We stop giving a fuck what other people think of us.

Imagine, younguns, a world where you just don’t give a shit about looking stupid or what your friends think or falling down in public or impressing the Joneses or having to go along with the crowd to do things you hate. Imagine how awesome that would be. The liberation. The joyous freedom. The glorious sense of possibility. Well, if you’re lucky, that’s what getting older is.

Now, this magnificent state of karmic bliss doesn’t come without a price. Humility is rarely inherited; it usually must be earned. Unless you’re one of the lucky folks that learns from other people’s mistakes, you’ll have to endure some experiential skill building. Which is to say you’ll have to go through all the fuckups and falling-down on your own.

The other cost of the passport to Zen is that your physical body makes its presence known much more clearly when you age. Stuff starts to hurt. Stuff starts to creak. Stuff starts to grow hair (or lose it). Stuff stops making some stuff you do want, and starts making other stuff you don’t want. And gravity isn’t just a theory, it’s the law.

Bodybuilder Ernestine Shepherd, in her mid-70s

Now, these changes don’t mean that things get worse. They simply mean that things change.

Frinstance, I’ve built more muscle in the last few years than I think I’ve built in my entire lifting career. (Thank you, Dan John, deadlifts, and the good folks down at the all-you-can-eat churrasquiera.) And I intend to keep building more muscle, at least until normal clothing no longer fits me and my ass looks like two cannonballs being absentmindedly twiddled by a rock giant.

And after years of training in a variety of activities, I have exquisite body awareness and muscular control. Any new activity I take up is speedily and easily integrated into a deep and broad physical practice. (Although I did kick my salsa partner in the ankles last weekend, but hey — that’s the price of an enchufle doble with a ninja, my friend.)

My body shape has changed as my hormones have changed. I can get all pouty faced while throwing out old bras, or I can simply shrug and go hit the January sales for something new. Neither better nor worse; just different.

Still, there are some not-so-great consequences. One of those is that our bodies simply can’t endure the abuse we used to throw at them. We might develop weird digestive intolerances. (Oh red wine and cottage cheese, how I mourn your loss.)

As we age we have to train smarter. We have to think about sustainability. The long haul. Tomorrow. Next year.

We have to be willing to tap out early and walk away — thus we live to fight another day. We have to foam roll and do our mobility work. We have to take days off and mix things up. We can’t go balls to the wall (which, by the way, has nothing to do with testicles and everything to do with engineering) all the time. We can’t pump till we puke… ever. We can’t do dumbshit things, because an injury today might mean weeks or months of recovery, instead of days. We should nap more.

We have to keep it real, be authentic, and both live and lift with integrity, self-compassion, and optimistic humility. We have to stop looking for the magic solution. There is no fucking magic solution. We are already magic. We are already stupendous. Aging merely gives us a ticket to the greatest show on earth — the wizardry of our own survival. If you’re smart, and think sustainably, that show will be magnificent until you croak.

Enjoy. And pass the prunes.

95-year-old sprinter Ida Keeling

“Meet your goals in 2012,” says the advertising for a nearby gym.

“Let us help you reach your goals,” says another.

We all have goals, or should. Right? Goals are Very Important. Especially when it comes to fitness and nutrition.

And, so the popular logic goes, our goals should be SMART goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-limited

We should whip out the Gantt charts and plan our lives like it’s Mission Impossible. Then we will be On Top Of Things. Then there will be peace on earth and good will to all, for we will have arrived.

I recently read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It’s a psalm for productivity. I flipped through GTD like people visit holy sites: with the panting hope that this – this formula, this system, this relic — would be the secret. That after I consumed this revered book, my inbox would be like unto a Zen garden and my mind would somehow be both a placid lake and a bubbling rapid of productivity.

Now, I’ve long been a fan of throwing things out. Try it. It feels delicious. Scary at first. But then… oh, so very, very yummy.

So high-fives to Allen for empowering us all to whip out the Glad Bags O’Justice on our lives. If we get nothing done out of Getting Things Done beyond mashing our hoarders’ nests into a pile and lighting the whole fucking thing on fire along with our teenage insecurities and adult pettiness, that would be quite enough.

I also love Allen’s idea of regular self-reviews, which I’ve done for a long time. At Precision Nutrition we are fond of asking the inconvenient question How’s that workin’ for ya?

In other words, look back on what you’re doing. Is it really working… or not? Really? Hey, no big deal if it isn’t. Just change it. Whatever the answer, the important part is that you know. And you can’t know unless you’re brave enough to look. Which few people do.

Especially not regularly. Think how much better your life would be if — instead of a frenzied, shamed, annual ritual of “resolution” — you simply allocated 5 minutes a day for a calm, compassionate, clear-eyed appraisal of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. An appraisal directed at intelligent problem solving, building awareness, or insightful reflection, not tiresome self-criticism or brain-hamster rumination.

Try this now. Whip out a piece of paper and set a timer. Spend 5 minutes just observing and reflecting.

• What did you do today? What did you think today? What did you feel today?
• Which choices were good? Why?
• Which choices didn’t work for you? Why not?
• What would you change?
• How would you go about changing that, starting now?
• Can you really change whatever it is you want to change? Is that the most important, most intelligent place to put your energy?
• What are your patterns? Where do you get “stuck” or where do you “latch on”?
• What are your routines? Do those work for you? Could you do more of what works?
• As you do this review, how is your breathing? Are you clenching your jaw? What’s happening in your body while you contemplate?

Doesn’t matter if you don’t do anything with this stuff right now. Just tune in. Give yourself your undivided attention for 5 minutes. Trust me, you have time. In fact, this may be one of the most important things you do all day.

Then, why not throw something out? Even if it’s a snotty Kleenex? Get in the habit of throwing things away. Trust me, it’s diviiiine. Today, Kleenex. Tomorrow, the piece of crap that hangs over you like a nagging sword of Damocles, reminding you that you never finished high school Latin or that you still haven’t read that National Geographic from 2003.

Back to GTD. To be brutally honest, Allen lost me around the time he proposed having seven project categories. Suddenly, this system that was supposed to simplify my life was looking awful lot like a Baroque alchemist’s bulbously elaborate horoscope of mental disorder.

Nowhere was Do Less proposed. No, the goal was to Do More… just with labels and file folders for everything. Contemplating this dystopian future, I felt my eyes go as glassy as a stuffed marmot’s.

I refocused my suddenly-softened retinas and soldiered bravely onward. I composed lists of Next Actions.

I spent the next few days in a frenzied haze of Doing Things. My tickybox-checking burned holes in my post-it stack. I plowed through Next Actions with the singular intent of a silverback gorilla on crystal meth.

At the end of those days, I had, indeed, Gotten Things Done. The idea of Next Actions is, in theory, a good one: You simply break larger projects down into smaller, more manageable steps. One thing at a time. I dig that approach real good. In fact, it’s the basis for the Lean Eating coaching program I designed.

But after improving my productivity by Doing piles of Things I didn’t feel any better. I felt worse. I felt breathless, hurried, and paranoid.

I reviewed Next Actions constantly, vibrating on red alert and poised for execution. My world became a series of Next Actions awaiting attention. Shrinking my stride while sprinting sped up the footfalls of my Next Actions. If I skipped lunch I could knock off three steps. Besides, lunch wasn’t in the project list, and adrenaline is the perfect GTD fuel anyway.

I ended the week exhausted and panic-attacked, driven to hyperventilating hysteria by my Next Action list that bristled with three minute to-dos. When I had a full-tilt ribcage-crushing weep session after accidentally spilling tea on myself (to be fair, the tea was really fucking hot and I was wearing a sweater that nicely insulated said liquid’s blistering wrath against the delicate epithelium of my chest before I could untangle my sleeves enough to rip the woolen napalm off myself), I knew it might be time to re-think my new approach.

What the fuck? When did we all become so obsessed with producing stuff? Do I really want to be able to make more stuff, faster? I thought I left that shit behind in academia when I got off the Publication Purgatory treadmill.

Over at Zen Habits, Joshua Fields Millburn’s written a very lucid piece on 100 Days Without Goals. It feels almost naughty even reading it, doesn’t it? That slackass! Where’s his 5-year plan?

News flash: The universe doesn’t give a flying fuck about your plans. You can either kick and scream against this reality, raging against the dying of your mathematically structured light, or you can get real, review the available evidence from your own experience, and accept that life is a change sandwich between two slices of chaos.

Rushing through a manic haze of Doing Things doesn’t solve two fundamental problems:

Problem 1: Too often we are passengers in the speeding train of our own lives, ripping towards an imaginary destination (“arriving”, “losing 10 lb”, “winning the lottery”, “finally being happy”, etc.) with the blinds pulled down.

We aren’t paying attention. We rarely even peek out of the windows to watch the blurred scenery whip past as we hurtle to our inevitable demise. We are simply hanging on for dear life, with faint nausea and our eyes shut.

Problem 2: We don’t know what we really want. (Or we’ve lost touch with it.) Our daily actions don’t reflect our deepest values, principles, and priorities. Quick: What’s most important to you in life? Write it down:

1. What’s most important to me is: _________.
2. I live for: _________.
3. It’s essential to me that I: _________.
4. In an ideal world, I’d never go to bed without: _________.
5. What brings me joy is: _________.
6. I feel inspired and excited, and immersed in what I’m doing, when I: _________.

You get the idea. Digest for a while. In an ideal world, if you were to receive the Mensch Award, what would it be for?

So think about this instead. Rather than what to get done, think about why and how to get it done… and how you can be there for the entire process.

Why are you getting things done in the first place?

But of course, it’s January so you want me to talk about goals, right? Here’s what I suggest.

Set Be-Here-Now Goals rather than Someday Goals.

Someday Goals are externally imposed goals that focus on following rules or expectations. Someday Goals are punitive and dour, focused on enduring (or better yet, numbing out) misery while you wait for an imaginary utopia. Someday Goals keep you living in the near future. Someday Goals often involve outcomes or “If-then” statements, such as “If I am good then I can ‘cheat’…” or “If I work out then I can have…”

Be-Here-Now Goals respond to what is, right now, here. They are calibrated by your internal environment while you twiddle the knobs of honesty and deep compassion for yourself. Be-Here-Now keep you living in the present. Be-Here-Now Goals involve words like “mindful” and “feel” and “choose” and “accept” and “allow”.

Be-Here-Now Goals often involve turning towards unpleasant things to fully experience them, while Someday Goals often involve temporary anesthesia so you can get through to the next checkpoint.

Be-Here-Now Goals are about living and experiencing. Living and experiencing your values, your priorities, your full range of experiences and sensations, and your daily life, no matter how banal. Be-Here-Now Goals are like the way a little kid navigates the world: looking, smelling, touching, tasting, manipulating, playing, picking things up and inspecting them, licking them, throwing them to test their weight.

Frinstance:

I’m not arguing you have to spend all waking hours in a state of Memento-esque amnesia, unaware of past or future. Some Someday Goals are great.

Frinstance, “Climb a mountain” is cool. Just break it into a Be-Here-Now Goal of “One step at a time, with full attention” instead of zoning out during your climb, daydreaming of Everest. Then, each single step will be a small joy. (Or painful. But at least you’ll remember each step.)

Be willing to accept the presence of the full range of human experience, right now. You don’t have to love it. Just be there with it. In this moment. Now.

And hey… why not do less in 2012?

Take things off your plate instead of adding them. (Unless you’re a chronic under-achiever. Then try adding something new to your plate while accepting the inevitable presence of mild discomfort that change brings. Your Be-Here-Now goal is simply to experience and be present with this discomfort. The end result is largely irrelevant compared to the victory of expanding your change tolerance.)

Seek contentment and presence, rather than “achievement” and “outcomes”. Have more unstructured, “empty” moments that allow creativity, synthesis, play, and “flow” to flourish.

Occasionally, seek getting nothing done… and simply experience your life in this rare moment of pause and silence.

Now that’s a goal I can get behind this year.

I was honoured to share a program with three other awesome women:

Stephanie Coontz

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders

Afterwards I had the opportunity to talk with students and faculty both formally and informally. From our discussions I concluded that these issues are more salient than I had imagined.

So many people out there are suffering with poor health and a lack of body-mind-life integration, and these are linked closely with social inequality as well as a lack of personal self-determination. It is essential for us to develop new visions for fitness and wellness that have a social justice component.

—————————

Thanks for inviting me here today. It’s a great privilege to be invited here.

Today I want to talk about change and transition. I want to talk about the lived realities of our bodies. I want to talk about pain.

