Ladies who lunch

India was smiling at me today. And I was smiling back especially as one gentleman sang Justin Timberlake at me as I passed by his car window. It was 9:30a on a Sunday and I just finished working out with my friend Raghu. He has one of the few names I could pronounce right away and he had no idea that there’s a spaghetti sauce by that name. I explained it was sort of a Pasta masala, let’s say and since then he’s sent me text messages signed ‘Mr. Sauce’.

Most of Bangalore had long been awake I think in part because bars close at 11:00 p.m. and dancing is prohibited anywhere that alcohol is served. If you’ve seen Bollywood’s gyration generation on VH1 recently, you’d understand that this law probably has more to do with rampant hip dislocations than a wobble towards conservatism. It makes for early nights around here though. Not to mention that it was day four of a five day cricket match against Australia and the fervor hadn’t dampened in spite of dampening rains and India’s poor showing. I remember thinking after day one when the hoards poured from Chinniswamy hooting like soccer hooligans, “pace yourselves people! There are four more blasted days of this!”

I was particularly impressed with their rigorous cheering after a day in the stands where even Indians will admit it’s hot. Generally Bangalore is considered mild or even ‘cold’ by Indian standards and that’s why the coffee is heated to 190 degrees. The bubbling heat in combination with all the added sugar should be just short of hard-ball stage which would turn their latte into a lozenge all to escape a chill. I was incredulous as this was explained to me by the Barista as I peeled the shirt away from my sticky back. I have grown to accept the fact that my conditions are now permanently swampy and that, however unpleasant, I can support a new kind of ecosystem that I care not to ponder. At night I’ve considered kissing the ceiling fan in thanks but I’ve been reluctant to get that close to the blades in the dark when I’m groggy. I do, however fall back asleep smiling as I’m lulled by its sweet, sweet hum.

I skipped a couple of hours of blissful fanning the other night in favor of a couple of extra hours of crowded swamp-dwelling. I went to my first pub in Bangalore making what feeble contribution I could make emptying a pitcher of Kingfisher beer with friends while I pretended not to notice the sweat dripping down my clammy belly having, as usual, come straight from the gym. I was trying to remember the directions I read in a guide book that explained how to avoid the epic headache that the local brew can apparently give you and wondering why so many things in this country have a nasty backlash.

Even the favorite milk treats here squirt sweet syrup venomously and squeak against your teeth as if in defense and protest. I’m unwilling to eat anything that puts up that kind of tussle, sounds like a baby rat and is an unnatural shade of pink. As for the beer, I recall the first step had something to do with tipping a bottle upside down. At the time it sounded less like science and more like a Puja so I quickly forgot how it went.

As I pondered, Vinayak said, “do you have a curfew?”

“Wha . . .?” In Seattle before I left I overheard two different conversations on Broadway between young hoodlums casually talking about their ‘PO’ or parole officer. If the subject of a curfew had come up then, it would have had context. I also remember noting at the time that moving out of my neighborhood started to look like genius. Here, I couldn’t figure out where a curfew might be coming from and figured it might be yet another thing caused by the viscous mosquitoes.

With a puzzled expression, I finally said “I’m like . . . 40!?,” using a vocabulary implying that I’m like . . . 20. “Mine’s nine. In fact it’s 9:30 now, I’m surprised my father hasn’t called.” He’s 26 and just spent the last couple of years in the U.K. getting masters in finance which, in the present economy, may qualify him for a job teaching Karate Kickboxing classes at Gold’s gym. That happens to be what he’s doing while on vacation this week besides being punched in the arm and browbeaten by the ladies at the table who were drinking the local wine. It was bright fuchsia and tasted like fermented Snapple.

I’ve been taking his class as a ramp up to the kickboxing class that I teach in the mornings and also because he’s one of the first people I can talk to here that understands most of what I’m saying. With a background in Karate, he finds the preoccupation with caloric expenditure to the exclusion of skill-development about as perplexing as I do. We can’t figure out if the disconnect is between our mouths and their ears or their ears and their limbs but whatever inspires their locomotion in class has little at all to do with the directions they’ve been given. At least they aren’t terribly concerned about it but Vinayak and I talked over beer as if we had blown something up in a science lab and were trying to piece together what went horribly wrong.

The problem probably begins when they sign up based on an advertisement written on a white board as they walk in that says I’m NSCM certified – a qualification that doesn’t exist – and that the class will be spurred on by rousing heart-rate elevating music. Unless I’ve forgotten to close the door to the studio where bumpin‘ techno remixes blast in from the fitness floor, there is no music for me to shout over especially the latest hits by superstar Bryan Adams, a singer I abandoned at about the same moment tears over my junior high heartbreak dried up. Slight Indian ladies walk in and learn how to twist off a man’s balls set to the tune of my barking voice. India has no idea what I’ve just done given that most of the women I’ve met here have 1/10 of my muscle but ten times my attitude evidenced by the ladies at the bar who had Vinayak, with his advanced training, ducking their flying fists. I was scared of them in spite of my purple belt and before any of them could aim.

Frankly, I find the inevitable physical assault of some of the males here both justified and long overdue. I’ve had several conversations with strange Indian men here that have made me consider giving up peace, love and harmony in favor of militant feminism. On two occasions, I was tricked into what I can only describe as a job interview which is particularly accurate given that dating either of these gentlemen would have felt a lot like work. Apparently some men here believe all it takes is a thirty-minute rapid-fire Q&A to get that whole girlfriend thing handled over a cup of coffee.

One gentleman chatted me up while I was at a café writing and as he ticked each question off his list he sidled his chair ever closer to me until our knees would brush and I’d move my chair. Had he actually listened to my answers rather than wait for my mouth to stop making noises, he would have heard that I was annoyed and had he noticed the way I turned my chair to halt his advance he would have had the good sense to run away. What happened instead was a good ole Sicilian what-for complete with hand gestures and a very detailed list of reasons why he should leave white women alone.

I think he just waited for my mouth to stop making noise so he could apologize for something he didn’t quite understand. And this is where a good ball twisting becomes absolutely necessary.

The finale occurred after the following exchange:

“Are you married?” he said, with a nervous twitch in the form of rapid-fire blinking while he grinned in a fake ‘group photo’ sort of way.

“No” I said, shuffling my chair away from him further.

“You don’t want to marry?” with all the shock of an Indian auntie.

“I haven’t found anyone I’d like to marry, no.” I said in a tone that should have registered ‘please notice that I’m being dismissive.’

“You can’t find anyone to marry? After all this time?!” he said after having resolved the ‘how old are you’ question. Even the numerologist at brunch on Sunday felt compelled to point out that time was running out. He assured me I’d be wed by the time I was forty which caused me to put down my fork because that’s less than twelve months to fit in a wedding dress and I had allowed myself to indulge in a little Biryani after beating the 20-year-old Raghu’s time in the workout that morning. The fortune-teller gave me his number so I could call in the next two months with ‘happy news’ though I’m told that ‘happy news’ in India generally means you’re pregnant which is the news my sister would have preferred from me rather than marriage.

“No. I have found men I COULD marry, I just haven’t found one I WANTED to marry,” I said.

Dear India: Please note the distinction so I’m saved from saying it again. Sincerely, Heather.

And as he chased me from the café puzzled that I hadn’t set up a time to meet again especially since it was clear that we were now dating, I wondered why violence isn’t a more legitimate form of communication. Instead I got in the car with Shiva and exclaimed, present company excluded, “You, no problem! But Indian men are blech!” hoping in spite of his inability to understand English that ‘Blech!’ might be universal. I had already explained to him when he asked me a few days earlier, “Drive other country? No English? Three years, maybe?” that he could be a driver in another country because women don’t expect men to understand them even after a couple of years. Heck, I myself recently proved it. And then he grinned like he knew what I was saying and that was close enough.

I was however hoping for a deeper level of understanding when I got in the car a couple of days ago on my way to Kanteerava Stadium. It was finally my day to work out with the Olympic Lifters and Power Lifters who had just returned from a competition in Mysore over Dessera and Shiva was driving me to the stadium. I told him that I was scared and I threw in a pouty, “I feel fat!” since he couldn’t understand what I was saying anyway and wouldn’t think to tell me I was being ridiculous. Shiva is my best friend.

“Shiva, you don’t understand! I saw a skinny, little Indian mom who can deadlift 151 Kilos!” I told him.

“How much you lift Madame?” he asked in a way that made it sound like the chorus of a pop song.

“Well, I can squat about 102 kilos,” I said a little shyly.

“Ooh, good job, Madame!” he said and then exclaimed “40 Kilos” and made motions demonstrating how he’d buckle under a 40K bicep curl all while he maneuvered through traffic. Then I grinned while he grinned. I marched into the stadium with that and nothing to lose.

Kavia set up the squat rack, alternated lifts with me and interpreted the directions from the head coach whose name has more than three syllables. It means I won’t have any idea how to pronounce it for at least a couple more weeks. I just smiled at her a lot and lowered my gaze to communicate her alpha status and then I nodded and thanked her when she said I’ll be competing in a month.

Chandana, who’s life tends to proceed as if it were planned or something, asked me all the questions that any reasonable person would ask as we sat poolside watching Diya’s swimming class at the Catholic Club.

Reasonable question one: “competing in what, exactly?”

“I don’t know”

Reasonable question two: “Who are you representing?”

“I don’t know”

Reasonable question three: “Where?”

“I don’t know”

Reasonable question four: “Can you do that?”

“I don’t know”

I sometimes find logic irritating. And it went on like that but I’ll spare the details.
The trainers asked none of those questions since they just appreciate competition and assume I’ll win because: 1. They believe there are strong Indian women as strongly as they believe in unicorns and fairies and 2. I’m ‘big’.

Ganesh offered his usual advice, “dye your hair black,” which is what he generally says because he thinks I’ll blend better and because I think he doesn’t like the looks he gets when I’m on the back of his motorcycle any more than I do. I offered my usual reply, “Shave your moustache.”

The friends back home who had the romantic notion that I would come here to marry underestimated the obstacle that is the south Indian moustache. It’s everywhere and for me it’s nothing more than a libido crusher designed to keep Indian men lonely and turn them back to the tradition of arranged marriage. Instead of ‘I’m in the mood for love,’ I find myself humming ‘Sabotage’ by the Beastie Boys and giggling to myself.

