_ You can see it in people sometimes, when they don’t know when to stop. If you go to an exercise class, you’ll often see the people who work the hardest are not the thinnest, most muscular, or the fittest participants. But they’re good at pushing it, because for some reason, they believe that’s what they have to do. I finally realised my self-worth is not based on my ability to work hard. It’s a difficult thing to let go of. And it’s often tied up in the need to compensate and a sense of superiority (which is, of course, the secret code word for inferiority – where else would the need to feel superior come from?) – I might not be good at x, but I know how to push it. I’m better than these people who look how I want to look, even though they’re doing it all wrong. The biceps are just a trophy muscle, they’re not useful (yeah, because the body’s just full of unnecessary muscles). I’m better than those other actors who have work, but they’re bad at it. Whatever. I want to get toned, but I don’t want to be strong. It’s a kick in the teeth for many people – women are supposed to look fit, but they’re not allowed to be able to throw a dude across the room. You still gotta be fragile in the right way. Toned only. A thin neck. Except that toned doesn’t exist. We have a docile, obedient population of dieters who have no energy to do anything, and who train for no good reason – only the vague threat that maybe one day they’ll be fat, and their own prejudice and fear (and hatred) will bite them in the ass. _ There’s a guy at my gym with a shoulder problem. At the end of every set, he gets half way through an exercise and winces, lowers the weight and shakes his head. I’ve seen real injuries before, and they don’t play out like that. He’s embarrassed that he has to stop. I can only assume he doesn’t want to appear weak, and y’know – it’s not that I’m stopping because I’m weak, it’s my shoulder.
In training, when it gets to the point where I need to stop, I no longer feel embarrassed, and I don’t need to make excuses. So of course, now I can finally have a real experience of training. Now I can actually discover myself, and my strengths and weaknesses – because I’m stripping away the prejudice. It’s okay to reach a point where you don’t want to go on. We use the word can’t to make it not our fault, not our weakness, not our choice. Do three more reps! I can’t! Oh, okay then – I’ll stop abusing you, because you’ve reached the limit of your will (except I still think you’re weak, even though you were never going to win this rigged game to begin with). There’s no shame in stopping. If we really wanted to motivate people to excel, and be healthy, and want to train – and if we wanted people to be truthful – we wouldn’t shame each other all the damn time. If I’m to be honest, and I like trying to be honest, this post was going to be next in the Will To Work Hard series of posts, but they aren’t quite turning out the way I thought. And it’s because I don’t really care how hard you’re working, and I don’t think you’re obliged in any way. Who do you owe it to, to vomit at the gym? Why should you work beyond the point of fun? To get to a point of satisfaction? Maybe. Reward? Maybe. But how far – and when have you gone too far? And can you ever get back home again? But it’s okay – every single experience in the gym will teach you something if you let it. About training harder, or gentler, and I’m learning that strength of character stops me from overtraining. I remember a friend once telling me – don’t study nutrition, study psychology. Clearly what he struggled with was getting people to do what he said. Manipulating people to make different food choices doesn’t help anyone. All I spend my time doing now, is kinda encouraging people to have fun, and trying to help them get healthier. But that’s hard, when they’re hell-bent on dieting, or on controlling their food choices, or ‘being good’. It’s a little heart breaking – seeing people who are eating maybe thirty grams of protein per day (if that) ask for tricks to help them eat less. They are seldom satisfied with my answer. That’s the thing with coaching. We are specialists, I get that, but specialists in what exactly? Teaching people how to deceive themselves? Getting people out of touch with their bodies, by telling them lies like “keep your body guessing”, as if your body isn’t to be trusted? As if your body isn’t you? As if it’s working against you? What? Aren’t we supposed to help people connect? Get in touch? Isn’t that what training does? When you’re trying to lose weight, you’re working against your body. You’re trying to make what is, conform to your idea of what should be, and you don’t have all the facts. It’s not just that buzz term ‘starvation mode’, your body cannot actually be dominated for its own good. It doesn’t work that way. Nourishment is the path forward, not depletion. Food doesn’t kill you - what you eat isn’t killing you - it’s not eating. That’s what kills you. If someone’s not eating what you’re telling them to – there’s something greater at hand here, and manipulating them into making different choices – shaming them or praising them – the body knows what it needs, and I don’t believe in restriction any more. It only makes it harder to work out, harder to get in touch with yourself. Rules get in the way every damn time, because our concept of reality will never be as complete and intricate as the nature of reality. So I don’t believe in deprivation. The science doesn’t support it, it’s pure assumption. People think it’s healthier to be thin, but they don’t think about what trying to get thin actually does to you. And it’s not pretty. I don’t post too many links on this opinionated site of mine, because it’s not really about science, but I’m quoting something really cool now: “a great deal of evidence