I want to talk about the ways in which self-transformation and working towards deep health are social justice projects.

I’d like to ask three questions today:

1. How we can incorporate scientific knowledge – particularly in the fields of physiology or biology (or in my case, nutrition, fitness, and health) – into social justice work?

2. How can we look at the project of physical self-transformation as a site for social justice intervention?

3. And finally I want to ask: Why does it matter? Aren’t these just personal vanity projects and beneath our notice as “serious scholars”?

Let me start with a brief history. I finished my PhD in Women’s Studies in 2002. I focused on issues of subjectivity as well as women in science and technology. This is where my interest in science – particularly biology – comes from today.

In 2004 I published Doing IT, which was about women’s work in information technology. In 2006 I published Trans/Forming Feminisms, which was about working across boundaries in trans and feminist issues. In 2008, along with Pat and Hugh Armstrong, I published Critical to Care, which examined women’s labour in ancillary health occupations.

Throughout grad school I worked as a personal trainer.

After I finished my PhD I continued to teach at York University in Toronto. I left to work for nearly a year in a public health/occupational health research institute. In 2008, I left academia altogether to work in three roles:

1. As the research director for the Healthy Food Bank foundation, which raises money to buy healthy food for food agencies.
2. As Editor-in-Chief of Spezzatino, which is a food magazine that supports the HFB.
3. And finally, I work with a company called Precision Nutrition developing a large-scale health intervention called the Lean Eating program. We’ll talk about this more in a bit.

What I do now

I’m going to briefly introduce what I do now so that you have some context, and then I’ll come back to it when I talk about the application of some of these questions I’m going to raise.

When I left academia, I started as a nutrition coach with what’s called the Lean Eating program of Precision Nutrition. Eventually I began to supervise the development of it. I now create the content and curriculum for it.

This started as a 4-month program, grew to 6 months, now doing 12 months. It’s a virtual program – all done online. It’s much like an online course.

Originally this program focused on sports nutrition – so, how can we get people to lose fat, gain muscle, and get fitter and healthier.

But along the way, we realized that we actually had a living laboratory of the change process, so the program has grown to be a large-scale, in-depth change creation process that uses body transformation as a point of entry for life transformation (although we don’t tell people that at the beginning!).

To be very clear, what we have found is that when people set out to change their bodily experiences – they change their lives.

And indeed one of the points I’m going to argue today is that our body is our interface to the world.

When we make changes to our bodies’ material (and make no mistake, we are changing bodies down to the electrical, chemical, and mechanical levels) — or our bodies’ actions — or our bodies being-in-the-world:

• we change our perspectives and outlook on life
• we change or deepen our political views
• we change our relationships to other people
• we change our social and physical environments.

So it’s very important that we do this with a social justice foundation, and we’ll come back to this later.

Now, when I quit my job in academia and started doing this, many folks were puzzled – their concept of what this would involve was very limited, so they imagined that maybe I was producing meal plans for people or lecturing them about how they should eat broccoli.

Here’s how the program works.

• It’s a 12-month intensive program organized around creating conceptual and behavioural change to people’s physical fitness, nutrition, and health
• There’s a program for women and program for men
• People get daily lessons and often assignments.
• People get daily workouts
• Clients get an online support group
• Clients also get individualized coaching and supervision

Each iteration has had about 500-600 people. We are on the 6^th iteration now – that means we’ve had around 4000 people in total go through the program. I’ve coached three cohorts and still retain some coaching clients.

Each coach will deal with hundreds of personal correspondences over the course of the program, and each support forum generates thousands of posts.

So as you can imagine, we’ve collected an incredible amount of data from this.

And we’ve learned a tremendous amount about the relationship between body transformation and life transformation, which I think has lessons here for both our own lives as well as the life of our political and social movements.

Key questions for me

I’ve been interested in science, technology and health – both individual and public health – for about 20 years.

I’ve also been interested in questions of subjectivity and identity.

Two of the questions that always interested me were:

WHY do people make change?

HOW do people make change?

I’ve always been quite curious and nosy about this. It’s great to be a qualitative interviewer because you get to be nosy with people!

• For instance, when researching trans issues, I went to conferences, events etc. met hundreds of people and often asked (once I knew people well enough – although Americans would talk without much prompting!): Why did you decide to transition and what was your journey like?
• When researching work and employment, I asked: why did people have the career trajectories they did?
• In this current position with PN, I’m focused on people’s journeys through desire for change and physical self-transformation.

Discomfort around change

As social justice advocates we are change agents. But change hasn’t necessarily gotten easier for us.

We continue to grapple with things like:

• WHAT actually needs changing
• WHAT constitutes appropriate, important, and/or valuable changes
• HOW to make that change – in other words, what methods or strategies we should use

And as advocates of social justice, we often feel and see a lot of discomfort around certain types of change, esp. body change.

1. First, we may be uncomfortable with change that proceeds to what we view as too heteronormative, too Anglo, too bourgeois, too ability-focused or normative in any other way. So, for example, when someone wants to lose weight, our hackles immediately go up – we want to critique the beauty myth.

2. Another type of discomfort comes from the assumption that change agents are judging us.

For instance, I’ve had people expect that I would be putting them under surveillance and monitoring their bodies.

I link this to the semi-punitive nature of the deficit model of change in our culture: the idea here is that you change because you are broken. We don’t view change as growth, evolution, or simply… change.

This is a good time to establish my own approach to change. I use an evolution or a growth model, which assumes that change happens for a few reasons:

• We get to the point of having a mismatch in our situation – either our coping mechanisms no longer work, or in many people’s cases their physiological needs are out of sync with what they’re actually doing with their bodies. Politically of course the same things happens with social movements – what you’re doing isn’t working any more.
• We reach a point where worlds collide – where physical pressures, psychological pressures, environmental pressures, etc. all come together into a moment of crisis.
• Or, which is the approach I like to focus on, we say “This is working really well. This is awesome. How can we do more of this?”

3. Another reason for discomfort around change is that we are critical of discourses of individual empowerment – such as “you can do it if you just try hard enough” – and rightly so as these discourses can be insidious and blaming and we feel defensive when we hear them.

These discourses suggest if your life isn’t better then it’s for lack of trying. These discourses suggest that you should always want to change and improve or be a certain way.

4. We may feel discomfort with idea of single-person change – which I call the “hero narrative” – that is decontextualized.

In the hero narrative, things like social geography, structural factors, community, environment and so forth are irrelevant. As I will argue later, change MUST be communal and work across boundaries and life domains.

5. There are misconceptions about what is and is not possible – especially with bodies but this can apply to other things as well.

We’re told that some things are possible when they aren’t. We continue to strive for them only to meet repeated failure, then assume it is our fault. On the other hand, we’re told that some things are impossible when in fact they’re quite achievable. The trick, of course, is to know the difference.

6. We may feel concerned that discussing change would obscure important questions about what is – what people are dealing with right now.

7. We may feel shame around change – shame at the desire for change.

People will say to me: “I know I’m not supposed to want this, but I do.” This is especially true for people in social justice fields who feel that any kind of focus on the physical self is a distraction from the “real business” of making political change. I know this because these people – from academia, or activist, or intellectual circles – are my clients. Many seek me out specifically because of my approach. They come to me feeling tremendous shame over wanting their bodies to be different.

We have to work through the question of whether body transformation is “selling out” or buying in to an oppressive system.

In addition, people who have gone through transition, or who are coming out, also struggle with what to do with their lived body histories, and each person makes different choices around this.

8. We may feel discomfort about change that is foisted upon us.

For instance, this could be a change in our health status. We age. We may become disabled or ill.

This could be a change that comes from the powerful drive for making our body presentation match our internally felt identity – as in the case of trans people or simply people who are struggling to develop all kinds of new identities. Another example of this might occur in migration (a literal kind of transition) and the work of having to develop a diasporic identity.

Then, there are other identity changes — such as pregnancy, or parenthood — where other people are ready to jump in and define your identity for you.

9. Finally, we have concerns about the nature of change itself:

• What are we trying to change to?
• Are we trying to be different?
• Are we trying to “fix ourselves”?
• Or does change involve elaborating on aspects of ourselves that already existed?
• Is this a total self-reinvention?

I would argue that change is all of these things – change is complex.

Today I am going to talk a bit more about my experiences of change, working in these domains of food and eating.

I want to focus on body transformation and change more broadly as a site for social justice work, and suggest possibilities for working across disciplines and practices.

Gaps in current knowledge/practice

During my 10 years of teaching I noticed that most students were interested in theory but not in developing practice or policy.

Now I find the same thing is true of nutrition clients. They’re often interested in a variety of plans or gathering additional information – especially with the internet – but not as interested in actually doing the daily actions that make change possible.

I’ve found that people in liberal arts and social sciences are also quite uncomfortable with discussing the actual science behind body projects; they have a fear of what I call – all one word — “scienceandmath”.

This discomfort and hesitation has left a gap in our understanding of health and body issues.

Social justice advocates have produced many critiques of science without understanding the actual science itself.

As activists and academics we are also very good at critiquing things without being able to provide clear, practical alternatives.

So this has given us an analysis of body experience that is missing a very large piece.

We have the social determinants of health approach, which identifies ways in which health, activity, and nutritional disparities depend intersectionally on systemic factors such as geography, the organization of public space, the social welfare system, immigrant status, income/employment, access to resources and services such as adequate health care, and so forth.

We have an approach that analyzes discourses around the body, and of knowledge production.

Now, I want to say here that investigating the knowledge claims of mass media, public discourse, and scientific or medical regimes is a valid project.

Social justice advocates from all fields have made important critiques of:

• media representations
• publicly disseminated scientific knowledge claims
• and body-related practices and domains of knowledge such as medical science

This is important, because we are avid consumers of health- and body-related information. There are industries – such as the pharmaceutical industry or what I call the fitness-industrial complex – that profit from our bodies and from particular discourses.

And it’s especially important because it’s often the people who are most marginalized who have certain regimes enacted upon their bodies.

In other words, it is essential to have a critical social justice framework that takes up questions of ability, aging, racialization, access to care, etc.

Critiques of the presumed “truth” of scientific findings are fundamental in an information- and image-saturated world in which bodies are commodified and consumed.

But.

Despite ongoing calls for a “materiality of the body”, very few social justice and feminist advocates are aware of or understand the actual practice, research, and primary literature in the field of anatomy, physiology or sports science.

Indeed, with a few exceptions feminist knowledge of physiology and the project of science in general appears to be derived entirely from secondary sources, such as women’s magazines that make inaccurate claims, or commercially marketed scientific studies that support the claims of drug or dietary supplement manufacturers.

So, often, when we talk about the material structures of physiology, this can be viewed as evidence of “biological essentialism”.

The underlying assumption here is that: society and culture are complex, while physiology is simplistic and mechanistic. “Science”, “medicine”, and “health care” are treated as: homogeneous, hegemonic, vaguely conspiratorial entities whose sole purposes are to “medicalize” our bodies and enact some type of disciplining practice upon it, such as pharmaceutical treament or surgery.

Social justice researchers – although they accept the fluidity of a discursive body – may forget both the facticity and the fluidity of the biological body.

What I mean by that is that physiology is governed by particular scientific principles – so for instance, if I raise your body temperature too high, your cells will die – but the biological body is also in constant dialogue with the lived environment as well as its own internal systems and substances.

Social justice scholars may assume that data, results, and diagnostic or methodological constructs emerging from biological research are widely and uncritically taken for granted even by the clinicians that produce them. There’s little awareness that within these disciplines, concepts and methods are also contested.

Today I want to make perhaps a strange proposition to a liberal arts audience – I want to argue in favour of the complexity, the richness, the diversity and wonder of biology.

We hear from the media sources that we rightly critique that we do not have “good bodies”.

I want to tell you that if you are alive here in this room you have a good body. An almost infinite number of tiny chemical reactions had to occur – and are still occurring – just right in order to create you and keep you going.

Biologically speaking, if you have made it to being a viable multicellular organism, you should consider your life a great success.

Let me illustrate this concept with a diagram. Let’s talk about one thing I know, which is eating. Who here eats? OK, so, eating is pretty basic, right? It’s hard to get more “essential” than eating.

I mean, yeah, there are social rituals around eating, and food politics, and stuff, but we can probably agree that eating is a basic biological function.

Here is a simplified schematic diagram of how eating is organized physiologically, in your body.

Source: Hans-Rudolf Berthoud and Christopher Morrison. "The Brain, Appetite, and Obesity." Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2008.59:55-92

Each part of that diagram is controlled by any number of chemical, electrical, and mechanical signals. You have literally about 100 things that can influence your eating behaviour just at a biological level.