I’ve explained this to Ganesh who has the softest, smiling brown eyes. This is a feature I noticed only after staring at his moustache for a solid week. I told him, “THAT,” as I pointed accusingly, “Was invented by Indian mothers to keep white women away.” He laughed and nodded slightly with confidence, “It’s MANLY.”

Poor, sweet, Ganesh. I hope his mother has good taste.

Ganesh was the one who got me set up with the coaches at Kanteerava like he was returning a stray kitten. It’s partly because of his kindness and partly because I strongly believe that you never swagger into somebody else’s dojo that I’m committed to keeping my mouth closed and my ears open. And I was also drawn in by the promise of a 150 Kilos squat by a male coach there with the movement and the mannerisms of a capoeirista.

Didn’t I just complain that Indian men are not smooth talkers? He had me at 150 Kilos.

As I started day two of my training with snatch practice I could only laugh to myself. How many different languages must I be told I have an early arm bend? It’s a bad habit that somehow made it through customs with all the rest of my baggage. I saw the correction coming long before the Kannada started to flow.

As the female coach with the impossible name I can’t pronounce focused her energy on training for an upcoming competition, I was given directions by her husband Sanjay, a name I can pronounce, who coached me using that impossible-to-interpret head bobble, a movement I simply can’t understand. I would make a correction look at Sanjay who would wobble about and then look at Kavia, “Yes? No? Maybe? Not-so-much? You’ll never work in this town again?” I deciphered.

“He said it’s fixed.”

Meanwhile across the room, the other coach examined me with his third chakra. Something was disturbing the energy in the room and I had my grip on it. Every time my hands inched in ever so slightly to accommodate my aching and swollen thumbs he paused before picking up his bar, turned slowly towards me and scolded me with his eyes.

Heather keeps her mouth completely shut: Day two. My tasks over the next month are simple: Say goodbye to the birthday Burfi to make weigh-in, go to the stadium everyday at 2 p.m. to train, and try really hard not to get crushed under heavy weight. Oh, and keep my mouth completely shut.

I’ve already fallen into a routine with my nutrition in spite of the couple of lapses and the increase in carbohydrates that can’t be avoided here. Thank Allah for ‘State of Punjab,’ a fast-food kebab joint in Sigma mall where I can eat a decent serving of chicken Tikka for Rs 140 and practice eating with my right hand in case I’m ever invited back to a real Muslim restaurant with better food.

For the most part, it’s not a place where I’ll be judged no matter how awkward my table manners which is made obvious by all the teenage Muslim girls who hide in the food court booths letting their hijab down and holding their boyfriend’s hands. Every now and then one of them gives me a look and I feel like saying, “Oh, don’t look at me like that, sister! I’ll tell you what – I’m calling your dad. Feel free to call mine.”

In fact, I called mine the other evening to leave an accusatory voicemail after my birthday. I was out with my friend Tammy, who’s a spinning instructor from South Africa and happens to know more about the nightlife in these parts than I do. With her urgings to order a birthday cocktail, I scanned the happy hour buy-one-get-one-free menu and my eyes landed on ‘Gin’ in the form of Gin and Lime Juice. Given that Gin is my father’s drink of choice I felt as if I was tipping a glass to the old man at a moment when I was feeling especially homesick and especially lost since I don’t know anything about cocktails. I also thought the reference to gin ‘n juice was funny and smart given that sweeter drinks give me the room spins almost instantly.

By the end of the evening, there were several things I was unclear about. First, I’m not sure how that particular buy-one-get-one-free deal worked since drinks kept arriving in my hand and I’m not sure how long that went on in a country where happy hour begins at five pm. I’m also unclear about how and when I’ve agreed to go to Mozambique and why my background in martial arts will be particularly useful when I go though I recall that being an important detail.

Any unanswered questions regarding my arrival back on Cunningham Road that evening or any speculation regarding how drunk I might have been will continue to be available at any security guard station from here to the end of the street until something more interesting happens. I do know that all of the drivers now greet me warmly whenever I come home and at any moment I’m likely to be invited to sit on the curb with them and play cards. I have now been officially defrocked of ‘Madame’ and have lost any privileges associated with the title. I feel like Vanessa Williams.

Of course, this is my father’s fault and I made that clear on the voicemail that I left. I was only influenced by the fact that I’m teetering on forty which I’m continually told is a little late to get married though I don’t recall asking, and I miss my dad. The next two days taught me never to buckle to that sort of silliness again since my hangover was epic. Later, Tammy and I were convinced that the exaggerated aftermath suffered by the both of us was either because the gin was made in a local bathtub with the sort of sanitation I’ve come to expect here or because the drinks were chilled with unfiltered ice cubes. Of course my dad was sympathetic and assured me that he’d be shipping a birthday present to his homesick daughter in a few days and he was wondering how long it would take for me to get the bottle of Gin he’d be sending.

Should I elect to blow the Muslim girls' cover and call their dads I suspect it will have far greater impact than anything whispered from the guard posts in Bangalore. I have sworn off Gin for several reasons now: 1. I’m training more seriously, 2. I have to know what my weight is doing, 3. I love my liver and it loves me and 4. I don’t even want to know what was in that drink.

I’ve decided instead to focus on more innocent pursuits while I train. I’m embracing cricket simply because everybody here is mad for it including Shiva and Chandana’s mother. I explained to Chandana that I intended to sit with 'agee' during the next test match with funny hats and foam fingers. I enlisted Shiva and I explained that it would be a party.

“Beer?” he asked.

“No beer,” I said clearly finished with alcohol and not wanting to turn Agee’s party into a Kegger.

“No Beer? Where’s party?” Some things really are universal.

I told Chandana about this and she told me, “Oh, you don’t know my mother!”

“She drinks beer?!” I asked.

“No. Gin and lime juice.”

Rock On, Shiva!

In a world where traffic laws go unheeded, it only makes sense that you'd rely on whatever other resource could offer protection. This morning Shiva did the annual Puja for the car, performing an elaborate ritual to bless it and keep us all safe. After seeing the garlands draped, the windows painted and splattered and the banana leaves affixed to the front grill, I couldn't help but wonder as Shiva drove off with the family like he was headed for the parade route if the ritual is meant to remind us what a blessing it is to see out of an unobstructed windshield on the other 364 days of the year. Keep in mind that all vehicles on the road including buses, bikes and autos will be likewise adorned with drivers navigating the usual hazards while trying to peek through greenery.

Bumping into bureaucrats

Psychologically, a 235-pound deadlift only feels heavy when burdened by gym-etiquette and the potential hazards of poor workmanship in a gym where the barbells reside on the third floor of a building built with cheap labor in a developing country. Lifting is not the issue. Putting it down politely is. Sending a barbell FedEx/'In-Care-Of-Gravity' through three floors to rest on a bed of scooters in the parking garage would warrant a disinterested shrug from most residents and page-8 placement in ‘The Bangalore Mirror’ buried beneath the current debate about whether or not women should be allowed to tend bar. Afterall, this is a place where every missile designed to collapse the infrastructure of Pakistan looks as if it was tested first on the city’s sidewalks. It’s assumed then, after clamoring over the kind of debris that only a SCUD could leave that everyday safety issues are of little concern.

No that deadlift wasn’t a max lift, I explained to the trainers when asked and no I wasn’t planning a max attempt today for the sake of my safety and that of the Gym-Gerbils on treadmills two floors down. The reply was “Whaat?!” which wasn’t about the weight as much as it was a rhetorical question of, ‘why not go for it?’ Though I’m completely lost when it comes to the official local language, certain words have become familiar. In regards to the word ‘What’, Indians I’ve noticed can neatly and efficiently pack an entire sentence into that one word alone or they can use it at the beginning of a sentence guaranteed to be stuffed with indignation. Either way, it’s always more than just ‘what’ and never an actual question.

I arrived in Bangalore on a Wednesday morning at one of the few hours in a 24-hour cycle during which both ‘night people’ and ‘morning people’ can agree to sleep. Three days later I worked out for the first time at Gold’s Gym Bangalore and it was not an impressive effort. I was still breathing like a guppy from the heat and pollution and I was suffering from toxic levels of carbohydrate intake. Now that my lungs have adapted to the point that I can siphon oxygen through swamp water or, for that matter, Saran Wrap, breathing itself is no longer a preoccupation and as for the carbohydrates, I’ve been able to fend off much of the fruit with handfuls of nuts. It leaves me instead to ponder my fitness goals though in my head at times it sounds a lot like a shrill “what am I going to do now”.

Clearly I could take my place in the rank and file of beefy Hindu’s and bulk up since that’s what the gym is designed for: No plyo boxes, no bumper plates, and no room to navigate. As expected, you can find most of the trainers clustered at the cable apparatus trying to get their anterior delts and their posterior delts to stop speaking to one another and fend for themselves. In truth it matters little what limb is flapping since every illegal anabolic is available for the asking with the exception, I’m assuming, of Bovine Growth Hormone. Cows are sacred here, people are not. Consider that you’d be beaten to death by an angry mob if you broadside a cow on your scooter but passengers on said scooter are not required or even encouraged to wear a helmet. This gets listed under a category of reasons my mother would have wrapped herself around my ankles the minute I said I was moving to India had she been alive to see me even go near a scooter here.

Among my remaining options, I could become queen of cardio - a goal I’m least suited for - except that the brown-outs shut the treadmills off at least twice each morning which leads to even more complicated Kilometer math when piecing it all together in the end. I’d also like to refrain from personally processing more of Bangalore’s air than I have to given that all my walks have become one long game of ‘Name That Feces’ which I’d be skilled at if I knew more about the various breeds of monkeys populating the area and understood the motivation of India’s poor to defecate mid-sidewalk on streets usually teeming with traffic. It still amazes me to watch women wrapped in ethereal fabrics with mesmerizing colors and patterns in a landscape otherwise dulled by everyday grays dragging their pristine hems through the filth without once appearing inelegant.