suggests that health problems linked to fat are actually a result of dieting, and the incredible strain that dieting puts on the body. A recent study found that people who lost 15% or more of their body weight had an increased risk of death compared to people of the same size who didn’t lose weight.” Read the original post at Body Love Wellness. A friend was talking about how important it is to eat seasonally – because we evolved that way or whatever, and I get it – I do. But to believe that humans have not been freezing food to preserve it for tens of thousands of years is simply wrong. During mini ice-ages and in colder climates, people used to bury berries and meats in the permafrost. You could have blueberries in winter if you wanted. Am I supposed to believe that human-kind did not evolve to be able to digest blueberries in winter? If your digestion is that weak, you’ve got bigger problems. And anyway – if you’re not able to digest a food properly, where does the fault lie? With the food? Maybe. But it’s not a given. When it comes to exercise, and the myriad health benefits, which all happen even without any weight loss (defence against cancer and improved immune response in general, hormone-optimizing benefits, increased heart health, these sorts of things), it’s not intensity that’s key. It’s consistency. And if you are exercising, and you start dieting, you can kiss those real and verifiable health benefits goodbye. You’ll get some of them, to an extent, but you start overexercising and underfeeding, and immune function worsens, you start depleting yourself, and then you’re depleted – hormonally. And where do you go from there? Diet harder? No. The only way out is by eating. You have to eat your way out of that diet-hole, and eat your way to health! Seriously, nobody’s honest about just how much food we actually do need to eat, in order to thrive. And eating something – anything – it’s better than starving. That’s what cravings do. Someone else I know, she’s a doctor – she went to a medical conference and they do all the long term generational studies on rats and mice because they’re such short-lived creatures – anyway, there was this study someone was presenting and the mice who were fed the high-carb diet were the fattest, which wasn’t too surprising, but they lived half again as long as the low-carb dieting mice. In some cases I think it might have been twice as long. And they were big fat carb eaters. And they outlived all the other mice. There is absolutely no reason to pay penance at the gym. If you haven’t been for a while, hitting it hard will only mess you up. It’ll just be hard to recover from, and it’s not going to burn any fat. It just won’t. As your strength improves, your ability to work at a greater capacity improves. Take it easy – it’ll happen in time if you let it, if you don’t overdo it. It’s not the training you’re doing now that burns fat now, it’s not so literal as that. How could it be? Seriously? Your body composition is determined by other things, and your training is one of many things that can have an influence. But it’s consistency over time that yields the most profound hormonal benefit, and that’s basically what body-composition comes down to – hormones. Having said that, nobody I’ve ever trained has lost more than a few kilos from training alone. Am I doing it wrong? Hell no. And the ones who were already dieting when they started to see me – think they had any better results? Nope. Why don’t they lose weight? Training burns calories doesn’t it? Yes. Yes it does. And calories are completely irrelevant when it comes to weight loss and body size. Especially when you’ve already destroyed your metabolism through deprivation. It’s the biggest lie ever told to fat people, and people who are afraid of getting fat (in short: everyone with any degree of privilege). You might as well just take a random number, attribute it to a random meal, and after eating – simply jog until you’ve been running for that many minutes. It’d be just as effective as counting calories. Two. Let’s attribute the number two to a bagel. Eat it, now jog for two minutes. It sounds more ridiculous, so who’s going to do it? If you want to get back into training, pay attention to yourself. Work within your capacity, and increase it as you like. Anything else is a waste of time, unless you’ve got an event coming up. Then you might benefit from some more specific programming. Which brings us back to exercise selection and the will and desire to work hard. More to come soon about that.
32 Comments
Aiyesha
6/2/2012 03:34:26 pm
Oh my goodness, the "eat seasonally" crap. Eat seasonally because it's cheaper, because it's interesting, whatever, but for fuck's sake, eating seasonally because of the paleo fairytale? Not only have we had blueberries in the winter since caveman-times (along with many, many other dried fruits and vegetables) but the downside to eating seasonally was that our bodies adapted to scarcity by depressing thyroid activity! Yes, by all means, replicate the human animal's evolutionary worst-case scenario, it's sure to lead to fabulous health!
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Chris Serong
6/2/2012 04:21:10 pm
Oh Gawd. The reason you eat later when you're hungry is, I'm tipping, because it's not a permanent fast. It's intermittent. Jeez. I was talking with someone about third world starvation stuff, and she pointed out that the images of starving children we see are the extremes. She described the long-term starvation of populations as being not quite enough food for years on end, which leads to a slow decay and demise. Which sounded, to me, exactly like Anorexia Nervosa in our first world societies. It's a slow death, caused by slow malnourishment. Sometimes so slow you hardly know it's happening. And things just start shutting down.