As you can see… it’s slightly more complicated than you would expect.

Now, I’m not implying that social science researchers must also be physiology researchers. I’m sure all of you are thinking “Oh gawd, not another demand on my time!”

Yet without an awareness of and dialogue with the biological literature, social science and liberal arts researchers risk understanding all claims about physiology as equivalent.

We risk making truth claims about physiology (and its associated institutional practices) that are oversimplified and reductionist; that disavow any role for biology altogether; and/or that can be refuted or confirmed by the available physiological evidence.

We need to keep critiquing knowledge about the body but we cannot do this if we do not truly understand the body or if we do not engage with this scientific research directly.

If we do not engage directly, we will not know that life sciences may contain liberatory or useful concepts and practices for feminist and social justice projects, rather than merely a set of negative, pathologizing discourses.

Thus what we need to do is work in collaboration and coalition – even with disciplines that may make us uncomfortable.

We may learn that there are certain unpalatable truths about biology that contravene our political agendas and long-held assumptions… or conversely that the richness and wonder of biology affirms the richness and wonder of our existence. It can go both ways.

In any case, we have to do this work if we want to reduce our blind spots.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the so-called obesity epidemic. I don’t want to go down that road too much but I want to make a few points.

Evidence from physiology suggests that:

1. First, activity and nutritional quality are much more significant factors than body weight alone in determining overall wellness, quality of life, and longevity. Not having adequate activity and nutritional quality is THE biggest factor in determining health outcomes and options – for instance, if you lose mobility then you lose a lot of self-determination and access to the world
2. Unlike body weight or size, many of these factors are within our control.
3. Improving access to these factors and helping people implement them (to the best of their ability) should be an important social justice project.

Let me be clear here. Preventable chronic diseases and poor health affect us and our communities. They affect our ability to do important political and social and personal work because many of us are exhausted, we are not functioning as well as we can, and our resources are going to simply surviving.

So I propose to you that in many cases – whether that is politically or individually – we need to confront physical change.

What does Lean Eating tell us about change?

The lessons I have learned in developing the Lean Eating program have reinforced many of my contentions about the intersections between feminist/social justice movements. These fall into four themes.

1. Knowledge of/in the body

Here I am describing an actual somatic knowledge that is stored and communicated chemically, electrically, and mechanically in the body, e.g. in the form of hormones and cell signals, and electrical impulses.

There isn’t just a “connection” between brain and body – brain IS body and vice versa.

As a quick example, let’s take the enteric nervous system. This is the “second brain” in your gut – it uses all the same neurotransmitters. You can think of how you get stomach butterflies when nervous. When we talk about “gut feelings” in fact we can be quite literal. This is essentially a non-cognitive brain that “thinks” and “feels” without explicit “consciousness”, right in the middle of our bellies. How cool is that?!

If we understand how human physiology works we will come to appreciate the incredible richness and wonder of it.

People come to me and think they are broken. They are in a certain situation, they say, because there is something wrong with them.

I tell them: You are not broken. Your body works magnificently. Your body is an elegant, incredibly complex and highly tuned system that regulates your intake and your expenditure with 99.9% efficiency at all times.

I heard someone say once that life is solving millions of complex equations simultaneously. That is what our bodies are doing.

Thus when I am talking about the discourse of the body, I am talking about actual chemical and electrical and mechanical communication that is occurring within the body. Your cells are talking to each other right now.

The body has many languages. It speaks through physical pain as well as through food and eating. I differentiate food from eating because both the substance of food and the act of eating have profound biological, social and emotional and political dimensions for us.

2. Pain

There is a tremendous amount of pain and suffering in people’s lives, and this pain and suffering is literally expressed in the body.

Women come to me for help because their lives are devouring them. They are experiencing a trauma of self-loathing and a lack of physical self-determination.

Women’s hunger is a hunger for change. They come to me because – for whatever reason – and I tell people that their journeys are their own – their eating and food and their bodies are causing them distress. Whatever they are doing to cope is no longer working for them.

Painful emotions are also stored in movement and body tissues. Massage therapists will tell you that sometimes, they’ll find a point of spasm, and when they trigger that point, their clients will have an emotional reaction.

We have women crying all the time during their workouts, especially in the early days, because the intense movement and present-ness somehow stimulates stored emotions. They’ll literally be doing pushups or something, and start bawling – somehow the movement experience and activation of their bodies in that way lets something loose.

The other interesting thing is what happens with angry clients.

Here, I distinguish between healthy vs unhealthy anger.

Unhealthy anger is not a judgement but an observation about the effects and consequence of the anger. Unhealthy anger is anger that seeks to destroy, slash and burn. It’s horizontal hostility. We are often so angry that we don’t even know what we’re angry about – we spray our anger everywhere or take it into ourselves and allow it to destroy us from the inside. We become alienated from our own bodies.

Unhealthy anger is exhausting. We see it among activists and academics in social justice fields who are burning out. This pain is expressed in our bodies.

Healthy anger is mad as hell and not going to take it any more. Healthy anger seeks justice. Healthy anger helps us work towards a better world. Healthy anger says “Hey, this is bullshit – let’s find a better solution”.

Healthy anger empowers us. Unhealthy anger destroys us. And with unhealthy anger, clients’ bodies do not work properly. They are awash in inflammation. They are literally eating themselves from the inside out.

So we can see food and eating and movement and other things as well such as inflammation or the chemical environment as languages that the body speaks.

We need – as social justice advocates – to recognize that body transformation is pain transformation. In order to transform your body you must go through the pain and engage meaningfully with it.

The goal is not to eliminate pain (since that is impossible) but rather to develop a different relationship with it.

Body transformation becomes a proxy for life transformation – but body transformation IS also life transformation.

Now one of the things I want to say here is that most of what actually happens in body transformation is intangible. Here are some things our clients have said to us.

• “I walk tall now.”
• “My posture is better.”
• “I’m so much happier on the inside.”
• “I’ve become a better parent.”
• “I feel healthy.”
• “I feel confident in my decisions.”
• “I am stronger… inside and out.”
• “I’m determined.”
• “I am more focused.”
• “You have given me back my life.”

However, that all being said, it’s important to point out that change itself also causes pain. There is no change without pain and discomfort.

3. Transition and changes

Transition is a complex time no matter what that transition involves – e.g. coming out, transitioning physically, or engaging in political movements dedicated to change.

Transition can be joyous, empowering, affirming, also traumatic and painful. It inspires primal & adaptive emotions such as fear, shame, anger – loss and grief.

As I said earlier, we assume that change often involves a deficit model – that we change because we are broken and need to be fixed. I see most people change because their healthy and resilient self and bodies are asserting their own survival – these resilient and creative selves are attempting to fix people’s relationships and environment.

This type of transition is not a kind of self-reinvention but rather a self-evolution in which the raw material for the new self was always there, and we honour the journey.

Self transformation is one of the most profound and complex human desires. We are constantly torn between the desire for change and the desire for comfort and stasis. This is especially true when we are doing the very hard work that change involves.

Change involves pain and trauma even when we want to change.

Change has physical consequences. We need to be able to cope with change and transition as it unfolds in our own bodies.

As social justice advocates we also have to be very careful to ensure that our own natural change process is a healthy and positive one, and that we do not constrain other people’s pathways. For instance, trans ppl speak of being shamed by social justice allies because their destination gender presentation is viewed as “too normative”.

One interesting thing I have learned is that when we act as change agents, we ourselves change. Change is a collective practice. There is no individual change. I cannot watch you change and remain unaffected by it. And you cannot change without me – or someone or something else – supporting you.

So what are we changing towards?

Well, in my business I focus on helping people move towards what I call deep health.

4. Towards deep health

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. (World Health Organization)

Deep health is about optimal performance not a single standard – it’s about ensuring that each process or organism runs as well as it can, accepting whatever limitations might be in place at any moment.

Deep health includes three things:

• development of a robust, flexible identity
• living in a body that is integrated and attached to one’s emotions and cognition – the thoughts and feelings do not exist outside the material of the body
• meaningful social connection and interaction – includes working across boundaries.

Deep health is about nourishment and ensuring that one’s physical experience in the world is as good and meaningful and affirming as it can be, while also accepting the presence of pain.

The pain that I see in my hundreds of female clients is tremendously deep.

It is the pain of spiritual annihilation (in a secular sense). The pain of self-destruction. The pain of no identity (As one client said to me, “I don’t know who I am.”).

Identity questions preoccupy feminism and social justice movements bc these hold the key to self-determination. The same is true of physical identity and capacity.

I want to close by arguing that questions of physical health, fitness, and good nutrition – and issues of the body’s material – are absolutely salient for social justice advocates.

If you work in the field of trans issues, for instance, you can see tremendous pain and physical alienation. Queer communities have all kinds of coping mechanisms as bodies try to compensate for or avoid pain. Rates of substance abuse, chronic disease, unhealthy eating are very high in marginalized communities.

We can see that improving health, fitness, and nutrition improves quality of life dramatically.

So treating bodily health and by extension developing and improving wellness relationships is a social justice issue.

Towards feminist fitness

Now, while most folks will agree that good health and good nutrition are valuable things, they won’t necessarily be as comfortable with the concept of fitness and movement.

“Fitness” is rarely well defined in feminist social science, and is often used synonymously with thinness or disciplined adherence to a particular, typically restrictive, exercise regime.

Yet in the field of physiology and sports science, fitness is defined as a capacity or preparedness for a specific set of tasks – in essence, the “power to do”. This definition matches the aims of social justice projects.

Fitness and wellness and good nutrition are all social justice projects because they help move us towards the power to do.

What we have found in our body transformation project was:

1.That it was important to develop deep health across all life domains, including physical experience, and

2. That we were able to conceptualize this deep health as something that connected people’s core identities and values to broader relationships and communities.

We have the capacity to bring elements of our bodies and our selves into being – there are many things that are within our control – it is not empowering to suggest that we are out of control and our bodies are simply essentialist objects.

If we don’t address this area we cut out a huge part of people’s lives and psychic domains. We also fail as advocates for people’s health. We are unequipped to deal with the real experiences of real people with bodily realities.

Biology is not essentialism. Biology is not “destiny”.

Biology is complexity and change – it is a rich, diverse, highly varied and plastic set of experiences and processes. Biology is a set of possibilities.

If we eliminate or avoid this domain of knowledge we do a tremendous disservice to social justice projects and our own health as those who advocate in favour of a better world. Yet if we embrace these possibilities, we can act in our fullest capacity as change agents.

Thank you.

“If you don’t feel fear with a heavy weight over your head, then you are probably mentally ill.”

–Charles Staley

Arizona is not for sissies.

As I walk into the local dirty hippie mecca – aka Whole Foods, my fast food of choice when on the road in the US – I notice a sign amongst the usual “No shirt, no shoes, no service” gallery: A finely rendered drawing of a rather large firearm, set within a red circle and diagonal slash. No guns.

The explicit statement of this guideline draws attention to its reverse: If you have to tell people not to bring hefty firearms into the grocery store, it means that, prior to said rule, cowboys/girls were packing heat in the produce aisle.

What did they fear? Mutinous oranges? The social order crumbling when someone brought 11 items into the express lane?

There is, indeed, much to fear in Arizona. Here, the terrain is baked hard.

This ground will chew you up and hork you out along with a mouthful of tobacco spit. The gravel crumbles underfoot and the rocks are spiky.

Everything has poky spines, from the saguaro’s skewers to the barrel cactus’ fish-hook harpoons, to the innocent-looking teddy-bear cholla’s pincushions. Even Camelback Mountain is named after a spine, which it resembles – all bony vertebrae and pithy humps. Our hiking guide carries pliers, in case our tender flesh might need a good yank or scrape. It’s a scary place.

I do this hike twice. The first time, I wear my tried-and-true Merrells, which are the stylistic equivalent of wearing Kleenex boxes on one’s feet. Like the old “It’s boxy but it’s good” slogan for Volvo, these are sturdy sensible shoes that any British Depression-era sanitorium nurse would have been proud to wear.

I clomp with impunity over hill and dale with these bad boys. I scarcely notice the danger. I dare a saguaro to piss me off – I will kick you in the effin face, cactus!! If I had a big gun like the Whole Foods peeps, I would blast baby animals like Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona.