As I inventoried options and equipment and began designing programs around obstacles –mostly the aforementioned beefy Hindu’s - I started hearing rumors that powerlifters and Olympic lifters lurked in dank, bleak stadiums that smelled of sweat, fear and pain (and maybe feces). Gold’s trainers knew about these places but had decided long ago to stop trying to understand the people in them once they failed to get adequate answers to the question, “What muscle does that work?” These are places where people lift heavy, make noise and spit in drinking fountains. I felt instantly warm and fuzzy - I must find this place.

The problem with talking to fellow trainers about stadiums here is that there are a lot of fellow trainers and there are even more stadiums. The fact that I can’t make out what most of them are saying a majority of the time doesn’t help. Finally I latched onto Nisar who told me, “KarnatakaKarnatakaKarnataka stadium Karnataka,” or something like that. I said, “Great. I’ll meet you at 2:30.” I smiled. Again, I’m not sure what he said but he has the sweet face of a well-raised Indian boy. Shiva, our driver, has the same gentle face and he hasn’t killed me yet in spite of the mutually agreed upon initiative launched by all of Bangalore to run down Chandana’s Maruti.

Already you’ve got to wonder why all the bother. For me, finding a gym with bumper plates and lifting platforms simply means that I can bail out from under weight when necessary. That little safety feature allows me to attempt heavier loads. It also means I can resume a strength protocol and possibly find like-minded souls at the drop of a bar. Of course, I’m far happier when I complete a lift and not drop it but then, these things happen. Unfortunately based on the deafening clatter alone not to mention the damage to equipment in conventional gyms that is not designed for actual use, the first sign posted in a Globo-Gym will be ‘don’t drop weights’ though in the states it’s usually posted next to the sign ‘No spitting in the drinking fountains.’

At 2:30 I met Nisar, a very large, muscular man on a benign scooter that could have used a testosterone transfusion from it’s amply supplied owner. I felt like I should pat it’s seat and talk to it in soothing tones so as not to startle it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the horn said ‘Pardon me’ in a voice not unlike a voicemail directory operator. For a man that imposing, you’d expect blades to pop out of the hubcaps to hamstring fellow travelers when necessary and even when not.

But this is Bangalore and even as a passenger I’d need to be prepared to fend for myself or be jousted off the back by scooters hauling 12 feet of bamboo, families of four carrying metal plumbing supplies or a passenger with five 10 Gallon water bottles stacked sideways on the footboard*. I yearned for my nailclippers since clearly they’re a lethal weapon given the way they’re handled by airport security. It turns out, however, that the schizophrenic beeping that once set me on edge makes sense when you’re in traffic and becomes a rather reassuring form of communication. I relaxed and settled into the work of not falling off.

Nisar checked his mirrors now and then more out of concern for me then for traffic. He’s very sweet and eager to make sure that India is a good host to the white woman with biceps and a funny accent who clearly has no idea what she’s doing. When I met him he described himself and his two best friends as the Three Stooges of Gold’s to which I replied, after noting his bald head, “You must be curly.” He had no idea what I was saying. It might have sounded like “seattle.seattle.Curly.seattle”

At 2:30 we headed for Chinnaswamy Stadium to talk to somebody who knows somebody who met somebody once. Nisar signed ‘Visitor’ logs and stated his business while I smiled humbly. Apparently I don’t visit and can’t possibly have business since my information was unnecessary. We shook lots of hands and shuffled from one office to another to sit in waiting rooms that felt more like a Petri dish given the way I was scrutinized.

Finally after shaking the hands of many a dapper bureaucrat and being sent along to the next visitor log, Nisar and I sat across a large desk from the chief of dapper bureaucrat. He stared, waiting for us to begin and then Nisar, who had handled every checkpoint so far, looked at me.

I launched into my request with an explosion of wordy English spilling from my pie hole (note: My insistence on using the term ‘Pie Hole’ is completely for the amusement of my sister). Nisar, who by the way didn’t speak much of the local language either, politely saved me the way Indian men seem to do. I say this because even in Seattle, they’d turn up in my life like superheroes rescuing me from dire circumstances while passersby looked on. Which is why if I was going to displace myself entirely, moving to India made the most sense.

Nisar interrupted me smoothly with succinct statements directed across the desk at the bureaucrat who had yet to make a sound.

“Not Possible!” was the first noise from the other side of the furniture and it was also succinct.

The answer didn’t seem to leave any room for the kind of bargaining I expected. Clearly this was not haggling for guavas. Nisar looked at me again. Once more the proliferation of babble about how I was visiting from the States and I really needed a lifting platform and that I know that he has a couple in this facility and I could certainly stay out of the way of the cricket players if I could just use his equipment every now and again which would mean several times a week. A pause for breath.

Our bureaucrat looked tired. After a pause he began an explanation that I only sort of understood but that finished with the sentence, “women don’t lift weights here in this county,”
My initial thoughts about that line of reasoning may have been briefly communicated in the reflexive smart-ass look that I reconfigured as quickly as possible. “Well, where do your women athletes go to train?” I asked in a tone that conveyed sincere inquiry.

“They go to other countries,” was his clipped reply just short of an exclamation point and stated as if the answer should have been obvious.

“Well, I’m here. In this country. And I lift weight.” I explained slowly in the same humble and succinct manner I just learned from Nisar, “So I’m asking if I could please use your equipment.”
“Not Possible!”

Crap. He’s looped. This is going to require a bribe I can’t afford, a shameless exchange of ‘services’ with a cricket player or a programmer to debug our dapper bureaucrat.

Finally I asked to at least see the gym, assuming that I wouldn’t feel as bad if I discovered that the equipment wasn’t worth squabbling over. I recall going to a “gym” many years ago in one of the better hotels in Prague to find a room that housed only a hyperbaric chamber and an ancient stationary bike of which neither worked. Since India is a country where holes for ceiling fans are cut twice the size allowing wiring to hang out haphazardly and fixtures to wobble simply because ‘eyeballing’ is an excepted form of measure, I assumed lifting platforms would be of a similar design.

There were competition plates stacked everywhere around neatly built platforms. Sadly, the gym was beautiful. And really, really empty.

Nisar felt bad and he took me for the best meal I’ve had in India so far. It was a Muslim restaurant that served amazing kabobs and tolerated western woman only a little. Though left handed, I was on my best behavior and used my right as would be expected. This worked well considering the food was blistering hot and I wouldn’t be able to feel my fingertips for some time.

At Gold’s the next day, the trainers were hopeful asking if I found the stadium and if I got what I needed. After explaining far and wide that no, they would not let me lift at Chinnaswamy, Ganesh shook his head. “Not Chinniswami! Kanteevara! Come, we go.”

I’ll spare all the details but a different Indian man, a different scooter in the rain, a different nest of bureaucrats, the same heroic efforts and a text that read: “Hey Heather, I’ve spoke about u they said to meet on Monday noon at 3:30pm”

In Kanteerava, the platforms are built into the floor and look like they’ve seen centuries of missed lifts. I’m pretty sure Shah Jahan set a snatch PR here and it’s scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall with the date. The room itself was suffering battle fatigue, with broken windows and sagging floors and had surrendered meekly to a rodent and bird infestation. Meager equipment sat in dusty corners and bars with arthritic bushings lay abandoned in a bathroom that was out of order. Ganesh assured me that Olympic champions were trained here and though everyone was at a competition in Mysore, this is where 25 of India’s best come to train.

I tried not to be mad or frustrated or disappointed while I thought of my lifting shoes that never touched pavement because it was important to take care of them. I kept asking, “if this is what these athletes are passionate about, if this is where top-level athletes train, why does it look like this? How can they use this equipment?” I could get tendinitis just looking at the equipment in what looked like a ransacked lifter's museum. There weren’t even enough plates scattered around for me to do a max squat. Ganesh kept shrugging. He had trained here eight years ago and abandoned the place to become a body builder.

On the way out, we swerved around four large padlocked and polished crates. Ganesh asked about them in Kannada since they were new to the gym since he had been there.

“Equipment,” The attendant said.

I felt like Indiana Jones in ‘Raiders of the Lost Arc’ and had just found the Arc, or rather Arcs, of the Covenant. My eyes went wide, Ganesh smiled. “We come back Friday,” he said.

If I had been looking for reasons to quit, I could find one every hour, every minute, every round every rep. What would I say to my clients, “I want to be healthy and do the things I’m passionate about but talking to bureaucrats is annoying and time consuming.” But quitting is just another way of saying the goal stopped being worth the cost. Is India really the challenge that’s really bigger than me? Hardly. I'll go back on Friday, or Monday, or however many times it takes to find what I need to make this work. As much as I want to consider myself a unique snowflake, I'm not the only person in India who wants to lift heavy. Maybe the trainers at Gold's will help me and maybe they'll just join me.

*Though I’m prone to hyperbole, this is factual. I have seen all of these things on a scooter including the water bottles though two of them were on laps while the rest were on the footboard.

When in Bangalore . . .

Except when it smells like dung or rot or rotting dung, all of Bangalore smells like a campfire, something I’m usually willing to tolerate only when armed with marshmallows and the appropriate stick. Here, given the mayhem, I assume I’m always downwind of some riotous tribal gathering meant to affect fertility. Not farfetched when the heat and the humidity inspire a sticky sort of sweat like I’m feverish, slightly over-caffeinated or sensing potential calamity that has my amygdale at attention. I’m frequently all three. It’s a simmering discomfort accentuated by the fear of being run over at any minute even when walking on crumbled sidewalks which are barely off limits to harried drivers whose considerations have more to do with the potential damage curb jumping inflicts on compact cars and less to do with the damage to lives that are clinging to the street’s margins.

The traffic looks more like a salmon migration, weaving at high speeds with limited hesitation. There is no noticeable recognition of lanes even when painted lines are meant to separate traffic heading in opposite directions. Vehicles spill out in any direction providing the pavement allows. The bulging cars suck themselves back into the flow in time to miss oncoming traffic, buildings and debris but grudgingly and only at the last second. Turn signals and rearview mirrors have been replaced by beeping horns as if the road exists only in front out the windshield and every thing else is navigated by ear. In the mornings as I wake I can hear the commuter’s startled chirping and squawking horns like a predator is running amok in a colony of exotic birds.