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Chris Serong
6/2/2012 04:29:38 pm
Speaking of paleo, I'm reading Clan of the Cave Bear, and I love how much time she spends talking about the food they eat. There's honey, all kinds of potatoes, and I get that it's fiction, but it's so detailed and interesting! And they eat grains!
Aiyesha
6/2/2012 11:54:50 pm
Nooo Chris! Don't let it get out on the internet, that cave-people ate grains! Oh don't worry, it was just a few grains here and there...it's not like they had whole communities of people harvesting the endless steppes plains...
Chris Serong
6/3/2012 10:31:51 pm
So, what we need, is a society that existed, that we can use as a reference point, who had enough stress, but not too much stress, and little prejudice, who had access to enough of a certain variety of foods, which they could afford to share exactly as needed, and had no genetic deficiencies and somewhere, after we tick all those boxes, we'll have a chance to see what ideal human health is like. And that will reveal the true state of the healthy human.... When we remove all potentially pathogenic factors? But isn't a healthy human one who can meet pathogens and overcome them? Isn't a healthy human one who can eat a wide variety of foods without worrying if too many carbs are going to kill them? This fantasy-land approach would have us believe it's only once we remove all sources of disease, then will we discover the true human potential for health... except that a healthy human would be resistant to disease... really it all comes down to this stupid idea that we can only be healthy if we live in an environment that's free from adversity. But we live in the world. Damn. And Spray N Wipe can't solve all our problems? Oh, the naivety of it all does my head in! All foods are bad for you, and all foods are good for you. What do you need? Some foods that are good for you, will interfere with your ability to digest other foods. Some foods that do you harm will also heal you (bitter foods, for example, which are toxic enough to stimulate the liver to work, but not so toxic to cause problems). And when you're fatigued, carbs are necessary for recovery in a way that protein and fat cannot compensate for by themselves.... Oh, I know you know a lot of this. I'm still ranting! I'm stuck in a loop!
Aiyesha
6/3/2012 12:02:47 am
Forgot to add, the Clan of the Cave Bear books (there's 6 or 7 in the series I think?) are meticulously researched. As in, Jean M. Auel has been granted a couple of honorary degrees and an award from the French board of culture and the arts, for her work in archaeology, and she's never technically even been an archaeologist! But yeah, those books are fiction, but they are also factually accurate with regards to the details of everyday life. Of course, no-one can know how the Neanderthals actually communicated, or what their spiritual beliefs were as they left behind very little record - but almost all of the material stuff you read in those books is from the archaeological record. So yeah, fascinating stuff!
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Chris Serong
6/3/2012 10:21:53 pm
Yeah, I read that she'd been given such honours. And they were making flat-bread, and heating water with hot stones, and Iza was picking burdock, and it's all so interesting to someone like me with my interests in things. Plus it's engaging in other ways. And I kinda buy the ancestral memory thing, as well, it's engaging - if memories are merely pathways in brains, that could be encoded in the womb, conceptually.... so I'm really intrigued!
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6/3/2012 09:59:17 pm
Chris, I think I love you. :)
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Chris Serong
6/3/2012 10:17:19 pm
Aw shucks!
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Aiyesha
6/4/2012 10:30:46 pm
About grains and other things we "can't digest," I overheard someone talking the other day (in a very definitive, authoritative tone) saying that your body cannot digest gluten, and that's why it irritates your digestive system and causes disease and is bad for you. I love this idea - that we can't digest it. I guess that's why we all end up vomiting up the undigested gluten the way cats vomit up undigested grass, or dying within days from compacted intestines the way elk do when they eat anything other than lichen. OH WAIT that doesn't happen.
Chris Serong
6/4/2012 10:47:29 pm
Yeah, I read somewhere... who was it... Was it the vegan vixen? Or some name like that? And she was talking about how meat sits in your guts and rots and how gross it is, and so I'm like - how the hell else do you expect to digest it? If it's not decaying, it's not digesting. It ferments in your intestines, and it's not like what's happening is some weird disgusting thing that's not supposed to happen - what happens is exactly what's meant to happen. Ah well.