The second time I hike, I wear Vibrams, essentially barefooting over Nature’s minefield. Now my senses are sharp. I am paying attention. My steps are different – I have to chart a course from step to step, dancing from rock to trench to crevice to slippery sand. My toes grip like a gecko’s. I am there, deeply present in the experience.

Fear has a way of capturing our attention.

This is not unlike the experience of dropping under a metal bar directly over my skull. The only things between 55% of my bodyweight and my cranium are my soft pink arms, my will, and the laws of physics – most of which are currently against the success of this mission.

Two men are watching my snatch. (Pause for comic effect.)

I’m training at the Staley Performance Institute in Phoenix, getting one-on-one advice from not one but two kickass strength and conditioning coaches – Charles Staley and David Jack. If it weren’t for the fact that my hands are ground hamburger after several hours of practice, I’d be in ecstasy.

A hulking Mistress Krista with Charles Staley (left) and David Jack (right)

We’re practicing the snatch lift. (Grow up, stop laughing, and Google it. Wait, don’t.)

Charles is making a frowny face behind his spectacles. Dave is crinkling his eyebrows. They have discovered an exciting anomaly in my lift technique, one that Charles – trainer of hundreds, possibly thousands – has never seen before. He is as puzzled and excited as a primatologist discovering a new species of lemur with tentacles.

Somehow my barbell is travelling outward, not upward, when I haul it up overhead. Charles is fascinated yet repelled.

“How can you shrug sideways?” Charles asks, to no one in particular. This is more of a rhetorical question directed at the whimsical universe that has, with impish glee, created a rift in the biomechanical time-space continuum.

“It’s like I’ve dropped a ball, and it’s gone sideways. Dave, are you getting this?” Dave is indeed getting this. He is scrutinizing my lower traps now.

“Are your traps connected to your sternum?” Charles wisecracks. Oohh! Anatomy tittering! I insist I am pulling up. Indeed, I can feel this snatch pull in my earlobes.

(Digression: Geoff Girvitz of Bang Fitness, commenting on the problem of over-active upper traps and Desk Monkey Hunch creating rotator cuff damage, opines that “Ears are poison to shoulders.”)

“Well, I’m stumped,” says Charles, conceding analytical defeat. Yes, dear reader, I have stumped Charles Frickin’ Staley with my bizarre lifting technique.

I feel proud. I am a unique and special snowflake!

We lift and lift. I have catchophobia. As Charles remarks, most lifts are known quantities. When you unrack a squat or bench press, or start pulling a deadlift from the floor, you more or less know what you’re getting. There won’t be too many surprises.

But with the Olympic lifts, each attempt is a leap into the abyss. A lifter must be prepared to sacrifice good sense and the expectation of comfort. Any number of exciting and possibly hilarious things could happen on the way to the top. This would be what Donald Rumsfeld called “known unknowns”.

Frankly, as an O-lifter, the only thing you do know is that you are facing a bar on the floor. As soon as that bar leaves the platform, you’re shipwrecking yourself on the rocky shores of entropy. Good luck, sailor.

Speaking of fear, Charles is no stranger to the sphincter-loosening terror of flinging a barbell overhead. I walk in to our training session to find him snatching a new PR of 185 lb, plummeting sickeningly beneath nearly two hundred upward-hurtling pounds into a deep squat. He pauses beneath the barbell, butt hovering above the floor, in a semi-crucifixion position.

“UP!” barks Dave. Somehow, Charles’ body, hunkered under a hunk of iron, obeys. The lift is solid. Today: Lifter 1, Entropy 0.

In between twice-daily training sessions (heaven!), hikes, desert yoga with a delightfully crunchy, still-beautiful sexagenarian hippie who tells me to open my fire chakra, and getting humiliated by David’s agility ladders, I sit in the sun like a lizard and read while the UV rays toast my white Canadian flesh. While readng, I stumble across a concept that is new to me (yes, I know that the late 1960s called and they want their concept back), but somehow incredibly explanatory:

Fear of negative evaluation: FNE.

I love me some TLAs. I’ve long been a fan of FMO – fear of missing out. FMO is what you experience when you can’t say no to things. ‘Cause, like, what if you miss something? What if something happens and you’re not there? What if there’s some crucial piece of information you don’t have?

If you have FMO you’re nodding right now, except you’re probably distracted because you’re also watching an instructional video and downloading an article and doing some committee paperwork, just in case.

Fear of negative evaluation involves constant preoccupation with other people’s potentially negative judgements of you. You do everything you can to avoid these judgements, because they scare the hell out of you.

• You might be a people-pleaser. Approve of me! Approve of me!
• You might be a pre-emptive self-criticizer – you shoot in like a ninja to crap on yourself before anyone else can. If you ninja crap yourself then you got there first, bitches!! You are the baddest and the best putdowner! Nobody else can hurt you with their slings and arrows like numero uno!
• You might fret and worry and whittle your spirit down to a little nub. What if? What if? What if?
• You might avoid situations where you could look bad or stupid. Looking bad or stupid is shameful and to be avoided at all costs. Consequently, of course, there is no juice in your life because to do anything fun or exciting or adventurous usually involves some potential element of silliness or screwups.

Notice what all these have in common? Two things:

1. Despite being focused on other people’s judgements, FNE is – ironically — incredibly narcissistic (What do they think of me? They must have noticed me! They really really give a shit about every tiny thing I’m doing and saying and thinking! They are so carefully observing me that they totally notice that extra piece of toast I ate!).
2. FNE leaches your life dry of every last bit of joy.

Out of curiosity, I took a quick 30-second FNE test. My score? 27 out of a possible 30. Doh.

To be fair, I’ve made tremendous progress in this department.

As a child, I could barely make eye contact with people. It’s like they could stare into my soul. I was a sideline-sitter, avoiding activities with great determination – anything that could or would make me (I thought) look stupid was cause for shame and angst.

After a pushy piano teacher put me into a music competition at age 7, I developed Baby’s First Ulcer. (Although I wasn’t as bad as the kid who threw a tantrum of humiliation because she didn’t score as well as she thought. I guess that kid is now tallying up their score of 30/30. I just popped a few antacids, quit piano lessons years later, promptly forgot it all – sorry mom and dad – and  got on with life.)

Now I love public speaking, can make eye contact, and only care what some people think of me. And I’m fully prepared to have Charles mock my bizarre Olympic lifting form, because humility is essential for learning.

You must chase fear from time to time.

You must dive in and come out the other side. You must risk this shame and humiliation. You must risk dropping the bar with a soul-shattering crash. It is the only way. Feel the fear, and do it anyway.

And along the way, feel the edges of your spirit crisping up, growing into sharper focus. When I am truly afraid with a healthy fear that says I am having adventures and stretching the envelope of my secure life – that is when I am closest to gnawing on the juicy bones of my existence. I am sucking every last drop of nourishing marrow from that present-ness.

When that bar flies up overhead – and floats – and flutters down gently into my shoulder girdle’s embrace as if guided by angels – for that heart-pounding moment I am touching the universe.

The only inevitability in natural systems is change.

I also write this with my right foot wrapped in an ice pack. Were I to unfurl this ice pack, I’d see bluish-tinted skin spanning the tips of my toes to my cuneiform bones, as if Vulcan blood pulsed in my veins. My left foot matches. I am wearing dusky sandals.

A few days ago, while warming up for a barbell complex with an empty 20 kg bar, I momentarily lost my focus and let the Olympic weightlifting bar — which spins in its sleeve — drip from my fingers and smash across both bare feet, crunching metatarsals and sesamoid bones between iron and hardwood platform like a potato chip panini.

There are two morals here.

First, don’t drop barbells on your feet.

Second, use heavier weights.

Had I warmed up with even a 0.5 lb plate on the bar, I could have thrown it from my full height and it still wouldn’t have scrunched my tootsies. Hell, had I been working the big-girl plates, I could have dropped it then dived underneath like a mechanic working on a car.

I offer penance to St. Mark Rippetoe, St. Dan John, St. Mike Burgener, et al.

At least this is how I choose to interpret the situation.

I’m lucky. Nothing seems broken. I remain unrepentant about doing most of my lifting in bare feet. After all, it took me 15 years to drop something on them. As Homer Simpson said regarding Krusty the Klown’s vow to spit in every 50th Krusty Burger, “I like those odds.”

As I hobble around, I meditate on the quality of life experienced by those who have not cared for nor appreciated their ability to move. Getting to the bathroom is an expedition (and it involves stairs — oh horror!). A revolving door provokes deep anxiety.

Lose the ability to move and you lose nearly everything. Barring unforeseen accident and/or disability, this is about 95% within our control.

Stay moving. We are like sharks who must keep swimming or die.

In other aging-related news, these days two things that are not doing much of anything — swimming or otherwise — are my ovaries. Yep, I’m effectively perimenopausal. And let me tell ya, it’s a helluva ride.

Let’s get some facts out of the way, because like me you may not have known that such a thing can occur to you in your 30s. (Menopause? That’s for people’s moms, right?)

Hormones are pulsatile, which means they’re typically released in little puffs and bursts, like tiny chemical farts. Some toot their teeny horns on a regular cycle, such as a day or a menstrual period. Others respond to stimuli such as light/dark, food, stress, etc.

As you age, your hormones may start blipping and blopping a bit more randomly. They may go up or down in a general average direction, but that’s average if you look at it over, say, a decade. From day to day, you could swing wildly between low, normal, and crazy-blast high.

This means that in your 30s, 40s — or even for a few unlucky folks, in your 20s — you could easily experience symptoms of hormone fluctuation as your estrogen and progesterone go wacky. And these symptoms may not correlate to a one-time blood test, which simply measures the level of hormones available at a single given moment, not over the course of time.

Thus, you might experience the following joyous events:

• waking up in the middle of the night feeling like a steamed dumpling
• puffing up like a balloon, especially in your lower belly
• the sloshing sound of epic water retention
• mood swings: crying jags, major anxiety, paranoia and apprehension, crabbiness, general psychosis
• brain fog, trouble remembering stuff like what the hell is Brad’s wife’s name, what is the word for those orange things you eat, and oh by the way where the hell am I?
• GI changes: digestive problems, bloating, new food intolerances
• changes in your libido
• headaches and migraines
• the sudden appearance of a few extra pounds, again often around your  midsection
• your boobs deflating and going south
• heart palpitations and feeling like your skin is crawling with ants (apparently this is known as forMication, which is less fun than forNication, just FYI)
• “phantom periods”: all the cramps, all the PMS, same monthly cycle, none of the red tide action (bonus: saves on Tampax!)

As with the unbroken foot, I’m lucky I didn’t suffer all of these things. But I sure was a crazy, bloated, crying, paranoid bitch for a while until I figured this out.

I’m fucking pissed.

I’m not pissed because my ovaries (or possibly something higher up the command chain) have decided to check out early. That’s their business. I always was a bit precocious anyway.

No, what I’m pissed about is this: Despite being a so-called “expert” in the field of women’s wellness, I DID NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS. Nobody does. Nobody, that is, except the millions of women who are sweating, crying, bloating, and wondering WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON AND WHY IS MY BODY POSSESSED?

In 2006, my periods started going wacky, suddenly appearing every 2-3 weeks. This was accompanied by what seemed like hypothyroid symptoms. I felt like my skin was vibrating and my whole life was on fast-forward. I’d wake up at 4 am, eyeballs sproinging open like the guy in A Clockwork Orange, as if someone had dumped a bucket of cold water on me. (This, I learned later, was from an adrenaline rush to free up glucose once cortisol checked out of doing its regularly scheduled overnight job. Thanks, stress!)

Food turned to the proverbial ash in my mouth. My weight dropped to 104. I hadn’t been 104 since I had my wisdom teeth out and sucked Tylenol and chicken broth smoothies through a straw for two weeks. My sternal ribs looked like a rickety ladder. The only thing I miss about this time was that my pullups kicked ass.

I visited my doctor. Everything seemed normal. She shrugged, unconcerned about the sudden exuberance of my cycles. “Frisky ovaries,” she said.

I imagined my ovaries like Mexican jumping beans, doing an acrobatic, tap-dancing version of La Cucaracha on my uterus.

Fast forward to 2009.  I am sitting in a new doctor’s office, no longer underweight — indeed, feeling rather like a PMSing walrus — wondering why my periods have, after their initial spate of Rockette kicks, suddenly gone MIA. The new doctor, thankfully one who actually gives a shit about things like actual medical diagnoses, says three words: premature ovarian failure.

She looks at me with gentle eyes. I can see her figuratively reaching for some kind of caring informational brochure like So, Your Ovaries Are Lazy Skanks.