If nature allowed, the auto-rikshaw, or auto drivers would join the migration not as salmon but as angry swarming hornets with the insistent dangerous hum and darting movements that leaves the pedestrian feeling hunted. It’s an understandable yippy-dog attitude from people steering popsicle-stick projects with lawn-mower engines built by grade school children in science class. After my first ‘auto’ ride through narrow lanes directly into oncoming headlights that were dim and erratic, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I was whispered a code word right before an inconspicuous package was thrust under my arm. It’s all very Jackie Chan with the same sort of energy except for the pedestrians who look drained and asphyxiated.

I crossed the street at the Queen’s Road rotary at what could have been a walk signal if such a thing exists and found myself faced by approximately 40 motorcycles ready to cross the intersection like I wandered into a motocross race at an unfortunate moment. Of the few pedestrians who crossed with me, I was the only one that seemed to notice the impromptu brotherhood bearing down. All two wheeled vehicles seem to travel like deep vein thrombosis mid-city. Of course it’s the only time I’ve seen 50cc mopeds revving next to vintage street bikes where nobody gets laughed at or pushed over and where ladies all brightly saree’d and sidesaddled sit primly decorating motor bikes in the midst of all the nonsense. They look fragile and bad-ass all at once.

My host Chandana’s driver, Shiva, navigates the roads looking alert but not concerned and only sometimes mildly annoyed. For the most part he’s at home with the weaving, noisy navigation. He only looks truly concerned when I get out of the car. It seems keeping an American from doing something stupid proves the greater challenge but then most locals have gathered that simply by watching the news. He stands in range and assesses the situation as I continually charge through security posts by accident. He shoves money back in my hand at the market and tries not to look baffled by my pointless changes in direction which take us through the dirtiest and sometimes bloodiest parts of the market.

A wrong turn had us both trudging through the Muslim meat stalls as if it was perfectly reasonable for a tourist to pause and watch livestock hacked to pieces like it was a puppet show. Perpetually in pink flip flops, which I’ve noted are not an all-terrain shoe, I return home each night with dirty, leathery feet. Chandana tries not to be appalled even as she slips an industrial grade pumice stone into my bathroom but my Yoga-guru sister who wears each prehensile toe like jewelry and could make them each dance like Bollywood extras would be truly ashamed.

The moment I finish drinking the water from a tender coconut and eating the jelly-like meat, Shiva whose standing nearby attentively inquires “another?” as If I could knock back half a dozen without raising an eyebrow. I considered for a moment wiping me mouth on my arm, making some impatient gesture and saying, “Hit me!” but I was already full and he wouldn’t have gotten the joke. Literally he probably would have hit me just because I asked and because ‘madam’ is very strange like that. He has the habit of calling me ‘madam’ which took some adjusting to until I remembered the reputation American women have and then I realized he probably thinks I run a brothel back in the States. That put me at ease.

Though he’s clearly interested in keeping me alive, he did fail to mention that straws at the market are usually reused and therefore I shared mine with dozens of natives. It sounds oh-so friendly unless you’re a ferenge with fragile digestion. Chandana told me about the straws later when a hollow gesture of “pit-tooey” was pointless. I distinctly remember my mother walking around when I was young explaining that this or that was “Teh!” which was meant to mimic a spitting noise and was used to indicate that something was dirty or shouldn’t be put in my mouth. India, it turns out, is “Teh!”

I like tagging along with Shiva when he goes to the market though it automatically ensures that Chandana will pay double for guavas at the fruit stand. Even she has a hard time when she wears capris and looks too ‘western’. Shiva will explain that she paid the ‘three-quarter pant price’ even though she speaks the language and sports all the right shades of brown. I think a few extra rupees are worth it when I scoop up the bags and try to carry them to the car for Shiva before he can make a move. It’s clear by the looks of horror on the faces of people who were staring at me anyway that ‘madam’ doesn’t carry bags. Secretly I’m sure he’s amused and he plays a game of ‘stunt driver’ on the way home aiming at a few more busses than usual just to entertain me. Perhaps mimicking the Masai system of tongue-clicks, Shiva beeps six times in rapid order as a way of demanding to be let back in to the proper lane before we’re run down. It’s worked so far.

I discovered on these outings that, at least in Shiva’s case, a head wobble means that he has no idea what I’m talking about and it occurs almost like a system error or an overloaded circuit. Luckily he reboots himself because frankly with all the processes and Gerry-rigging procedures I’ve learned for things as simple as making a cup of tea, it would be beyond me at this point to remember how it’s done. And I’d wobble back but years of fending off chokes in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and protecting my face in Muay Thai do not allow for neck muscles with that kind of suppleness. I can shrug and duck quickly enough but sideways wobbling in my world would only be used for baiting and taunting. My body operates like I’m in a Pink Panther movie and Kato is going to jump me from behind at any moment.

My neck as well as the rest of me will just have to adjust and that’s kind of the point. I’ve lived in my carnivorous world going ninety miles an hour for so long that I either have to learn a different way or manhandle all of India until it keeps pace. I have no idea which one of us will compromise and I’ve been so busy being right about fitness all of these years that I’ve lost touch with what the rest of the world is doing. So call this a recon mission and like any well planned special ops assignment, I’m minimally provisioned and adaptable.

One wonders if it was completely necessary to up and move but as George Carlin pointed out, where you live is just the place where you keep your stuff. I got rid of my stuff and now technically I live nowhere and everywhere. This makes the Post Office, or maybe ‘Homeland Security’, really uncomfortable and when I tried to tell them I live nowhere and everywhere they insisted I attach a street address to that. If you’d like to know why the cost of postage stamps is continually on the rise, it’s because the post office insisted on forwarding my junk mail to India. That Value Pack coupon is going to come in real handy.

Now, only a few days into my mission however and I’ve blinked. I’ve abandoned two local traditions in favor of my own: Screw tea with breakfast and sleeves on my shirts.

Damn the British and they’re tea. If I had a three-cornered hat and a few inebriated ‘Sons of Liberty’ I’d find a harbor to dump their Tetley in on a double-dog dare and then I’d go out for coffee. Days after landing and with the excuse of exploring the city, I jumped up from the table in the middle of reading “The Hindu” daily and threw on a well worn black sleeveless t-shirt – my first bare arms in Bangalore - to join Shiva who was leaving to buy eggs for breakfast. On the way back from the market I confided, “Shiva, Chandana makes terrible coffee. Can you take me someplace where I can get espresso?” I’d endured three days of syrupy, thick brews simmered South Indian style with a heavy percentage of chicory and limp milk that turned the mixture a disappointing grey. He looked at me gravely, wobbled his head and took me straight home.

I’ve since trudged around a bit looking for alternative brews. I have, after all, gone from the coffee capital of the United States to the coffee capital of India and though I’ve made some significant headway regarding south India’s unique taste in coffee, it’s been at the expense of my head. The pollution has turned my hair lank in some places and frizzy in others while my cheeks burn for hours after I’m safely indoors. The adapter for my hair straightener isn’t working and so I’m au natural with the most hideously unnatural result. I’ve begun to rely less on my footwork and more on my fingertips, searching the web for coffee feedback and maps of the city while my hair is slicked together with the local remedy of coconut oil. Now I have a clearer understanding of Bangalore’s coffee tradition, hair painted to my head like a Weeble and a hankering for macaroons.

In my first sampling of street vendors, I paid 10 rupees for a cup of coffee and I assumed the price was in dollars given that I frequented Starbucks in a past life but even for coffee that turns out to be damn-near free – A little more than 20 cents in the U.S. - it took some getting used to. Most street vendors sell tea and coffee in what looks like a DayQuil dosage cup which measures a dose of ‘swig’ but it’s scalding hot and I was quickly faced with the choice of burning off my fingers or my uvula. 3-2-1-burn digits burn. No longer can I be fingered by my fingerprints and it explains why every officiating body in India requires identifying photos instead. EVERY officiating body and in duplicate, by the way.

The Coffee Board which functions under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry is located around the corner from where I live and was set up in 1942 under an Act of the Parliament to control research, quality and promotion of Indian coffee in India and around the world. According to their website, “The Coffee Board conducts basic and applied research on coffee and can boast of 75 glorious years in coffee research. The Central Coffee Research Institute in the Chickmagalur district, Karnataka State has been in the forefront of coffee research over the years and continues to remain one of the premier institutes of the world as far as coffee research is concerned.” Cheers.

But just because they can study the brew and isolate its chemical compounds doesn’t mean they don’t simmer swill. I needed to investigate so Chandana and I walked into their shop after some impressive street-crossing reminiscent of a ‘Frogger’ high score attempt and I was greeted by official looking representatives sporting Raj mustaches and modified turbans with folded napkin swans swimming serenely atop their heads. Some turbans had seen better days and their swans flopped sloppily as if whoever folded them in 1942 promptly forgot how it was done and they’ve had to make do ever since.

The coffee was milky, sweet and bitter from the added chicory which is said to add body to the flavor but also has medicinal qualities. To me, it was better than what the vendors offered but it still didn’t taste like the coffee I have known. Again, according the coffee board, “The Board runs two quality control laboratories in Bangalore and Hassan, which control and advise the industry on quality issues. The labs are equipped with the best roasting and brewing machines. The best cup- tasters and quality evaluators keep a strict vigil on the pre and post harvest processes with a view to ensure that the quality of Indian coffee is maintained.”

I spent most of my Saturday morning waiting for the leisurely opening of Blossom Used Books and reading at a Coffee Day off of MG Road – Here Mahatma Gandhi is casually referred to as ‘MG’ like he’s MC Enlightened or something – because Coffee World’s day starts way later than my coffee day. The manager explained that they grow and roast their own beans nearby and he served me a free espresso for the sake of analysis since I was from Seattle and therefore an expert by way of zip code. After downing it to the nod and grin of the manager I realized that the confounding issue may not be the espresso here which was actually quite good but the scalded, questionably sourced buffalo milk heated to the temperature of a neutron star.