Michellers
6/13/2012 06:02:57 am
While tasting our way through a local Farmers Market last week, my daughter and I found a cheese booth. As my daughter and I tried all the cheese, an older woman standing next to us was assaulting the poor cheese vendor with her theories about eating cheese is good only if you don't eat any carbs with it. She eats her cheese in lettuce leaves! I'm fine with that, eat your cheese however you want. But then she turns to my 6-year-old and tells her not to eat cheese with crackers. She looks up at me for validation, so I just said, we enjoy cheese with crackers and bread and all kinds of carbs--it tastes good that way to me and life is too short to worry about carbs. She looked shocked that I contradicted her but the cheese guy gave me a huge grin.
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Chris Serong
6/13/2012 10:02:02 pm
Oh my God people are so rude! What kind of world do we live in where strangers think they can tell children what and how to eat? Feeling like this shouldn't make me as angry as it does, but - well, I was a child who was told what he can and can't eat, as were we all, and it fucked me up. Not that alone, but y'know - it was shitty. Plus, you can argue that point a lot - it's not like she's telling some eternal truth - adding fat to carbs delays their absorption and lowers the glycemic index, so if you want to take that particular 'rule' of nutrition carbs are better off with fats! More cheese for everyone! Seriously, a friend of mine, his wife got gestational diabetes, and she was eating grapes after lunch, and her blood sugar went up, and they asked me for help, and I'm all like - add cheese to the grapes, it lowers the GI, and she did, and then she had no blood sugar issues with the grape-eating. They commented that doctors are all like telling them what not to do, but have no helpful ideas about what to do. So grapes + cheese is a definite yes, for me! Anyway, I like your response. Totally a polite way to say we eat whatever the hell we want, and it's none of your business.
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Chris Serong
6/13/2012 10:05:40 pm
Plus, I read somewhere recently that calorie restrictive dieting in children (under the age of like 20 or something) is associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes at a later age. And it's a rather close association, apparently. No dieting for any children! Ever!
Min
7/20/2012 08:51:31 pm
Hey there! just stumbled across your blog, and just HAD to say I love the message you're putting across! ( don't normally comment on blogs, to be honest) I wish more personal trainers were like you! I too believe in keeping active for health not beauty, and enjoying food that you have! It's sad that people have lost the enjoyment about sheer movement because you want to, not because you have to to fit into some non existent ideal. I'm a junior doctor myself, and it kills me everytime I get a big patient that comes in all morose and dejected and automatically starts the self beratement " yes yes, i know i'm fat and should diet and go to the gym".. etc etc... Man, its the depression that would kill them, not their size! It's mind boggling to me, you see. because I've been fortunate enough to come from an asian country which LOVES food. "dieting" doesn't quite exist in the same way.. lol..salads are a garnish, not FOOD...and in fact.. exercise is used as an excuse to eat MORE :P But because of that, I've grown up surrounded by "obese" people ( think monks, martial artists, tai chi practioners etc) ... but heck, they're SUPER strong and could hurl you across the room..have superb stamina, hiking up and down hills all day.... SUPER flexible.. think splits, cartwheels etc....and.. most importantly.. happy people to be with. At the same time, I know so many " skinny" people that are crazily unfit and can't move 3 chairs across the room, and gym buffs that look like models in the magazines we're suppose to emulate that can't do practical things like chopping down a tree, yet can lift 100s of kgs in the gym..I mean.. whats the POINT?!?! Such a sheer waste of time, when you could be out there enjoying life! My patients just STARE at me when I tell them I really could be "f***ed * how big they are as long as they are active ( note i didn't say EXERCISE), and by that, i don't mean being a hamster on a treadmill. I mean doing chores, enjoying playing with the children, going for a good walk up a hill etc. And eating REAL food. For nutrition. Because ultimately, that's what the body needs. Its mind boggling how people breakdown everything in carbs/protein/fat ratios, when really.. you need everything to survive! You need the FULL amount of fat in milk to absorb the vitamins in it, the YOLK of an egg for all that good nutrients.. all that yummy stuff that we deprive ourselves of- its yummy for a reason! our body needs it! people say "omg.. i can't eat ice cream!" but geez, when you break it down ( and i mean good old fashioned ice cream, not processed with all the additives and such) it's just good ol eggs, cream, and fruit. how IS that bad? And so my patients jaws drop when I tell them to enjoy their mayo with their healthy tuna, full cream milk in tea etc.... because really, it IS about nutrition, not calories. BUT. keep active ( a lot of people take it to mean that you can sit on your butt on the couch all day and stuff themselves and literally not move a muscle but really, what quality of life is that?) I tell them to make like a kid. Literally - to go to a playground and observe the children. They MOVE because its fun! All that activity - and its not torture, its PLAY :D
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Chris Serong
7/21/2012 04:40:13 pm
It's so good to hear your thoughts! There seems to be this problem with people swearing by some evidence and ignoring the rest, and just being too prejudiced and closed-minded about it all. If your patients stop to think (or even if they don't), they probably find it really valuable not to be judged all the time. Safe places and relationships are so important!