“So…” she says, “this means you cannot have children.”

“Really?” I say, with great excitement. I am, in fact, thrilled at this bit of news.

“Yes… umm…” she continues, soldiering on bravely with her shpiel, “many women find this somewhat traumatic…”

“No,” I squeal, “this is fantastic!”

“…and so, we recommend counselling to deal with the — what?”

I pump a high five. “Now my mother will finally get off my case about not having children!”

Doctor wrinkles eyebrows. Writes me a prescription for estrogen cream.

I finally fill this prescription in summer 2010. My pharmacist is one of those middle-aged Eastern European battleaxes that you find in bra shops, the kind that barge into the changeroom, flinging aside your flimsy privacy curtain, to grab your tits and pronounce judgement on them. She squints at me over her half-moon glasses on the gold chain. Her voice is approximately 130 decibels.

Her: IS THIS PRESCRIPTION FOR YOU?

Me: Yes.

Her: THIS IS ESTROGEN.

Me: Yes, I know.

Her: WHY ARE YOU GETTING THIS?

Me: Because I need it.

Her: WHY DO YOU NEED THIS ESTROGEN? PLEASE SPEAK INTO THE MICROPHONE AND LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE BRIGHT BLARING SPOTLIGHT.

Me: I apparently don’t make enough of my own.

Her: YOU ARE TOO YOUNG FOR THIS.

Me: No shit.

Her: THE VAGINAL APPLICATOR IS IN THE BAG. NOTICE I SAID VAGINAL APPLICATOR. NOW EVERYONE WILL LOOK AT YOU AND FEEL ACUTELY AWARE THAT NOT ONLY DO YOU HAVE A VAGINA, YOU INTEND TO PUT SOME MEDICINE INTO IT.  I AM ALSO MAKING A JUDGING FROWNY FACE AT YOU AND YOUR VAGINA. YOU’RE LUCKY I DIDN’T GRAB YOUR TITS. HAVE A NICE DAY.

Me: *grabs bag, runs away, desperately grateful not to suffer scrotal acne or explosive hemorrhoids*

Over the years, working with clients, I have come across many women who are also pissed. Except in their case, they’re pissed because their bodies let them down. Mean bodies! Lazy bodies! Stupid bodies!

“I can’t believe I ended up with Type 2 diabetes,” says one, usually a diehard couch potato type. Really? You pumped sugar into your body for five straight decades and you’re mystified?

“My body is letting me down,” says another, usually a type-A ultramarathoner CEO type, whose body is merely a sniveling hunk of meat to be tamed. Really? You live a high-stress life, don’t sleep, work 100 hours a week, hammer the bejeezus out of yourself with ever more stringent physical abuse, and when you aren’t complaining about what a lazy ass your body is, you’re telling it what a piece of shit it is… and your body is letting YOU down?

“I hate my body,” says a third. Who even cares who this one is, because it’s approximately 600 million of you. Well guess what, your body probably hates you back for years of loathing.

Actually, no, although you probably deserve your body’s hatred, it doesn’t. Because that’s the thing about your body. It loves you like the best mother bear in the world loves her Gerber baby cub — with a fierce, visceral, snarling love that will do anything to protect you. Boy, are you friggin lucky.

If you’re mad because you’re over-fat, feeling cruddy, out of shape, riddled with aches and pains, etc. etc. you should start by taking a good, hard, honest look at how you’ve treated that ever-patient container of yours.

• What have you fed (or not fed) your body?
• How do you rest your body? How long do you sleep every night, and how well? How do you still your mind and give it serenity?
• What chemicals do you put into your body? What industrial-pharmaceutical products do you eat, spray, inhale, bathe in, or smear?
• How do you move your body? Do you move it at all, or jam it into a chair or car for several hours?
• Do you let your body out to play in its natural environment? Do you see sunlight or greenery, or breathe fresh air, or feel the change in temperature every day? How well do you match your schedule with the cycle of the sun?
• Do you say nice things to your body? Do you high-five it when it comes through for you? Do you high-five it just for existing and being a marvellous triumph of engineering?
• Do you subject your body to a constant cacophony of sensory overload and stress?
• When was the last time you wrapped your arms around yourself and gave yourself a big smushy hug? When you patted your tummy and felt its softness happily, instead of hating it for not being a hardened washboard? (Seriously, when the fuck did “washboard abs” become a goal that otherwise reasonable and intelligent women pursued? Evolution is laughing in your face, ladies. Suggest revising goal to “squatter’s ass”.)

Why, in short, should your body perform for you? Have you earned that performance?

Really?

If you can read this list and — in good faith — say “Hey, I’ve done a darn fine job, and I still don’t feel well,” then you are indeed entitled to be a bit grumpy about the state of affairs.

But most of you will have gotten stuck on point #1, mouths agape, drooling Froot Loop crumbs. Admit it. Hey, we’re all works in progress.

This isn’t about blame, of course. Most of you are also pros at self-blame (which is often part of the problem in the first place). It’s about taking responsibility and accepting the inevitability of change.

Maybe there are factors within your control that shaped the outcome. Maybe not. Shit happens, after all. But was it really random?

When I was first diagnosed, I racked my brain, scampering towards self-blame, as many women do. Did I eat too much? (Maybe.) Too little? (Maybe.) The wrong things? (Doubt it.) Did I train too much? Not the right way? (No, squats are almost never wrong!!) Was I too stressed? (At the time, yes. Now, no.) Was I too lean? (No.)  Should I get fatter? (I tried. Didn’t help.)

But blame is useless. It’s a narcissistic exercise. If self-flagellation were helpful in achieving life goals and meaning, wouldn’t nearly everyone be perfect? Blame immobilizes us in a snake-biting-tail cycle of helplessness and shame.

Responsibility, on the other hand, is extremely useful. Responsibility is about responding — moment to moment, dynamically, as the terrain of life shifts. It’s response-ability. It’s action-oriented. What bag of shit has life just handed you, and how can you make it stink less?

The best you can do is make the choices that give you the most options. Poor choices limit my options. Good choices expand my options. Then I am prepared to face change in the best way possible.

In June, Toronto was rocked for three days by G20 protests and riots. On Saturday, June 27, I walked down Queen St. West, one of my familiar haunts, to face a line of riot cops, just to see what it was like. At that point, it was much more like a rock concert, with riot police standing in for the stage, bored-looking hippies standing in for the headbangers, and iPhones standing in for lighters during the power ballad.

I left when the tear gas threatened. About 10 minutes after I walked away, a car was set on fire by the spot where I stood. I watched the ensuing footage on Saturday night, goggle-eyed and slackjawed as the rain poured down and cops poured into the streets. Neither let up. The next day, police rounded up hundreds of people — protestors and bystanders alike, boxing them in and then shoveling them up.

Shocked Torontonians watched the footage (or were among the nearly 900 people swept up in mass arrests) and said, “This is not my city. This is not the city I know.”

Well, it is.

It is your city. It’s just different now.

On Sept 5, I found my first two gray hairs.

Change is inevitable. And you’re gonna have to deal with it. Roll with it, give yourself the best chance possible, and try to have a sense of humour about the pharmacy lady.

KB:

Could you do me a solid?

I need someone to supervise my nutrition.

Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous.

Frankly, it felt ridiculous.

Here I was, Dr. Krista, gentle creator and longtime tender of Stumptuous.com, coach to hundreds of women as part of the Lean Eating program, emailing my buddy Kyle to ask — really sort of beg — him to check whether I was eating my spinach. Luckily for me, Kyle wasn’t just some random dude, but an awesome nutritionist and a helluva nice guy.

Still. I mean, c’mon. What’s up with this?

Excellent question. One that I tried to answer for months and months. Given that I was the “expert”, what the hell was I doing when I took second helpings at dinner? When I got slack about skipping the odd workout now and again, or having a little extra hit of frozen banana? (God I love that shit.) When, in the vortex of a hormonal tornado like a befuddled airborne cow whirling across an Iowa cornfield, I ate the bag of Xmas gift chocolate in one go? (DO NOT ADVISE REPEAT DO NOT ADVISE.)

Well, as it turns out, self control and “willpower” is a limited resource. Use it up on other stuff, and you’ll find it a lot harder to keep things together as the day progresses. It dawned on me that I was expending so much intellectual and emotional energy monitoring all my little ducklings that I ran out of it for myself.

I discovered that this was, in fact, not unusual among my fitness industry peers. I found strength coaches and personal trainers who hadn’t trained in ages. I found nutritionists who counseled clients by day and binged by night. I found life coaches who secretly angsted about their own life choices. (Same deal in academia, by the way: I remember profs who were so busy teaching that they’d barely even cracked the spine on a trashy novel since VC Andrews was popular.)

Sure, you could say this makes us all hypocritical assholes, but a more charitable interpretation — and one that’s borne out by talking to these folks — is that they’re utterly worn out and exhausted by giving and giving and giving to their clients.

A good coach, trainer, teacher, or nutritionist, you see, gives a shit. We really do. I have literally lain awake at nights, worrying about So-and-so: will her shoulder get better? will he quit smoking? will she have another overeating episode and beat herself up? I truly care whether you are eating your vegetables, and every time a client does her first pullup, an angel gets its wings.

All this organizing and fretting and reminding — all this caring — seems to take its toll. We care about our clients and end up caring less about ourselves.

It’s not that we end up like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, wandering around supermarkets late at night in a bathrobe looking for the makings of a White Russian. “Not eating well” for us might mean 5 servings of veggies a day instead of the usual 25. “Not working out much” may mean we’re still more active than the average North American. (But then again, a corpse may theoretically be more active than the average North American.)

Yet we do find less energy to supervise our own nutrition and fitness journeys.

It’s not that we don’t care. In fact, every day that goes by and our hard-won abs recede into our doughy flesh like eroding sand dunes in a flab desert, or we start to debate substituting frozen banana for hot romance, our image of ourselves as superninjas dies a little bit more.

It’s more that we run out of gas to manage. We exhort our charges to eat more kale, over and over and over, and when we get home — fuck it! No goddamned kale!

(Actually I love kale, and believe it or not I even crave it. If you’re in Toronto, check out Live‘s rainbow kale salad; it is the shizzle! I’m eating kale as I type this! My body is alive with antioxidants!)

Just because you can do something yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

I can make pretty, extremely OCD spreadsheets, but I have an accountant. I can use a shovel but I prefer to pay a nice young man to hack the dying cedars out of my lawn. I scrub a mean bathtub, but I consider hiring a cleaning person to be some of the best money I ever spent. (I’ll ask my accountant if I can write this off as “mental health costs”. Feminist labour theorists, rest assured that I pay an excellent, equitable wage and treat the occupation of cleaning with the immense respect it deserves.)

The first thing KB said to me nearly made me cry. I was waiting for him to berate me for being such a loser, such a hypocrite, such a screwup. I was waiting for him to lecture me about eating too many carbs at the wrong time of day, loving chicken pate in the Biblical way, or my attachment to chilled fruit. I was waiting for him to say Yeah, I noticed, chunky monkey. Instead, he said: Forgive yourself.

Forgive myself?

Wow. *sound of far-off gong*

This guy is good.

You see, despite a strong eco-friendly deodorant, apparently I was radiating the stench of “I’m a classic Type A middle-class white overachieving disordered-eating self-critical perfectionist stress case” for several kilometres around me. In my earnest enthusiasm to be All That I Could Be, my increasingly strident pursuit of self-control had simply worn me out. It hadn’t made me any better or smarter or well-behaved.

At that point I kind of dissolved into a puddle of pent-up self-flagellation. Upon receiving the command to forgive myself, the puddle slowly evaporated into a noxious vapour, which then dissipated molecule by acrid molecule… until after a few weeks, it disappeared altogether. I was reborn. Relieved. Re-invigorated.

It dawned on me that everyone needs a coach. Even coaches.

We cannot see ourselves from all angles. While we should be mindful of a need to seek approval or validation from others at any cost, there is tremendous value in seeking external feedback — if that feedback is honest, compassionate, informed, and caring. We need a kind friend to tell us gently, “He’s just not that into you.” We need mirrors to tell us our skirts are tucked into our pantyhose. We cannot know ourselves in totality simply via self-analysis, even though we think we can.

I don’t know whether it’s the Protestant work ethic or liberal individualism, but we have this stupid idea that we all have to be martyrs, soldiering on bravely and alone, handling our bidness valiantly by ourselves. But think about it — when the state realllly wants to punish criminals, what does it do? Locks up them by themselves. We are social beings. We need social engagement to thrive. And part of that social engagement is, as I have come to realize, accepting guidance from others — even in areas where we are supposedly “experts”.