Though the coffee itself may be premium coffee, the chicory in traditional coffee is the variable that changes the flavor. Most Indian spices and additives inevitably turn out to be a digestive aid, an anti-inflammatory or both. The reasons are startlingly clear. In the case of Chicory, it’s both. The interesting thing is that chicory is also a sedative meant to blunt the effects of caffeine. After two days of impossible jet lag and several days of erratic sleep patterns, I wasn’t necessarily trying to defuse the dose of caffeine I was getting. Again, however, I marvel at how Indians seem to instinctively find organic remedies to various afflictions. It’s then I remember that this is an inhospitable place with a long history and an endless supply of both lethal threats and people impacted by them. Tradition is shaped by the trial and error of generations that leaves a staggering and yet virtually unnoticed body count in a country of over a billion people.

It brings into focus my most pressing question of whether or not the population can thrive on so little protein which of course is the question that is most pressing for me since I’m living in a household full of vegetarians. The Recommended Dietary Allowance for protein is 63 grams a day for men and 50 grams for women and for me it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to eat enough yogurt and lentils to make that happen even if we hired another cook and a staff of locals to rub my belly afterwards.

In fact, on the first day I tried eating lots of yogurt on the suggestion of a friend who said that eating a ton of the local culture would help my digestion adjust, I went to the fridge and dished up a big bowl of the fizzy, chunky ferment and almost passed in favor of a crippling stomach virus. Realizing that it’s rude to be so finicky and knowing that I couldn’t possibly fend off another meal with a handful of cashews which had thus far been my strategy, I slurped it down while reading the paper for distraction. Later I was told that the fridge, a more obscure brand with a manic thermostat that nobody can find parts for, had lost power and that the yogurt hadn’t ‘set right’. Again, too late for a ‘pit-tooey!’ and please pass the cashews. I’ve been buying yogurt at the store ever since but as you can imagine it’s always more carbohydrate than protein.

The loudest voice in the pro-plant protein camp these days is T. Colin Campbell, PhD, who authored ‘The China Study’ as a result of a 20-year project studying nutrition and health for the China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project of which he is the project director. His argument as a result of his research is "...Only 5-6 percent of dietary protein is required to replace the protein regularly excreted by the body (as amino acids). About 9-10 percent protein, however, is the amount that has been recommended for the past fifty years...The relatively few people consuming more than 21 percent protein mostly are those who "pump iron," recently joined by those on high protein diets." Given his credentials, I’d be inclined to listen more intently to his argument if only he would start supplying scientific data when answering his detractors instead of attacking their education and intellect. Like Dr. Atkins before him, he may have legitimate findings that get lost when he insists on being an ass.

Arguing the other direction, Dr. Loren Cordain – a researcher and a gentleman – makes the case that pre-agricultural diets suit our physiology proven again and again through his research. In ‘Implications of Studies of Early Hominin Diets,’ he states, “Although all available data point to increasing animal food consumption following the arrival of lithic technology, the precise contribution of either animal or plant food energy to Plio-Pleistocene hominin diets is not known. Obviously, then as now, no single (animal/plant) subsistence ratio would have been necessarily representative of all populations or species of hominins. However, there are a number of lines of evidence which suggest more than half (50%) of the average daily energy intake for most Paleolithic hominin species and populations of species was obtained from animal foods.” In further study of indigenous diets leaving out the most extreme climates where no plant matter is available he notes, “For all 229 hunter-gatherer societies, the median subsistence dependence on animal foods was 56 percent to 65 percent. In contrast, the median subsistence dependence on gathered plant foods was 26 percent to 35 percent (Cordain et al., 2000).

In the end and after exhaustive research on the health implications of high-carbohydrate intake, he makes the recommendation that endurance athletes, a segment of the population that demands the highest carbohydrate intake should consume 0.8 - 0.9 grams of protein/lb/day. That yeilds a percentage of the total daily caloric intake that still works out to be substantially higher than Campbell’s percentages even though it’s the low-end recommendation for Cordain.

Surrounded by vegetarians, it’s no question that they survive on a low-protein/High-carbohydrate diet like the one described by Campbell but there’s no real evidence that they consume enough of the essential Amino Acid Lysine from pulses rather than rich animal sources. This is the key deficiency that experts discuss when considering the vegetarian diet. According to Wikipedia, “The human nutritional requirement is 1–1.5 g daily. It is the limiting amino acid (the essential amino acid found in the smallest quantity in the particular foodstuff) in all cereal grains, but is plentiful in all pulses (legumes).” Listed among the foods rich in lysine are soy bean, Kidney bean, Lentil in sprout, Lentil in seed, black cumin and roman coriander. All of these are eaten here regularly but whether or not consumption yields the necessary one gram daily is a good question. One for which I have found no answer.

In the May 2004 issue of Public Health Nutrition D. Millward of the Centre for Nutrition and Food Safety, School of Biological Sciences, University of Surrey, published his opinion, “The lysine limitation of the cereal-based Indian diets is dependent on the choice of lysine requirement values from the published range. We consider that the value selected is too high, because of uncertainties and inconsistencies in the approaches used. A more appropriate choice from the lower end of the range would remove the lysine limitation of cereal-based diets, and reduce some of the perceived risk of deficiency.” And here I thought lowering the bar was a distinctly American approach. He continues, “We conclude that the choice of values for adult lysine requirement should be re-evaluated and that serious consideration should be given to the extent to which adaptive mechanisms might enable the metabolic requirement for protein to be met from current intakes. This will entail a better understanding of the relationships between dietary protein and health.”

In every case of indigenous consumption patterns there is talk of adaptation and an evolutionary process that takes place allowing the local population to tolerate local fare. Though I’ve seen discussions in which experts argue an adaptation to plant matter that accommodates, I’ve seen no actual science about how this is so. Also, if the residents of Bangalore stuck to local foods the argument for evolutionary adaptations might be plausible but like every emerging country influenced by western practices, the foods found readily available are predominantly made from white flour and do not reflect the diet consumed even ten years ago. Think Pizza Hut in the form of Tikka Deep Dish.

I went to the Kebab stand the other day for lunch after trudging through the heat and dust to find that it was closed for reasons anyone who speaks Kanada would understand. Thwarted, I went to the nearest coffee shop hoping to find something with enough meat to tide me over. I tried to explain ‘most chicken’ to the waitress while pointing at the chicken section. “Ah, most chicken, Madame!” Crap, she’s spoken to Shiva and she’s heard I own a brothel. She brought me a ‘Chicken Puff,’ a sandwich that I can only describe as a thin layer of a Chicken Masala marmalade in a genetically modified monster croissant. I shuffled back out into the heat only to pass a McDonalds where I read the take-out menu and realized that for the first time in my life I could have gotten a healthier lunch in a happy meal. Later, when I started looking at coffee shop menus to get a better idea of what people were eating, I saw that for the most part, local breads have been abandoned for American bulky rolls and bulky waistlines.

“With regard to diet and health, food staples and food-processing procedures introduced during the Neolithic and Industrial era have fundamentally altered seven crucial nutritional characteristics of ancestral hominin diets: (1) glycemic load, (2) fatty acid composition, (3) macronutrient composition, (4) micronutrient density, (5) acid/base loads, (6) sodium/potassium ratio, and (7) fiber content,” said Cordain in the aforementioned study, “Each of these nutritional factors either alone or combined with some, or all, of the remaining factors underlie the pathogenesis of a wide variety of chronic diseases and maladies that almost universally afflict people living in western, industrialized societies. “ The fact that wherever American food chains pop up, waistlines pop out doesn’t seem to catch the eye of the affluent who can buy this kind of food. Then they are left looking to the very people who are losing the battle to obesity for help.

I went back to the apartment, laid on the bed and watched the ceiling fan for twenty minutes while I waited for the lethargy to subside. I spent most of my twenties in a coma caused by wheat flour and even now I can’t escape the impact. Even Chandana, after a controlled weight-loss program in which she limited refined carbohydrates can now feel the difference that refined carbohydrates make when her energy is drained after consumption. Like me, she wasn’t able to tell the difference until she controlled her intake for a period of time. Until then the lethargy was just business as usual. When it comes to adaptation, we are two people who clearly missed that bus.

But even the carnivores argue for adaptations to explain the positive impact of higher protein diets even as they claim the only adaptation to cereal grains is metabolic derangement. In Cordain’s research he states, “Carnivorous diets reduce evolutionary selective pressures that act to maintain certain anatomical and physiological characteristics needed to process and metabolize high amounts of plant foods. In this regard, hominins, like felines, have experienced a reduction in gut size and metabolic activity along with a concurrent expansion of brain size and metabolic activity as they included more energetically dense animal food into their diets (Leonard and Robertson, 1994; Aiello and Wheeler, 1995; Cordain, Watkins, and Mann, 2001).”

Whatever the percentage, there’s no question of proteins importance. The immune system functions properly when sufficient protein ensures an adequate supply of white blood cells and antibodies. Robert Heaney, M.D., a bone researcher at Creighton University in Nebraska studies the way that protein helps maintain and improves bone density especially after fracture when adequate supplies slow bone loss and assist recovery. His research supports 70 to 100 grams of protein for older adults to maintain lean muscle mass. And even here trainer’s supplement with whey protein to help gain muscle mass. Of course, when they talk about taking ‘medicine’ to increase size they are only sometimes talking about whey protein.

“In reality, the difference between a diet that is one hundred percent animal products and one that is two percent animal products is merely one of quantity, while the difference between a diet that is two percent animal products and one that is zero percent animal products is one of quality,” sites Chris Masterjohn in his review of ‘The China Study’ for the Weston A. Price Foundation, “A diet low in animal products and a diet devoid of animal products are simply two fundamentally different things.”

One quick cruise of most bodybuilding websites will contain endless discussions about the bioavailability of various proteins. Quality and nutrient density are topics that can’t be avoided. Nor can they avoid the topic of boobs and body hair removal but that’s a completely different post.