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Min
7/21/2012 10:18:14 pm
haha....Wouldn't be encouraging anyone to just live on ice cream, as great as that sounds! LIke I said.. everything in moderation. Breast milk has a lot of other stuff ice cream won't have. vitamins, antibodies etc which is the main reason why we encourage it, not for the macronutrients! again, the inherent dangers of breaking things down too much... WE're only looking and comparing the things we are looking out for, if that makes sense..but definitely not make ice cream the enemy! haha. how about breast milk ice cream? best of both worlds, that... :P
Chris Serong
7/22/2012 06:20:35 pm
I have heard of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and reading up about it was one of the things that started me down this path that I'm on. I was horrified at how much damage can be done with calorie restriction and fascinated that they needed to be consuming 4000 calories a day for many, many months in order to repair the damage to their tissues. Not only that, their starvation was relatively modest compared to many modern weight loss diets, which is even more horrifying. LCDs are bad enough, it's unconscionable that so many people recommend VLCDs as a healthy weight loss option.
Min
7/22/2012 11:37:18 pm
yea, was referring to that breast milk ice cream.. Haha.. well.. I've eaten weirder things, I suppose. There was even this one dude that wanted to just solely survive on his wife's extra breast milk for as long as he could, but.. er.. abandoned it due to outrage from the community, i think.
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Chris Serong
7/23/2012 08:50:52 pm
I think it's really good to be adaptable, and I think that's a great sign of good health - if you can do a variety of things, if you can eat a variety of things, if you can handle periods of deprivation and periods of excess - it's a sign of good health if you can handle all that without too many deleterious effects. But what we can endure, and what's good for us can be quite different, and often it's tough to work out the difference when you mightn't notice the result of your behaviours or choices for years to come. And then, when something does go awry with your health, was it because of something you did? I think it often isn't, but we are quick to take on and assign personal responsibility (and guilt) for our condition. Which makes me a little sad.
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Min
7/23/2012 09:31:54 pm
Hahaha.. true. what we want and what's best for us ain't necessarily the same thing. all a matter of perspective, isn't it? " Best" according to who???
Chris Serong
7/23/2012 10:26:45 pm
Oh, hindsight! It's good, isn't it?
min
7/23/2012 10:47:32 pm
Ah.. used to do wing chun in Melbourne. Haven't done it since I left though, mainly because I haven't been able to find a school I like >< Love tai chi and kung fu. there's so much subtleness to it that so many people don't get or understand. It's not about strength per se - so much technique and skill that you need instead, plus flexibility etc.
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Chris Serong
7/24/2012 12:13:31 pm
It's been a while since I've really looked into massage courses. If you're still in Australia (?) you'll want a Certificate 3 qualification in something if you want to be able to practice in any kind of professional capacity. That isn't what I did, and I had to jump through a few hoops to get membership with a relevant association and insurance and things. I really like Chinese massage (tui na), Shiatsu and Thai massage. I think there's a detail and attention and depth of knowledge and skill that draws me to these systems, and typically they're a bit easier on the practitioner than some of the western remedial and sports methods. But they can also be a bit cult-like and any school can buy into its own dogma a bit much. It's like the kung fu, though, as you said - subtlety and variety in the approach is something I value too.
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Min
7/24/2012 04:58:20 pm
Yea, in Adelaide now. was looking into doing a Thai massage thing, but would be hard to get a membership if I wanted to do anything commercially, but not sure how it would work if it was just on a voluntary basis. The courses cost HEAPS though, for a certificate or diploma, rather than just a casual course.. is ridiculous!
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Chris Serong
7/24/2012 10:01:15 pm
I don't know what it's like now, but at Vic Uni they used to offer a diploma course, and you wouldn't pay more than like a thousand bucks or so per year, because it was a university and was government subsidised... I don't know if there'd be somewhere like that in Adelaide? Not all universities offer massage courses... If you go to maa.org.au and browse through their accredited course list, you'll probably find something cheaper, not a remedial qualification, but they do recognise some courses that exist outside of the Cert 3, Cert 4, diploma etc. framework.
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Min
7/25/2012 12:20:36 am
Thanks!
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Chris Serong
7/25/2012 09:33:58 am
Double check with maa, and see what they suggest. I'd be leaning more towards the massage therapy course, rather than the relaxation one - it's likely to be more interesting and detailed.
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10/1/2012 04:22:04 pm
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Chris Serong
10/1/2012 10:47:56 pm
Thank you!
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