Upon receiving my marching orders from KB, I got to work immediately, feeling enormously relieved. Managing this was now someone else’s job. All I had to do was follow instructions and accept correction where necessary. Every week, I’ve nailed it. I no longer had to expend energy in excessive self-administration; I could simply follow the program. I didn’t need a drill sergeant or hand-holding. I didn’t need a shrink. I just needed someone else to care.

And guess what? I feel great. My pants are getting loose. I’m kicking ass in my workouts. Most importantly, I don’t feel like a screwup. I feel like a normal human being who just needed a bit of support.

I’m a DIY type by nature, and I don’t like to make a fuss. Asking for help was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But — along with hiring a cleaning person — it was also one of the smartest.

By the way, if you’re in the same boat, KB can probably get you to forgive yourself too. Check it out — Kyle Byron Nutrition. Tell him Stumptuous sent you.

Tips for working with a coach, teacher, and/or trainer

I’ve worked with hundreds of clients, as I’ve said, as part of my own practice and the Lean Eating program. Here are the tips on being a good “coachee” that I’ve gleaned by observing which clients succeed and which don’t.

1. Find someone with good credentials and experience. (See here on how to choose a personal trainer.)
2. Make sure they’re a good “fit” for you in terms of their personality and approach. You don’t always have to love them, but you should respect them and understand what they’re talking about.
3. Shut the hell up and listen. Do not tell them all the reasons you cannot do what they ask. Entertain the possibility that they probably know what they are talking about (if you successfully did #1.).
4. Remember that what you were doing before was not working. If what you were doing was working, it would have worked. If they suggest you do something other than what you were doing (remember, the thing that didn’t work?), try that new something.
5. Give things time to work. Be patient and persistent.
6. Ask questions where you need to. Get informed. Understand. But don’t second-guess.
7. Follow instructions. If you’re in physical therapy, do your rehab exercises. If you’re being coached, do the exercises. Follow the meal plan your nutritionist gives you, or the exercise program your trainer gives you. I know! Crazy! It works!
8. Do not bullshit us with excuses or crap justifications for not doing stuff. Either you want to do this or you do not. If you do not, that’s fine, just don’t waste both our time. If you do want to do this, then see #3 and #7.
9. Recognize that a good coach will push you outside your comfort zone. This is necessary for growth. Sure, you might not need a drill sergeant screaming in your face, but you should occasionally feel a little bit insecure and apprehensive.
10. Look for the evidence in your results and experience, not your assumptions. Work with your coach to decide on measures of observable progress.
11. Allow yourself to feel foolish, even stupid. Then get over it. Don’t become defensive or ashamed. Your coach, if s/he has experience (see #1) has probably seen everything. If not, s/he knows better than to laugh openly at you. If you can get over your fear of looking and feeling stupid, it’s amazing what you can accomplish. Be open to the learning process by allowing yourself to be vulnerable, rather than putting up egocentric barriers to ensure your apparent coolness.
12. Once you both agree on an outcome, then forget about the outcome and focus on the quality of your process. The outcome will arrive on its own time. You are responsible for your process, though.
13. Be a mature adult. Don’t act like a rebellious teenager, passive aggressive debutante, or whiny baby. Don’t turn the coaching relationship into some Freudian melodrama. Accept responsibility, grow up, and be an active, engaged participant in your own change.

The inhabitants of this land were lean and sculpted. Their skin was firm and blemished neither by the zits of youth nor wrinkles of age (nor that weird zit-wrinkle combo — like, what is that even about? make up your mind, skin!). Their ass cheeks were heavenly spheres betwixt which no flatus had ever egressed. Their abs were serrated blades upon which no flab nor dimples perched. These divine citizens wore hot pants Rollerblading and tiny swimsuits to do their laundry, and lo, it was good.

Their sturdy jaws were set with abundant, gleaming white Chiclets. The good citizens of Buffland used these Chiclets to masticate their four-to-six daily servings of lean protein and green vegetables, which they enjoyed at all times. They never deviated from this ingestion of aminos and antioxidants because they were a better, stronger, more in-control species than our slothful, gluttonous human race.

There was only one problem with this magical land.

It was complete. And utter. BULLSHIT.

I am about to lay some heavy duty stuff on you, possums. Now, you may be feeling real smug, because, like, you know that magazine are airbrushed and stuff. But do you believe it? Have you seen it step-by-step? Let me help.

OK, fine, we all realize Photoshop is involved and mainstream media eats a plate of ass. Hello, 1985 called, they want their feminist media analysis back. I know, I know.

But let’s talk about something more insidious. Look at your fitness role models. Look at the men and women who seem to have their shit together, are always perfectly lean, and never have a bad hair day. (Powerlifters, you can be excused from this discussion. Ha ha! I kid!)

What if I told you that many of these deities who look sleek and shiny on magazine covers or on the physique stage, or even the hotstuff trainers at your gym, had a big, fat secret?

That when the camera is off and the lights go down, those hotties get in their car, drive to the 7-11 and grab a 1 lb bag of M&Ms? That after the contest or the shoot, they gorge themselves to the point of pain on junk food? That they make 3 am runs to Taco Bell, or raid their refrigerator, swirling a block of butter in some brown sugar, or spooning in some ice cream with the laser focus and frantic speed of a meth-head surgeon and then afterwards feel sick and shameful? That they’re then shitting and puking and purging and exercising and starving that food off their bodies? That just like you, their diet ends in disaster as their bodies, ever more iron-willed in defense of homeostasis, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of Doritos?

Krista, you say. Surely you exaggerate. These are things that, say, misguided teenage girls do, or perhaps overweight lonely cat ladies who wear muumuus and read romance novels with unicorn bookmarks in them.

I only wish.

But biology is a bitch. The mechanisms that control eating behaviour are stronger than your pathetic attempts to delude them with fake foods. The exquisitely sensitive machinery that analyzes every last molecule that you send down the plumbing knows your game. Your brain may be fooled by the Splenda or the low-carb bread, but your digestive system is all like, “Oh honey, puhlease” before it sighs and sets about sorting the triglycerides into their allotted compartments or upregulating Poison Control to deal with the toxic sludge you just dumped in there in the form of diet soda. Your body will roll its eyes and go along with your little “I’m going to be so gooood” game from 7 am till 7 pm, and then the gloves are off — and said ungloved hands are shoving your face into a jar of peanut butter.

Combine the bitch goddess of biology with an environment saturated with stress, addictive food-like substances, and precisely delineated yet entirely false visions of “perfection”… and you have perfection all right — the perfect storm of disordered eating and self-loathing.

After working with nutrition clients I started to notice a funny thing: for many people, there was in fact an inverse relationship between socially accepted ideals of “fitness” and happiness.

Which is to say, the leaner and buffer many people got, and the more their bodies matched the mainstream norm, the unhappier they were. The more they binged. The more they purged, often through increasingly vicious exercise regimes rather than the old-school “open up the digestive sluices”. The more they restricted their food intake, whittling away and obsessively recording calories and carbs and choices. And the more they felt they “failed”.

Got your body fat down into a healthy range? Great. Go for lean. Got down to lean? Go for ripped. Got down to ripped? Go for “lipodystrophic wasting disease”. I want to see eye sockets, people!

Meanwhile, the folks who started out at, say, 300 lbs were just thrilled when they could breathe a little easier, get out of bed pain-free, and take a nice trundle around the block. If they tried a new veggie, or cut back on the soda, or their belt felt a little looser, they high-fived themselves.

This is, of course, the opposite of what you’d expect.

You’d expect that the fine citizens of Buffland would forevermore play beach volleyball gleefully, wear horizontal stripes fearlessly, and/or have ongoing instances of nice, tidy sexual congress. You’d expect that once their toned thighs or rocklike pecs had been accomplished, Bufflanders would close the door on the inconvenient chapter of their lives that involved cellulite, fried chicken, childbearing, and gravity, never to open it again. They’d be fit and perfect and eat kale. And that would be that.

You’d be wrong.

In fact, I’m not sure I’ve met a less happy group of people in my life (in the sense that “happy” would imply a deep, heartfelt satisfaction with the immediacy of one’s existence) than people who approached having “perfect” bodies, where “perfection” was defined entirely by an aesthetic ideal that defies most ordinances of nature, such as mortality, midsection squish, or menopause.

Literature majors, let’s double check: Poignantly contrary to what was expected or implied? Check! Yep, we have irony.

What’s the problem here?

The problem is what it takes to get that “ideal” body.

What it takes to get from “fit normal” to “magazine shoot” requires such a tremendous cost that your sanity usually goes into debt. There are a lucky few who can take their body to extremes of performance and aesthetics, and do so without becoming a rabidly bipolar beast who alternates between the highs of self-induced restriction and the lows of self-induced gorging. (High-fives to you, sirs and madams, I salute you. You are rare and unique creatures, and you should probably consider having your brain and metabolism examined for scientific purposes.)

Most folks are not so lucky. Scratch the surface of many “fitness pros” who buy in to the commercial industry and you’ll often find disordered eating and self-harming behaviours.

Talk frankly to a fitness or bodybuilding competitor about where they go and what they do after the shoot or the contest. It probably involves Baskin-Robbins or Pizza Hut or Cinnabon and the word “epic” may be used. Ask the tautest tush at your gym how s/he feels about him or herself. If they are speaking honestly, they will tell you that many of their days are preoccupied with thoughts of how to acquire, prepare, and consume food, as well as thoughts of all the body parts that are not quite good enough yet. Look at the hormone profile of these shiny young things and you may find elevated stress hormones, depressed sex hormones, and the blood cell counts of a chronic disease, for the gentle citizens of Buffland are often starving and shaming and stairmastering themselves into oblivion.

And it’s not restricted to pros. Anyone who ventures into the serious pursuit of aesthetically based fitness ideals, and/or who marinates in the malodorous stew of the fitness-industrial complex — even just a little toe dipping– is at risk. Male, female, old, young, smart, dumb, expert, newbie, nobody is immune.

What a fucking tragedy this is.

Scott Abel is one of the few throwing out the bullshit flag on this with books like The Other Side of the Mirror and his posts about metabolic damage. (Check out his April 2010 piece Sometimes Falling Feels like Flying… For A Little While)

So what’s the solution? Should we all just give up?

No. Going face down in the KFC Double Down does us no favours either.

If I like fitness and health, do I immediately turn into a narcissistic, self-destructive jagoff?

No, of course not. I wish more folks would love fitness, nutrition, and health… at least I wouldn’t bore so many people at parties by talking about how awesome it is to drag a sandbag around, and how many things you can make out of broccoli.

Use fitness, health, and nutrition to live better, and to engage more fully with life, not to withdraw from it, be angry with it, avoid it, or be afraid of it.

Does this mean we should all be “beyond caring” how good we look?

No. We have eyes for a reason, and sexual attractiveness is important to our species.

But. The disordered eating, behaviours, and mindset rampant in the industry have very little to do with true joy, visual pleasure, and/or sexiness.

When you are starving, self-obsessed, narcissistic, compulsive around food, avoiding social occasions because you can’t have your special kibble or because you think you still look too fat in a bathing suit, when the hormones that control your happiness and horniness are MIA because your body thinks it’s about to die from scarcity and is shutting the system down, that is not joy or pleasure or sexiness.

My solution is this. Focus primarily on what your body can do, and how you feel inside it. It is OK to want to be beautiful. It is OK to want to look hot nekkid. But understand what is real and normal and sane. Shoot for “fit normal” as an ideal and beyond that, focus on living wellness and an authentic, honest, loving relationship with your body (which includes, by the way, eating real food).

When you eat, ask yourself what your food is doing for you, not whether someone or something is allowing (or preventing) you eating it. Ask yourself how much distress this project prompts in you.

When you work out, feel the pleasure of your body moving, and the thrill of emergent power, not how many calories this is burning.

Are you going towards joy or away from it? Understand that drastic restriction, control freakery, and rigid rules will always come back to bite you in the ass, whether that’s an hour from now or a year from now.

Are you present with this body of yours? Aware? Mindful? Thoughtful? Are you caring for your insides — all your insides — mental, emotional, and cognitive? Do you bullshit yourself? Tell yourself lies? Yell at yourself? “Should” yourself?

Does every choice you make say “Yes, I will love and nourish you, self”? or do your actions really say: “I hate your guts and I will do everything I can to beat you into submission”?