“Not all animal products are equal. Putting aside all differences in quality such as soil composition, pasture feeding and so on, there are certain animal products that are by their nature vastly richer than most others in important animal-based nutrients,” Masterjohn discusses in cholesterol-and-health.com where he posts a rebuttal of Campbell’s remarks on VegSource.com in which Campbell insisted on being an ass, much like he did in the protein debate with Cordain hosted by performancemenu.com some time ago. He goes on to say, “This is particularly true of shellfish. It would take just over a quarter pound of beef per day to fulfill the minimum requirement for zinc, yet a single serving of oysters per week fulfills the same requirement. One would have to eat two servings of salmon per week to meet the minimum requirement for vitamin B12, but would only have to eat clams once per month to meet the same requirement. “

So when we’re talking about low protein/high carbohydrate diets, is the meager percentage recommended by Campbell misleading because of the nutrient density of the protein consumed? “The China Study's questionnaire had no questions specific to the consumption of shellfish. How, then, could anyone possibly draw a conclusion from it about what the optimal amount of animal products are, if the amount needed is so different when the nutrition is supplied by shellfish than when it is supplied by meat?” asks Masterjohn. Either way, it poses more questions than it answers in a time when I’m embarking on a study of my own with a single test-subject – me. Please pass the cashews.

Next Chapter

Thirteen years ago I moved from New Hampshire to Seattle with a back-pack full of flannel shirts in a pick-up truck stocked with household goods. I was Elly May Clampett without the boobs or the investment capital which in retrospect makes it all kind of sad. The loot included an old-even-then television set and a Jan Sport backpack that my father bought me for the trip because all the students at the University of Vermont were carrying them and they seemed pretty durable.

It was almost poetic that on my last day in Seattle, I was carrying the backpack after 4,745 consecutive days of use – unwashed, some will insist I mention – and sneaking down the block with my older-still television that I was depositing on the lawn of a neighbor who creates sculpture from an assortment of household junk. The Salvation Army won’t take TVs made before 2000 which I found rather snooty and the garbage man would have had to don a HazMat suit and file an incident report if I even considered placing it near the dumpster. I had few options. Leaving alms to the artist seemed a suitable solution.

Thirty minutes later, I was sitting curbside in my neighborhood on a 1960s turquoise Naugahyde chair with wooden arms and stainless steel legs – the last of my impressive collection – as I waited for my friend who would drive me to the airport. He had agreed only the day before to stash the chair in his basement all because of a last minute attack of nostalgia that had me wailing over the phone, “I should be able to keep ONE chair, MY FAVORITE ONE, Why not ONE!” as if this had been somebody else’s decision and they were prying my furniture from my desperate grasp. He’s a bachelor and has absolutely no equipment to deal with irrational girly episodes. I counted on that.

A man on his bike with the guitar on his back took a moment to stare at me as he sped past. It was, after all, 3:30 a.m... Shortly after I had settled comfortably in my chair outside, it had crossed my mind that some undead thing might creep down from the adjoining park right out of the Thriller video to eat my brains. That would be suitably tragic for sensational local news coverage given that I was moments away from an amazing journey when the aforementioned spooky thing chose me as its victim. I was just creating the proper ambiance by crooning, “It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark . . .” when the bike rider whizzed by.

Since we can only guess that the grim reaper wears black and carries a sickle rather than rides a bike and wields a guitar, I held my breath for a second, which technically, would not discourage said reaper in any way since his job would be easier if I ceased respiration first. “You try to scream . . . .”

The man on the bike looked a little frightened which instead had me wonder if this was really just some dude in a band who thinks there’s nothing scarier than a woman perched on a throne of Naugahyde, singing ‘Thriller’ in strained tones with no range (for those of you who have seen my YouTube contribution, you know what I mean). In fact, that’s grim reaper kind of frightening.

I was still singing in spite of the audience simply because I wanted to get to the part where I punctuated the line, “. . . but ‘terra’ takes the sound before you make it” because I find that particular pronunciation of ‘terror’ so darn amusing that it needs to be belted out regardless of who’s within earshot.

Moments later my friend arrived in the Subaru that would take me out of my neighborhood for the last time. I would have cried one last sentimental cry but I’d exhausted my tears over the last couple of weeks and, again, reminded myself that I was sitting next to an ill-equipped bachelor. The sappy behavior had already culminated anyway in a mid-afternoon sobbing call to an ex-boyfriend after I had sifted through every sweet card he’d ever sent me. It ended up sounding like a 2am drunk-dial with a lot of drippy I–love-you-man’s. Mortifying in retrospect. Sorry, Taha – I love you, man.

Three weeks earlier I had decided to move to India. After the initial surprise wore off, my Dad made one of his 6 a.m. phone calls – I stopped mentioning the three-hour time difference to him awhile ago – to voice concern about inoculations because someone had a cousin whose friend’s sister’s boyfriend got really sick there. I assured him that I’d get shots and wear saran wrap over my head and hands whenever I went outside. As well as guarding me from contact, it should keep the locals farther than sneezing distance from the weirdo wrapped in plastic.

What’s particularly funny about this call is that my father lives all summer at a camp in Vermont near Lake Champlain with no running water, no electricity, questionable refrigeration and an out-house. Whatever power he needs runs off his truck battery so that his entire life requires less juice than my smart phone. With meager culinary prep, my father and his like-minded friends sustain themselves with meat-loaf sized hamburgers and vegetables plucked from the garden. Sometimes the only obvious attempt at sanitation appears to be a quick glance upward and a plea to God. One of my Dad’s famous ‘camp burgers’ could take out his entire little commune if it wasn’t for the liberal use of an antiseptic called Gin in it’s most economical form. Apparently, Jesus and Gin trumps e-coli.

Most of my friends smiled and nodded when I told them I was moving to India but I don’t think they believed I’d do it even after I set about breaking camp like a nomad packing up the yurt. Probably because they knew any nomad would have known better than to accumulate that much stuff. With my 1950s and 60s collectors kitsch – it could either be considered a $300 find on Craig’s list or a $5 this’ll-work-cut-it’s-cheap compromise at the Salvation Army. It was love-it or hate-it stuff and we’d been growing old together, my Naugahyde and me so it was tough to be objective.

This would also be one of the few occasions in which I could honestly blame my mother. Most of the baggage I’d like to assign to her is actually my own but the boxes of yard-sale finds can actually be blamed on her since she did indeed ship them across country. Her motto, “if it’s ugly, it must be worth money” combined with “heck, it’s only a quarter” culminated in a collection of artifacts that I could only now sift through because she passed away. I wouldn’t have dreamed of getting rid of a single item while she lived and I still had to call my sister for her blessings at least a couple of times in the process.

As I would explain later, my mother was a shyster. This isn’t the time to explain how she passed off Duncan Hines brownies as her own at all the bake sales or how she convinced me that the Pillsbury Pie Crust was homemade after she rolled out the fold and floured the counter liberally, but I discovered it wasn’t the last of her capers. I agonized over the ‘Depression-era, hand-blown glass’ vase she sent me trying to decide if I should keep it simply because to her it was a valuable find even though to me it was cranberry, a color I would never decorate with. After electing to save it with the few meager items I was keeping, I turned it over to slide the candle out and I noticed the ‘HD’ sticker on the bottom which I would recognize as a Target brand household good but she would not since she seldom went to department stores. I’ll never know why she attempted to pull that one over on me since this is a woman who knew her depression-era glass but it’s yet another of the complicated reasons why I loved her so dearly.

I also elected to paint a house before I left. As I settled all my clients elsewhere, I needed something to do other than keep myself company and cry over old birthday cards. I walked into the project blind, had no concept how much work it would be and longed to be done with it because it was stressing me out. File “house painting” next to “marriage” in a pile called, ‘Things to try only once.’

I’ve been known to do experiments in manual labor and this was what I thought would be another lab to determine if my functional conditioning is actually functional. Most importantly what I learned is that men who shop in upscale supermarkets only flirt with me when I’m dirty and covered in paint which is weird and worthy of further study. Had I known this, I could have changed the face of my dating history simply by rolling around in the parking lot on the way in.
I also learned that paint is really hard to get out of your hair, that people who climb to the top wrung of ladders positioned on uneven ground have brass balls or no understanding of physics, gravity or medical coverage, and that what little sanity I maintain can be preserved in trying situation only as long as I have access to podcasts of ‘This American Life’. Physically painting was no problem but if it hadn’t been for Ira Glass the mental game would have beaten me. If this had been the Navy Seals of monotonous labor, I might have wrung the bell.

I had hoped this project would be reminiscent of my drywall experiment of 2002. Then however, I got to work with a crew of Romanians who where all a lot of fun with the exception of the plumber. Since apparently the Romanian wives would not be happy to discover that their husbands worked on a coed crew, I was scooted out the back door whenever the plumber arrived. Of all the men in this little congregation, the plumber talked when he drank. Oh, and he drank a lot. As Sam, the dapper young family man I worked with frequently would say sternly as he shook his head, “this no good.”

Their wives had no reason for concern. They were not attracted to me as they would continue to attest that Romanian women were the most beautiful women on the planet but rather, as devout Christians, they were fascinated to be in such close proximity to any human being that in their minds would be fed-exed straight to hell upon expiration. Sam found the blasphemous lifestyles of Americans almost as offensive as their ungodly preference for drywall over stucco. He also couldn’t understand why we weren’t smart enough or considerate enough to learn any other language fluently and he thought my divorce was a tragic mistake because it would leave me with few prospects. So far I’ve done little to disprove his theories.

His mudslinging always began during the literal slinging of mud. Sam would fling trowels of mud at all the wall’s seams while complaining nonstop about how this was a stupid American invention and far inferior to the genius that is stucco. I still preferred taking a browbeating for my fellow citizens to standing on saw horses propping sheets of drywall in place while he screwed them in. The vibration of the screw gun made it hard to see how much my muscles were quivering at the effort.

What I learned from that job was that any task performed at full range of motion for greater than twenty reps was outside of my training and challenging for me to do. All the training I did in the gym up to that point did not prepare me at all for the demands of real labor. That particular epiphany about the dysfunction of conventional training turned me towards CrossFit and I never looked back. I had hoped for a breakthrough of equal magnitude with my little paint project but other than it’s Zen-like moments which could have been attributed to the wax-on/wax-off sort of focus or the combination of dehydration, sun stroke and paint fumes, I can only be sure I met my RDA of Vitamin-D out in the rare Seattle sun.

Wolfeboro, NH, where I’m now staying with my sister, docks on Lake Winnipesaukee. Visitors rent boats, splash about in the lake and probably fish for trout. It’s a lake. So when the tourists swagger up to Dockside - what would look like your typical Oceanside seafood and burger joint if you were hours south at Hampton Beach - and ask if the clams are fresh, the teenagers working the window try not to be too sarcastic. Did I mention it’s a lake? You’d better hope the clams are previously frozen ‘cause anything caught in the gulp of water that’s Winnipesaukee, ain’t a quahog.