———————————

One of the best meals I ever had was a grubby-looking protein shake made out of a smorgasbord of green veggies and fruits. I drank it out of a Mason jar.

I did not love it because it was virtuous, or because of its calorie content. I loved it because I drank it at the sixtieth kilometre of an 85 km bike ride, and it was sweet and nourishing, and gave my body what it needed to keep going. I loved it because I drank it while sitting on a park bench looking out at Lake Ontario, knowing that my tiny legs had pumped those pedals all the way around the shoreline. The question of my legs’ aesthetics was not at that moment even on my radar, beyond my brief notice that they were grease and mud-splattered. (Sexy.)

At that moment the veggies and fruits were my friends, nutrient powerhouses that would protect me from harm. I chose them because of how they made me feel: strong, joyous, energetic. Getting back on my bike I felt like my seven-year-old self with the streamers on the handles, riding the sparkly banana seat, thinking, “Wheeee!”

This is what the citizens of Buffland want but will never have. No matter how fantastic your ass is, if you don’t feel “Wheeee!” at least some of the time… and if your eating has become more like religious penance… then it’s a darn good sign that your soul is seriously out of shape.

Recently I’ve been checking my head a lot and having what the self-helpies call “breakthroughs” or what stoners might call “Like, wow, man”. It all started with a trip to Hawai’i. Boy did I need a vacation at that point. Now, my life’s been a whole lot more chill since I dumped the rat race (and by the way, happy second second birthday to me!) so I was just busy, not the teeth-jangling stressed I used to be. But nevertheless, I’m a busy bee, so I was, well, busy.

First couple of days in Hawai’i were tough. No, wait, bear with me.

We were on Kauai, at the very north end, near the terminus of the only road in the area, which pretty much ended in a cliff. This is a rural, fairly isolated area. The road washes out periodically. There are only a handful of locals, some taro farmers, and a few mainland escapees who probably don’t want to be found. Plus Pierce Brosnan, so the locals said.

Oh, and this guy, who walked around the local town with about 9 tiny dogs dressed in grass skirts.

Anyway, there’s nothing to do there except sit on the empty beach. Great, in theory.

But for the first couple of days, I couldn’t hack it. I had to be, I felt, doing something. I had to be productive.

The funny thing about places like Kauai, where Nature is large and in charge, is that modern conveniences are present but feel largely irrelevant and idiotic. I had internet but Facebook seemed even more pointless and stupid than ever, although I half-heartedly uploaded a few photos. I tried watching TV a couple of evenings while flash rainstorms lashed the cottage, but in the context of such dramatically diva-esque Ma Nature, its tinny banality was intolerable.

One is, in short, forced to confront the reality of one’s existence. And slow the fuck down.

I adjusted. In the mornings I got up and sat on a log for half an hour to watch the sun come up as I drank Kona. At night I sat in a lawnchair and watched the glittering stars appear. I got acquainted with the kind of patient do-nothingness that shapes the lives of people who are truly content.

I walked the abandoned beach barefoot, foraging coconuts, which I then smashed open on rocks, in true Paleo style.

Behold! I have slain the mighty coconut with my pointed stick and smashy rock! Also notice my squat depth! And scary mean face!

And I started to realize that perhaps I was, in my “other life”, at times still shoveling to nowhere — being busy and “productive” for the sake of being busy and “productive”, while not actually producing anything valuable.  Now, obviously, it’s good to be busy and productive sometimes… but not all the time.

I had forgotten how to do nothing.

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter Gibbons: I would relax… I would sit on my ass all day… I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he’s broke, don’t do shit.
–Office Space

This might seem silly, but ask yourself: How often are you simply alone with yourself? No TeeVee, no interwebs, no music, no distractions? Simply present with yourself? Aware?

For some people, such a reality is simply too distressing to contemplate, and thus they self-medicate with food, addictive behaviours, and other distractions or emotional anesthetics. And busy-ness.

Which brings me to the subject of expectations.

I’m in the business of expectations these days as a nutrition and fitness coach. People come to me expecting that I will help them get in shape and feel better. And I do.

But what is interesting is how people conceptualize this project, and the expectations they have for themselves.

For one thing, it seems like everyone can quantify their expectations.

• They know what % body fat they want.
• They know how much they want to bench press.
• They know what size pants they want to wear.
• They know the number of their “pack” as in, “I want 6-pack abs” or (modestly) “A 4-pack would be fine”.

They also know the time frame in which this will occur. 4 weeks. 8 weeks. 12 weeks. It’s almost always “weeks”, not “months” or “years” or “I don’t know; I assume time will unfold as it should”. Sometimes it is days or even hours: “I weighed myself tonight and I was 1 lb heavier than this morning! Am I broken?” (No, you just ate food.)

Yet folks do not seem to have clear expectations of how they will accomplish this magical number, nor what they need to confront in themselves in order to do so. They rarely expect life’s obstacles, which are generally quite expectable considering that most of them happen to us with striking regularity: kids, job, commute, weather, having PMS, and so forth. Nor do they expect their own habits, most of which happen every single day. They’re probably not even sure what to expect once they have achieved this special number.

They do not expect, in other words, reality.

Perhaps more distressing is that folks are marinating in expectations of another sort. These expectations are almost always imaginary but no less real. These are the dreaded “shoulds”.

Ask yourself if this sounds familiar.

• You worry. A lot. About what? Whatever. Will you get a good job? Will you get a better job? Does X like you? Do you look fat in these pants? Anything and everything is fair game for worry.
• You find yourself saying, “I’m stressed out”. But you don’t live in a war zone; you aren’t getting beaten up by street thugs; your roof hasn’t caved in lately. You’re just… stressed. About… whatever. (See bullet 1.)
• You lie awake at night thinking of things you haven’t done.
• You lie awake at night thinking of things you have done, but wishing you’d done them better.
• You feel like one mistake equals big disaster. You ate a cookie? Idiot! What a screwup!
• You pick apart everything, especially your body. Too thin. Too fat. Stupid nose. Straight hair. Hair too curly. Etc. You can diagnose the 101 ways in which you do not look like a cover model. In excruciating detail.
• You use words like “grotesque”, “horrible”, “disgusting”, and the like to describe your body.
• You know exactly what you think you should look like — what weight, what height, what perfect boob circumference. And you don’t look like that.
• Did you go to the gym yesterday? You didn’t? You loser! You really should!
• Did you go to the gym yesterday? You did? Did you beat the living shit out of yourself? I hope so! You have to batter that body into whimpering submission. This is Sparta! Better skip breakfast just in case.
• How much protein did you eat yesterday? Enough? Can you tell me down to the gram? I hope so because you should be logging that shit, along with every gram of carbohydrate you were piggish enough to plow into your gob.
• Phew. You’re wiped. How about a coffee and a fatburner pill? A Ritalin? Prozac? Effexor? Crap, now you can’t sleep. Have an Imovane or Ambien.
• Why aren’t you there yet? Why aren’t you CEO? Married? A perfect mother? Where are your balloon tits and shiny Chiclet teeth? You’re 25; shouldn’t you speak three languages? You’re 45; shouldn’t you keep that perky ass like Demi Moore?

Ask yourself: Do I even know what the hell “OK” looks like? Or am I drowing in fear, worry, anxiety, and “shoulds”?

I look around me now and see a lot of women who are driven as hell. They don’t know where they are going exactly, because the destination is largely fictitious. They are out of fuel and running on fumes; their bodies are crying out in distress with adrenal dysfunction, chronic fatigue, disordered eating, and stress-related illnesses. Nevertheless they are determined to white-knuckle the steering wheel of that bus right over the cliff.

If they’re fit women they have a very clear idea of how they should look, and most of them don’t look like that. They probably look like lovely, normal women but that ain’t good enough. I heard an elite athlete recently say that she had always hated her legs. Her legs were stupendous. Her quads could crush carbon into diamonds. But her legs did not look like some imaginary starved sylph, so in her mind they were a testament to failure.

All or nothing, baby! If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!

I know these feelings, because I was once there too. The more you “screw up”, the more rigid your rules for yourself become. The more you worry, the more you try to impose order on the world. Of course, the more you do this, the worse it gets. Rules and expectations. Defeat and failure. More rules and expectations. Worse defeat and failure. Lather, rinse, repeat until everyone hates being around you and you are a crashing bore.

The expectations of “fitness” are more insidious than the simple expectation to be skinny. Being skinny is pretty straightforward. You’re just skinny. End of story.

But with modern fitness-industrial culture, “fitness” is very, very complicated and specific. You can’t just enjoy “going outside for some fresh air” or “throwing a ball around”. You have to focus on body parts and stand on a vibration plate and “bring up your medial delts”.

Funny thing is, this world is mostly imaginary.

Look around you. What do you see? Do you know any women who are actually 12% body fat? Do you know any women who’d leap on stage in a bikini and high heels? Do you know any of these legendary creatures who are amazing mothers, driven career women, lusciously taut and muscular, perfectly pleasing daughters and BFFs — and not insane or heading for a nervous breakdown? Sure, they probably exist… somewhere.

Yet it’s not as if you’re surrounded by the Next Stage in Evolution — you’re probably surrounded by normal, statistically likely out of shape people, so frankly, even engaging in regular activity of any kind already puts you ahead of the pack.

Have you ever noticed that images of commercial fitness models rarely look all that fun? And how many of them seem to be shot in skeezy hotel rooms? Or how often a “come hither” pout strays into “I’m feeling constipated” in the visual lexicon?

Bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman is given oxygen backstage during final judging rounds at the Mr. Olympia, to combat the effects of severe dieting and dehydration. Photo by Zed Nelson from the Love Me series (www.zednelson.com).

Is that what you want? Is that your dream?

Purposeless self-punishment is not productive discipline any more than self-flagellation and shame brings you closer to God.

Ask yourself: What would “pretty good” look like? What would “slow down” look like? Who expects you to do all this shit? To be all this shit? Who is, in other words, The Expecter?

• Your friends? They’re probably thinking about themselves.
• Your coworkers? They’re probably thinking about fantasy football and stealing pens from the supply cabinet.
• Your partner? S/he probably (hopefully) thinks you’re awesome the way you are. And s/he wishes you would see that in yourself.
• Your kids? Depends. If they’re under 10, they probably think you’re God. If they’re 10-20, they probably think you’re an idiot. If they’re 21 and need help setting up a mortgage, they probably think that you’re not so stupid after all. In any case, they don’t notice your abs.

The Expecter is you.

A narcissistic, self-focused you. Yeah, beating yourself up is still pretty self-centred, even if it gets disguised as a public service.

What do they think of ME? What if someone sees ME like this? What should I be doing? I am so bad! I hate ME! Me, me, me!

Pull your head out of your ass and get over yourself. So let’s say you get those abs or that bench press. Let’s say that magical number appears. Then what?

Are you going to be happier than some nutty guy with a ukelele and 9 small dogs in grass skirts? Ask the Magic 8 Ball… signs point to “no”.

Let’s say you don’t measure up. Then what?

Someone who may be paying attention (probably not) may be slightly disappointed for a microsecond. There may be mild inconvenience. Or not. Probably not. Ouch! Your abundant and highly specific self-loathing didn’t change the universe! That hurts!

The sun still came up regardless of whether you made partner at 35… and if you allow yourself to do so, why not sit on a log with a nice warm mug and simply enjoy a moment with the real you?

How to get off the hamster wheel? Why, the Fuck It Way, of course!

There are two ways to get rich:

1. Make more money.
2. Desire less.

–Tshirt seen in Hawai’i

Why not start things off right with an awesome Stumptuous 2010 calendar?? HELL YEAH!!

OK, Stumplady is putting on her prognosticatin’ pants and giving youse the Predictions for the Decade.

1. You will fail at your New Year’s Resolutions this year — and every year — unless you figure out the real problem and focus on the process, not the product.

Why are you out of shape? Why are you poorly nourished?

It’s not “willpower” — it’s the current structures and systems of your life.

Your relationship with your body mirrors your relationship with the other domains of your existence. Your body reflects your current values and priorities as well as your environment — social and physical.

• Fix your surroundings and relationships.
• Bump fitness and nutrition up the list of values and priorities.
• Find the limiting factors that are holding you back, and remove them.
• Examine the structure of your physical environment and daily routines to find the elements that sabotage you (or help you).
• Get away from soul-sucking people, things, and situations. Go towards people, things, and situations that bring you joy and give you energy.
• Question your underlying assumptions about how this whole project works and why it matters.

Not saying you have to solve it all, but if you don’t address the root cause of whatever’s bothering you, you’re doomed to fail.