My nephew Dustin works at Dockside washing dishes while my nephew Gunnar works at Garwood’s doing ‘cold-side’ prep and I am spending the month flipping crepes at a crepery a few doors down. I haven’t asked what they’re making per hour and not because I haven’t considered comparing wages. Though you can imagine that after ten full years of fighting obesity with no downward trend, I’ve thrown up my hands and joined ‘Team Diabetes’ just to play on the winning side for once, there is no nutritional angle to this. In fact, I only grimaced internally when a father ordered Strawberry, Nutella, Candy, Syrup, Honey-smothered Crepes for his two scrawny offspring for dinner and then explained proudly that his children are vegetarian. He then looked at his robust niece when she asked if she could please have chicken in hers and said, “Fine. You’re mother’s paying – she can kill animals.” “Coming right up, sir,” I said grinning.

Yes, I have the pleasure of working at ‘Crepes Ooh La La!’ where I walk past the phone quickly before it rings so I can avoid saying it. It could force me to acknowledge the midlife crisis I’m pretending not to notice. I stand on display and prepare crepes to order and in spite of my wheat sensitivity, spend most of my day smelling like pancakes. Instead of paint in my hair I now have to contend with Nutella which, unlike paint, can be removed by licking though I wouldn’t advise it. If I hadn’t been spending my evening making runs to 7-11 for tacos in a car full of teenaged boys going 70 m.p.h, I’d walk through a bar just to see if men buy drinks for girls that smell like breakfast. (Disclaimer: It was not Gunnar driving and they may not have noticed an adult in the car because I was the shortest one there. Oh, and I didn’t eat tacos and it wasn’t my idea).

As for the rest of the teenagers in town, I think I work with all of them. My favorite is a budding Einstein dressed all Abecrombie. I'm sure he'd display his natural brilliance if it wasn't for an unfortunate roominess between synapse. When we're all operating on DSL, he's dial-up. It's odd to be moving at the pace of crepe only to have you're rhythym disrupted by the slow ardious shuffle of untied sneakers moving at the pace of a dimwitted knuckledragger. He was country when country wasn't cool.

I’m willing to consider the job at the crepery an inventive way to mingle with the locals while I spend time with my family and learn yoga before heading off to India. So far I took three or four of my sister’s classes and so far my mind is more open than my joints. I promised myself I’d chase away whatever thoughts I had like, “this isn’t functional,” “this movement is dangerous”, “I can’t do this,” or, “holy Krishna it’s only been five minutes!” and give this thing a chance for the sake of sisterhood. Stacey told us in soothing tones at the beginning of class to pick a spot to ‘work-on’ and after spending the first couple of classes trying to ‘breath through my shoulder,’ I decided to shift my spot from my shoulder to my attitude. I think I hit the spot. In spite of my inability to wear my own limbs as a straightjacket, I remained composed and open to the possibility of one day swaddling myself and at the same moment realizing why you'd want to.

Stacey’s been to Gordo’s gym with me, too, which I joined moments after stepping foot inside the city limits. After we spent 30 minutes rearranging a jungle of benches and elaborate machines designed to test whether pullies work, we were set up to do a ten minute workout. I started showing Stacey how to do dumbbell cleans and I believe within the first five minutes she said, “This movement is dangerous,” “I can’t do this,” and “Holy Krishna, It’s only been five minutes!” She hasn’t been back yet but I think she should hurry. My show at Gordo’s might be a limited engagement after I horrified the locals with a little Push-Jerk Squat medley that turned me three shades of red. Historically, they’ve burned witches nearby with less tangible evidence of demonic possession. Or maybe they were just peeved because I smelled like pancakes.

Ten Times More Excited

I started a seven-month leadership program that I expected would hone my skills as a trainer. When I signed up, I was promised that my life would be unrecognizable by the time the program was complete. I think I might have said, “cool” without even considering the old ‘be careful what you wish for’ adage that my mother would have quoted without missing a beat and that would have annoyed me at almost the very same second she said it. Unrecognizable sounded inspiring not horrifying like the kind of unrecognizable I’d be if a semi hit me in the Sentra. Maybe I should’ve been tipped off by the monkey paw that came with the introductory binder.

By month four, my business was dissolved I was unemployed and certain people were responding to me as if I had all the charm of poison sumac. This included my on-again/off-again boyfriend who informed me I was annoying, a sentiment apparently shared by the other girl he was secretly sleeping with. Clearly that makes us ‘off’.

It took a couple of weeks of practice but I can now successfully answer the ‘what happened’ question with the ‘he wanted to see other people’ spin and not be tempted to end the sentence with ‘. . . naked and drunk and then lie about it.’ Can’t people just break up with a handshake instead of going all ‘country song’ with it? Not that I’m bitter, but if Karma hasn’t caught up to them yet it’s simply stuck in traffic with the wrong Google map.

I had a brief but meaningful fling with Haagen Dazs Fleur De Sel Caramel Ice Cream but then remembered it won’t erase an ass from my life only add one. Ultimately it had little impact – I cried out all the bloat over ‘P.S. I Love You’ which I think gave me swimmer’s ear from crying sideways into a puddle I continued to lay in. I rented an embarrassing stack of cheesy romantic comedies until I feared Hollywood Video would sell their database and I’d get a mailbox full of flyers for suicide hotlines and Match.com as well as a suspicious number of coupons for psychotherapy in my MoneySaver pack.

Eventually I was able to reboot myself with enough romance to spike my blood sugar and convince me to at least put on deodorant and chapstick before I left the apartment just in case Gerard Butler or James Marsden was in line behind me buying Fleur De Sel Carmel Ice Cream to match the dried stain on the wrinkled t-shirt that I was clearly intending to be buried in. But it’s amazing what a few clever movie lines can do considering that finding a suitable breeder in my neighborhood is as likely statistically as a semi hitting me in the Sentra.

I played over 3100 games of bubble breaker on my phone which it turns out serves as a sort of screen saver for my overworked melon. Whenever my mind started whirring along I clicked it into energy conservation mode by bursting little colored bubbles until I drooled or my thumb hurt and I couldn’t hold up my arm anymore. Finally, I started meditating which I think happens naturally when you’ve maxed out rheuminating. I started with guided meditation on CDs which I napped through rather successfully so I’m not sure if giving myself a pedicure with the ex’s toothbrush after I woke up was a sacred Tibetan practice on the path to enlightenment as suggested by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso or whether my mind was making a funny. The toothbrush, by the way, was not bad Karma unless I allowed him to brush his teeth with it should the opportunity present itself and I wouldn’t do that. Well, I’m pretty sure but I think that’s mostly because he’s never getting within fifty yards of it.

Between the search for an enlightened path and detours in my career path, I’ve weathered my fair share of stress for the first time in forever. My life was not complicated before and that was by design so my only experience with adrenal overload was thanks to my unholy love of coffee. But as I’ve been recently educated on both impermanence and attachment, so goes it. Sigh.

So if my mind joined the maniacal march of the unconscious thanks to the ceaseless jumping from past suffering to future uncertainty at least until I finishing crying my last ugly, snuffling heartfelt cry you’ve got to wonder what toll that takes. I’ll tell you it didn’t feel all that healthy. Anthony Colpo in ‘the Great Cholesterol Con, Why everything you’ve been told about cholesterol, diet and heart disease is wrong!’ summed it up rather nicely:

“When we become acutely stressed, our internal environments undergo a striking transformation: our bodies, in effect, go into red alert. Blood is diverted away from organs and tissues participating in ‘non-essential’ activities – such as digestion, immune function, growth and repair – and re-routed towards those involved in dealing with imminent danger, such as the muscles and heart. Our reflexes sharpen, our muscles tighten and our hearts start beating faster in anticipation of intense physical effort. This is the famous ‘fight-or-flight’ response, which is triggered when the body releases substances known as catecholamines. The two most abundant catecholamines released during stressful times are norepinephrine and epinephrine (adrenaline). Stressful situations also cause the body to secrete abundant amount of the catabolic hormone cortisol.”

“Norepinephrine and epinephrine exert pronounced effects on the cardiovascular system: they increase heart rate and dilate blood vessels in muscles, allowing for increased blood flow to support muscular effort. High levels of catcholamines also increase blood viscosity and encourage blood clotting, a development that serves to minimize blood loss from any injury that may occur while frantically fighting or fleeing danger. Meanwhile, cortisol raises our blood sugar levels, ensuring a ready supply of fuel for the brain. In order to achieve these elevated blood sugar levels, cortisol overrides the action of insulin. In other words, during brief periods of stress we become temporarily insulin resistant.”

Prior to my present series of plot twists, I was only able to achieve that level of stress through sleep deprivation. This, as I’ve mentioned before, has the same impact. Larry McCleary, M.D. makes it clear In The Brain Trust Program. The noted neurosurgeon said, “Studies done in young healthy male volunteers have shown that even a few days of sleep loss (on average sleeping about four hours a night) can disturb the metabolic systems that regulate blood sugar. This produces transient glucose intolerance to the degree seen in diabetes. When these young subject resumed sleeping for nine hours each night, the metabolic changes resolved.”

But a sleep debt doesn’t get resolved the way most people attempt it in one lazy weekend lolling in bed. In fact, in a study by the Institute of Aerospace Medicine in Köln, Germany studied thirteen helicopter-based emergency medical service pilots (mean age 38 yr) who operate from sunrise to sunset, requiring up to 15.5 hours of continuous duty in the summer months for 2 days before, 7 days during, and 2 days after their duty cycle. Over the 7-day duty period, mean sleep duration decreased from 7.8 hours to 6 hours or less. Results showed that, “Mean levels of excreted adrenalin, noradrenalin, and cortisol increased significantly by 50 to 80% and remained elevated for the two post-duty days. Although the actual flights did not cause critical physiological responses, the acute and accumulated sleep deficit led to incomplete recuperation between duty hours and induced elevated stress indicators.” Again, the recovery period tested was two days.