Another fitness writer talked about a woman he knew who planned lavish, indulgent, junk-food meals while she was “on a diet”. In other words, this is a temporary fix, and then things will be magically different and I can engage in poor choices with impunity. Nuh-uh. It doesn’t work like that.

Be brave.

Get some big garbage bags — real or metaphysical — and start throwing shit out, whether that’s energy vampire people who don’t support you, crap “food” that poisons you, or assumptions and mindsets that are fundamentally self destructive.

Question everything until you peel away all those onion layers to find out why you are in the situation you are in.

Hint: it’s not because you eat carbs.

2. Everything will be two diseases.

My theory is that in fact all diseases are the same disease, and there are really only two kinds.

• diseases caused by a foreign pathogen or external accident — parasites, viruses, a safe falling out of a window on to your head, etc.
• autoimmune diseases, where your body attacks itself

Dig this shit: in the last decade-ish, we have discovered that the following health problems (and by no means is this an exhaustive list) have autoimmune features:

• cancer
• heart and cardiovascular diseases
• diabetes
• gastric esophageal reflux disease (GERD), aka heartburn
• digestive problems, including inflammatory bowel, celiac, leaky gut
• autism
• mental illness
• neurodegenerative disorders, e.g. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s
• obesity
• skin disorders such as rosacea, eczema, and psoriasis as well as acne vulgaris

My theory is that the autoimmune list above signifies that everything is the same disease.

And often, disease #1 can become disease #2.

For example, a viral or bacterial infection can trigger a cascade of events where the immune system starts beating up on itself. For instance, this is how death often occurs in respiratory infections — it ain’t the virus or bacteria that gets you, it’s your body’s response that makes you drown in your own lung butter.

Or, an injury can trigger chronic pain that does not disappear when the physical damage does. (Back pain sufferers, you know what I’m talking about. Your spine’s tissues have long forgotten about the actual owchie but your brain is hoarding the memory of that pain like a cat lady hoards old newspapers.) Speaking of that, we will become more insightful and sensitive about dealing with pain, and regard it as a complex mental-emotional-physical event.

As my judo teacher likes to say, It’s all the same fucking throw. (Our class is somewhat… informal. Kano wept.)

In other words, the fundamental principles and features apply — and if you have one thing, you often have other things too, whether you see them or not.

The body is a system — a very complex, self-regulating, sensitive system.

Think about it. Let’s imagine your body as a neighbourhood.

It has roads and railways — let’s call those blood vessels and our GI tract. It has a communications system — let’s call the electrical lines nerves and the postal system our endocrine system. The plumbing is our lymphatic system. The houses are our organs.

What happens if a road gets blocked by construction?

• There’s a big snarl-up at the point of blockage
• Everything gets diverted
• Regular systems can’t work as well — the mail carrier has to change the route; messages may not get delivered as well
• Digging under the road screws up the plumbing
• The people living nearby can’t sleep because of the construction noise and horn honking; they bitch to their neighbours and write crabby letters to the local paper
• Etc.

One little road blockage affects the entire neighbourhood.

• Do you really think your liver doesn’t notice if your heart is clogging up with tiny chicken wings and beer bubbles?
• Do you really think your blood vessels all over your body don’t care if there’s a nasty chemical running amok in the plasma?
• Do you really think you can sneak that shit past your digestive system while it’s looking the other way?

No, my friends, the body is a very chatty, gossipy, omniscient being. It knows when we’re sleeping. It knows when we’re awake. It knows when we’ve been bad or good etc. It’s like Santa and God together.

3. We’re going to realize that stress literally kills us.

Sure, we know stress is bad. But did you know that physical, emotional, and mental stress can actually rearrange your DNA?

Problem is, modern life is more stressful than ever before, and it’s showing no signs of abating.

A global high-tech world means that along with the usual woes that have always plagued humanity (food, shelter, getting out of bed in the morning, getting and maintaining sex, mean people with pointy objects and thundersticks, malevolent power-grubbing bosses, etc.), we have new ways to stimulate ourselves, to which our physiologies (see #6) have not yet adapted.

For example, chronobiology will show us how the natural cycles of life — daily and seasonal rhythms — can be disrupted by our current structures such as shift work, artificial daylight, etc. and how this affects our metabolic health, including nutrition and exercise.

And multitasking just makes you worse at stuff. You think you can talk on your cellphone, read a map, juggle a coffee, and whip down the freeway, but you can’t. In fact, you’re doing badly at all of those things.

Speaking of coffee, your 4-venti-a-day habit is probably frying your adrenal glands.

Adrenal fatigue became the buzzphrase of the late 2000s. While it’s not yet recognized as an official disorder by the medical community, it makes sense that there’s a continuum between “total adrenal explosion” and “happy adrenals”, just like there are subclinical manifestations of several metabolic disorders.

Natural health practitioners are pointing out that just maybe all that stimulation isn’t so great. (See #10.)

In the next 10 years, we’ll start to see the long term effects of over-stimulation by chemicals. ”Fat burner” supplement consumers, are you paying attention? Or are you too distracted by the xanthines slamming into your adenosine receptors?

4. Our tummies have brains.

Say hello to my leetle friends!

And boy are they pissed.

The GI tract, long ignored as a poop-filled garden hose, is getting its revenge. The enteric nervous system and the rich, diverse microbial colonies of our gut may in fact be responsible for much of our immune system and  subconscious sensory activity.

Celiac disease now affects 1 in 100 people. Food intolerances are on the rise — whether this represents a higher rate of diagnosis or incidence is hard to know, but I’m guessing a bit of both.

We’ll start understanding the havoc that we’ve wreaked on our tummies with the Western diet in a more profound way, and autoimmunity of the gut will become understood as a fundamental component in a variety of other health conditions. (See #2 above.)

And by the way, the liver will replace the heart as the disease organ du jour. We focused a lot on heart disease starting in the 1980s. However, disordered liver function underlies an immense number of metabolic diseases, and in a sense it’s the canary in the coal mine. Put your money on the liver as a key player, while the heart’s disease celebrity career is going the way of Vanilla Ice’s.

Gut instinct, indeed.

5. The lipid hypothesis will go the way of Jazzercise.

You’d be tempted to think that Gary Taubes was the first to throw the bullshit flag on the twin statements of “Dietary fat makes you fat” and “Dietary fat makes you diseased”. But in fact, scientists were figuring this out in the 1920s and 30s.

The lipid hypothesis — the idea that dietary fat makes us fat and sick, and that we can perceive this disease state by looking at lipoproteins, and that we should all live on statin drugs — will die. Statins will be the new Vioxx but we’ll only figure this out when we wonder why our muscle tissue is dissolving.

Saturated fat is not the enemy. Nor is dietary cholesterol. Humans evolved to eat this stuff. However, they did not evolve to eat high fructose corn syrup, Frappucinos, and Ho-Hos. (See #6.)

Viva pork belly and organ meats! (But make them organic and pasture-raised. See #7.)

6. Evolutionary biology will become a guiding force in helping us understand ourselves.

We are, after all, animals. Our physiology is 10,000 years old or more, and we’re closer to yeasts than we’d like to admit.

Yeasts exposed to sugar age just like humans do. Less sugar = longer life.

Once we understand ourselves as hunter-gatherer hominids, a lot of stuff makes much more sense.

Our diseases (see #2) come largely from trying to do 21st century things with 10,000 year old bodies. (See #3.)

Epigenetics will become big news. We smugly thought we figured it out when we figured out DNA.

As usual, every time we say “Well, that’s the end of that question”, we find out we were wrong. (Why don’t we learn? Well, maybe arrogance and the desire for completion is also part of our DNA.)

And here, by the way, I don’t mean evolutionary pop-psychology of the type barfed up in mass media, e.g. “Men like to go in their cave” and “Women like potpourri because it reminds them of gathering berries”. I mean, like, real science with actual evidence and stuff. Pop-psych simplifies and stupidifies the world; real science makes it more complicated and interesting.

7. Farms will become both more and less personal.

Industrial conglomerates will continue to expand and dominate the food systems.

But a devoted and growing group of food fighters will continue to advocate for small farms, organic methods, and local food production and distribution systems.

There’ll be more chemical shit on the shelves, but consumers will also have better access to CSAs, pasture-raised meat, organic foods, and farmers.

People will start asking more inconvenient questions about where their food comes from, but unfortunately, food manufacturers will continue to distribute their nutritional napalm into new and vulnerable markets. (See #11.)

And then, things will just get weird.

8. Aging will continue to be a key focus for medical research.

The Boomers are shuffling into senescence, so there’ll be a lot of money thrown at research into age-related diseases.

We’ll come to realize that a lot of “normal” aging is simply disuse and neglect. We’ll realize that many chronic diseases are connected, and ultimately part of the same underlying phenomenon. (See #2.)

People will expect to stay active and sexy with a good quality of life. They will not go gently into that good night.

This will lead to some pretty awesome bionic replacements, major advances into understanding cellular damage, a plethora of invented medical conditions and “cures”, and us having to contemplate Hugh Hefner still gettin’ it on.

Unfortunately we won’t put as much attention into making sure kids don’t die early from inactivity and poor nutrition (see #9), and aren’t whacked out on drugs that fry their little brains (see #3 and #4).

9. Healthwise, the U.S. will implode.

Sorry guys, but no matter what happens with that healthcare plan, the Titanic has hit that iceberg and you’re rearranging deck chairs.

• An entire swath of generations is now obese and developing serious metabolic diseases.
• Those 45-odd million uninsured folks aren’t going to get better overnight.
• Children are walking around with type 2 diabetes and heart disease, stoned on Ritalin.
• A growing population of seniors and the working poor are going to food banks.
• Farmers are living in poverty, and much of the available cropland in fertile areas is drying up or saturated with chemicals.
• The food regulation and industry lobbying system means that manufacturers are allowed to produce and distribute utter garbage for the populus to consume (and then produce ridiculous offenses such as high-fructose corn syrup commercials); pharmaceutical companies can advertise their wares to all and sundry.
• The US scores poorly on many key indicators of overall health, such as infant mortality.

Between well-established social determinants of health such as the economic recession and unequal distribution of resources (see #3), the health-crushing geography of suburban life (and the housing crisis), atrocious food (see #7), the aging population (see #8), etc. your country is in big, big trouble.

I am always desperately saddened by the tales that Americans tell me of their healthcare system, and the delusions they hold about the rest of the world. (Death camps, people? Really?) I am still haunted by the boy who did not seek help for a broken wrist because he could not afford it.

Don’t worry, the rest of the world is catching up to you in many respects, but you’re leading the pack, and you’re the only affluent industrialized country without a centrally administered public health care system. Congratulations. You’re killing your citizens.

10. The idea of “___ resistance” will emerge.

We already know about insulin resistance, which is the inability of our glucose transport and storage systems to work properly when they’re constantly flooded with insulin and glucose from a prolonged high-carbohydrate diet.

We’re learning about leptin resistance, which occurs in obese people whose bodies no longer respond well to the effects of the hormone leptin.

We’ll start to realize that continual hormone imbalance is bad news. Like parents tuning out a screaming toddler, our body downregulates systems in order to accommodate receptors that are overloaded.

11. Nutraceuticals will be big news, big business, and often a big pile of bullshit.

We’ll learn, as Hippocrates instructed, to make our food our medicine and our medicine our food.

Except instead of interpreting this dictum correctly — that we should eat well and treat each meal as an opportunity to nourish and repair our bodies via Nature’s gifts in whole foods — most folks will simply turn to chemical-laden “vitamin waters” and acrylamide-laden French fries with “cancer fighting” chemicals, helpfully produced by large corporations looking to disburse more low-cost garbage into the collective gullets of the populace.

This is like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, but saying “It’s OK, because the hammer came with an ice pack and a roll of bandages!”

If a manufactured product advertises its health benefits (low fat! low carb! high in calcium! trans-fat/cholesterol free! balances your Q zone! aligns your cosmic vibrations!), 99.9% of the time you should not eat it.

For one thing, label claims themselves can be very misleading. (More examples)

For another, label claims may have absolutely nothing to do with the real problem. I ate a whole lot of high-sugar, low-fat Fig Newtons and Twizzlers when I was low-fatting my way up to 50 lbs overweight. Sure, they were actually low-fat. But in that case, so is a sugar cube.

Oh, and I keep rooting for curcumin (a compound found in turmeric) as Supplement of the Decade. I think this is the decade!

Over to you, 2010s! To quote Principal Skinner, “Prove me wrong, children! Prove me wrong!”

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!