McCleary also pointed out that the increase in cortisol “makes brain cells more vulnerable to the physical toxic insults of the environment.” How vulnerable? John Hopkins University researchers injected mice with ‘known chemical carcinogens’ after altering their natural sleep patterns as reported in ‘Lights Out – Sleep, Sugar and Survival’ by T.S. Wiley and Bent Formby, Ph.D. As a result, the short-night mice developed tumors so quickly that researcher couldn’t tell which substance caused the cancer. And, by the way, said substances were as simple as household cleaners, plastic from water bottles and components of antiperspirant. The long night mice didn’t get as much as a hangover from their carcinogen cocktails.

What I find interesting is that spikes in cortisol levels associated with sleep deprivation coincide with the most common sugar cravings. After ten years of training, I can easily say that most people suffer from the munchies mid-afternoon and evening. If you look at the cortisol profile in the study, ‘Impact of Sleep Debt on Physiological Rhythms’ by Centre d'Etude des Rythmes Biologiques, Laboratoire de Physiologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, the results show, ‘If the overall 24-hour cortisol profile was preserved, sleep restriction was associated with increased cortisol levels in late afternoon and evening hours and the duration of the quiescent period was reduced.”

Just because I traded my sleep debt for garden-variety stress, doesn’t mean I escape the ravages of cortisol. Colpo makes that clear in ‘Cholesterol Con’ when he says, “In controlled experiments, infusion of stress hormones produces an immediate but temporary insulin resistant state in healthy human subjects. If excessive catecholamine and cortisol levels occur during the post-meal period as a result of psychosocial stresses, then even greater rises in blood glucose and insulin release can be expected.”

He goes even further though because he makes the connection to the arterial clogging I could’ve looked forward to if I had insisted on being a victim of circumstances. “Dr. Malcolm Kendrick is by no means the first cardiovascular researcher to focus on the postprandial period, but he is the first to hypothesize the potentially atherogenic connection between the post-meal period and psychological stress. According the Kendrick, the presence of psychological stress in the postprandial period – a phenomenon that can significantly amplify the usual post-meal rise insulin and blood glucose – may dramatically accelerate the progression of heart disease.”

I obviously had no real interest in suffering from heart disease even if it was almost poetic that it would have been caused by heartache. And that would also be great raw material for a country song if you can find a word that rhymes with infarction. I instead elected to meditate and I’d be inclined to share my experience about that if I didn’t fear it would sound like ‘Eat, Pray, Love’- a book that made me want to ear-flick an Air Marshal so they’d turn the plane around and I could get my money back at the Bookstore near N-Gates.

I also dug out an old CD of tribal drumming designed to align my Chakras. Taha and I bought it years ago to listen to while making pancakes smeared with Peanut Butter long before I knew how far out of whack either ingestible was going to throw me. I only listen to it occasionally because each track corresponds to a Chakra and I never listen to the whole thing which makes me fear further imbalance. I'm not sure if it actually works but I do know you can time a nervous tick to it quite nicely.

My sister, who’s way more grounded than I, responded to the loss of her entire Anna Forest Yoga training homework by dropping to her knees in a flurry of expletives – a way of expression refined by my people and passed to us at an early age - and vigorously flipping the bird to whatever celestial being paused to take notice. As reported, this lasted for a minute or two and then she collected herself and moved on. This may have been another sacred practice on my CD that I slept through. I might try it next making sure to notice my breathing.

I'm Flossed

It never crossed my mind that twenty minutes of 45K Overhead squats followed by 100 pull-ups for time arranged as some sort of scenic-overlook/rest-stop on the way to the airport was in any way a bad, bad plan. But when the adrenaline wore off and I gathered my pink flip flops as well as a collection of uncomfortably heavy bags spit out of the conveyor belt in security, I realized how closely ‘carry on’ sounded like carrion. I was now going to be separated from the herd on the way to N Gates. Had it been the Serengeti, I’d have been lunch.

As the tragically unfit scurried past me rolling over my toes with oxygen tanks and wheely luggage on the way from sedentary jobs to inert vacations, I was left vulnerable to whatever lurks in the dark corners behind the regional art displays nobody ever looks at. And though clever considering security procedures, flip flops are not a load-bearing shoe and in fact enforce speeds not to exceed a stroll. I had visions of walking up to the nearest security guard, throwing my arms up over my head, and pleading, “Up!” which I’ve seen work rather successfully with small children in supermarkets.

When I say it never crossed my mind however, I’m assuming that’s a lie. Lots of reasons, excuses and justifications run ticker-style behind my eyeballs but it’s about as significant to me as the S&P 500. In fact, as far as my mind is concerned this whole ‘get-off-your-ass and step away from the cupcakes’ lifestyle has always been a bad idea and an experiment destined to fail. That’s why I stopped paying any attention to it because as much as I adore my brain, it doesn’t seem to have my best interests at heart. It turns out there’s really just a fat girlfriend living in my head who’s trying to sabotage me so she doesn’t have to eat alone.

So I’d guess that at some point the words, ‘but you’ll be sitting on the plane all sweaty’, ‘but won’t that kick the snot out of you’ and ‘that could make this a very, very long day’ passed unheeded along with ‘pack appropriate underwear – you’ll be wearing skirts’ which, as it turns out, I didn’t take note of either. I realized that many people think the incessant internal debate will at some point go away ‘when they’re fit.’ Hmmm, let me know when you get there – I haven’t seen it yet.

The only difference with me is how unwilling I am to engage in any conversation with my brain about exercise because it’s clear that it’s a two-year old in the candy isle who skipped her nap. One measly twenty minute workout could consume four hours of foot-stomping internal misery while I whine ‘why!’ along with a bunch of silly reasons I’m not even buying. But that’s if I’m willing to pay any attention greater than the slightest note I make of elevator musak.

“No, I’m good. I’m flossed,” Aaron Hendon said at the ILP Weekend I was attending simply to point out how silly it is that we operate like something is ‘handled’ when it’s clearly a maintenance issue. In the world of wellness, there’s a meal to eat and a workout to do and right now that’s what your fitness looks like. Keep it up, and you can see a trajectory but no guarantees. So it comes down to a series of decisions that you make that are either consistent or inconsistent with you’re goals.

What’s funny to me is when clients argue that they should see results anyway because they’re ‘trying.’ That’s like going to a college graduation and handing out the diplomas followed by a bunch of ‘honorable mentions’ of equal merit because these are people who had unique circumstances that the rest of as couldn’t possibly understand. Good to know, but you either do the work or you don’t.

What’s even funnier is that I understand this so clearly in the gym and yet I’ve been unwilling to see the rest of my life the same way. Doesn’t everything start at a ‘Point A’ where you set out to get to ‘Point B’ and there’s a bunch of stuff that has to get done to get there. If you don’t do the stuff, you don’t see results no matter how much you whine that it’s not fair and that so-and-so didn’t have to do as much stuff and that this shouldn’t be so.

I see clients struggle through similar conversations in the middle of workouts and I say – thanks to the advice of Michael Street – shut up and work. It’s all very fascinating and yet nothing other than a muscle contraction will make the weight move. And since I was hired to help get weight to move and not to facilitate a support group of one, you can see where the conflict begins.

So I was in San Francisco in a leadership training program engaging myself in a non-stop whine-along about how I couldn’t do the homework while the coach side of me rolled her eyeballs and said, shut up and work. “But . . .” my mind would whine. Honestly, I was ready to break up with me. “Please, I’d like to see other cerebrums,” I’d say and then excuse myself to the restroom so I could ditch me. Can you lobotomize yourself with a coffee stirrer and expect a reasonable amount of accuracy, I wonder? Somebody please Google that. In the meantime, I got my own coaching right back at me yet again.

So what have I learned? I’ll never stop whining. So what. It’s never a good reason to stop what I'm doing. And when people whine to me, I’ll nod sympathetically but it’s all still a bunch of noise that isn’t going to make me budge because I'm familiar with all the unpleasant consequences either way.

For me, that’s evident with nutrition more than exercise. I spent the whole time in San Francisco eating at Whole Foods yet walking into every bakery, caressing display cases, smelling the sultry smells, reading the names and ingredients of all the baked goods and then walking out. It was neither heartbreaking nor brave that I chose not to eat anything – it was just the overwhelming desire to not feel like ass even as my mind whined about being ‘on vacation’. 98% of the time, the choices I made were consistent with my goals simply because one urge outweighed another.

What’s insane is when a client tells me how yucky they feel and still tries to debate with me why they should be able to eat crap anyway. Um, ok. I promise not to interfere with your efforts to lesson the quality of your life even though, inevitably, you paid me to do so. Please make all payments in advance.

Yes, you will always want to eat crap and believe me, I know what that feels like. Stop worrying about the wanting, choose the results you’d like to see and then do the stuff that gets you there. Feel free to be as neurotic as you’d like along the way, however. For instance, I once knew a bodybuilder who looked as spectacular as one could look while training that way and she always answered the question, ‘how are you?’ with a list of what she ate that day. That might be the answer to ‘what are you?’ and for those of you who are curious she was a lot of canned tuna. Though reflexive, I stopped asking after awhile and would just smile and nod hello whenever I saw her leaving the meal plan for someone else to sign off on.

As for me, I can see myself placing an ad in the ‘Seeking other’ section of ‘The Stranger’ that reads, “Please eat powdered sugar donuts for me while I watch . . .” and I’d only get a little weird about how they’d have to smear powdered sugar all over their face but not really creepy like they couldn’t have milk or something. It would be next to the ad asking for someone to throw luncheon meat at them. No, really. I actually saw that ad and I wondered if they meant Boar’s Head or Oscar Mayer. Thin sliced Boar’s Head in some classy Italian meat that’s cured or smoked and ends in ‘della is one thing but steamy Glad-bagged Wonder Bread sandwiches adhered with warm processed cheese foods and perspiring bologna is clearly twisted. On the other hand, it earns props if it’s unsliced and serves as a new dodge ball inspired game with Honey Hams. That would require skill, an ability to tolerate blunt force trauma and the courage to face down high glycemic glazes.

I probably had that entire conversation in my head while refueling from a brown Whole Foods box filled with a chunk of uninspiring hormone free meat from the hot bar. Well, at least it was keeping the fat girl in my head occupied while I was busy not listening.