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.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, May 19, 2008
More input on output
It’s a beautiful sunny day in Seattle and in my neighborhood, that’s a lot like flicking on the fluorescents in a bar after last call. You know the moment when you realize that what might have looked like the romantic dancing of shadows are clearly a smattering of stains that are nothing short of miraculous so high on a wall and in patterns reminiscent of a crime scene. It’s also the first time you wonder too that a stray cigarette didn’t torch the place once you’ve calculating how much alcohol has soaked into the floor. You could cook a steak over the flames of the welcome mat alone but only after pausing first to thank God for shoes. Nobody needs to mention the startling way that bright-eyed charmers with porcelain complexions who converse lucidly turn into pasty-faced drunks with a crazy inability to focus once floodlit. Bartenders really should just flick on the lights throughout the night whenever someone tries to stumble out the door with anyone whose name they didn’t already know when they arrived. Consider it an intervention. Yes, it’s interesting that here on the Hill crazy people look crazier in bright sunlight but maybe that’s because those of us suddenly absorbed in the awkward and labored effort of a rusty Vitamin-D production are a starker contrast.
In the glare of summer sun, the infestation of bugs on a curbside rat* carcass outside one of Craig’s favorite Mexican restaurants looked more like a little beach party which made me wonder if I should rain down a cloud of spray-on sunscreen to keep the little buggers from sunburn. In light of that and every other now-evident dingy detail, I couldn’t help but wonder if this whole neighborhood could use a pressure washing in spite of it’s nearly constant dousing of rain. Can you imagine a whole street of people shivering and clinging to their fluffy hotel towels handed to them like Red Cross supplies after getting a hearty pressure-wash and a scrub from concerned soccer moms who carpooled over from their orderly cul de sacs on an emergency mission? I think Eastside moms would be happy to don pink lapel pins and do it as a fundraiser for breast cancer awareness. They’d get sponsored by other soccer moms with slightly busier schedules or allergic reactions to the mandatory latex gloves. Though it would be fun to watch, I’m reminded of my 1940’s bathroom fixtures with their shiny, slick coats long scoured away and realize that pressure washing wouldn’t bring back the luster. Personally, for the sake of the visual environment and knowing that I couldn’t blame the rain today, I wouldn’t have minded if one crisply dressed mom sorted out my bed head while I waited in line for coffee. I suspect they’d lob off the last four scraggly inches at the direction of my friend Josh who’d seize the opportunity to right a wrong. (I think it bothers him more than he’d say though what he said was, “you should cut this off” as he wagged a chunk of it at me distastefully. Maybe that actually does capture his level of 'bother'.)
I was instead distracted by a text message that read, “HA HA I JUST DID THE ON THE TOILET SQUAT POOP.” All-caps courtesy of the author. My reply was “Cleanly? Props either way but extra points for accuracy. Your descending colon is in love with you right now.” As I’ve mentioned, most people wander away from me at parties almost immediately in hopes of finding less horrifying conversation and a little nosh, what’s left is an assortment of characters that send text messages like the one above. This one in particular might require a little background:
I once dated a man who routinely stood on the toilet seat while making deposits because, as he said, modern toilets are designed for a deconditioned population who can’t squat fully. As a result, our colons are straining at awkward angles that don’t accommodate our mechanics. Fascinating. You can see why I was smitten. I may have shared this fact with a number of people and at some point many of them lost my number and stopped returning calls. The few that are left obviously have the kind of social schedules that allow time for excremental experimentation and the sharing of results.
Since I read Fiber Menace, I’ve been particularly distracted by the end results of my nutrition. My concern for input has been entirely eclipsed by my focus on output. This, as you can see, is something I’ve been sharing with friends of like interest which you’d assume would be nobody. But unlike this particular gentleman with scientific leanings, I’m unwilling to dedicate any of my efforts in the direction of bathroom circus acts given the incident in a Bed and Breakfast outside London when I was six. After a long drive, my sister beat me to the bathroom and neglected to mention that the toilet seat was unanchored. She must have calculated my results with glee knowing that, at my height, my feet would barely touch the floor and she waiting until I started my urgent business to fling the door open and watch my panic as the seat began to slide starboard while I tried to cling to the toilet paper holder. Amid the whir of a rapidly unfurling roll of paper, the result was a mid-stream Sit ‘n Spin experience that left me forever uncertain of toilet seat stability. Is it odd that uncertain footing is the only reason I find the concept of squatting on the toilet seat out of the question?
My efforts have been in other directions. I have been drinking a daily bottle of Kombucha which was a recommendation of Jennifer Adler, my favorite dietician, brewer of bone broths and apparent purveyor of concoctions. Kombucha as defined by Wikipedia is, "the Western name for sweetened tea or tisane that has been fermented using a macroscopic solid mass of microorganisms called a "kombucha colony," usually consisting principally of Acetobacter-species and yeast cultures." When I sent one of my clients, a long-time sufferer of psoriasis, to her she recommended that he drink a bottle a day. I decided that perhaps I could benefit from the good advice.
First it’s important to know that I chew yogurt and could never tolerate pulp in juice. I get confused by viscosity and texture so the floating nonsense in kombucha throws me off. Frankly, I don’t consume anything with that consistency unless I’ve offended a waiter and, in those cases, I’m unaware of the unsolicited contribution. Now, there's not a lot of floaty nonsense but what exists is the kind of thing you're accustomed to spitting out not swallowing. When I notice the content, I suffer a moment of confusion and a desire to choke.
"Each time the kombucha culture goes through the fermentation process, it creates one new "mushroom" layer, or zoogleal mat, which will form atop of the original. After three or four layers have built up, the tea will become sour and taste somewhat like sour cider." Zoogleal mat - I'm not sure I could have made up a word that sounded that gross and it brings me right back to visions of the welcome mat in the aforementioned bar scene. My only contribution would be to change gleal to gleet. Um, sorry - moving on.
When I sipped a bottle disdainfully during an at-home training session with a client, I felt compelled to share about it mainly because she was beginning to take the look on my face personally. She later tried a bottle and described the smell as ‘vile.’ And her pronunciation was so uniquely British. Her inflexion captured a true repugnance that doesn’t translate with an American accent. In fact, I suggest that you go back and read ‘vile’ again with a British accent in order to capture the mood here. In New England, we can generate the same intensity with the expression, “it smells like ass.” We’re a classy bunch. (By the way, using that phrase in the Northwest will make you even less popular. Most Seattleites will at very least claim they lack a frame of reference.)
Wikipedia blames it on the acetic acid. "Acetic acid, which gives Kombucha that 'kick' to its smell and taste" says the post and I say 'kick' is entirely subjective and depends on who's doing the kicking and whether or not you saw it coming.
*Regarding the rat, I’m sure it just paused to peek in the windows and curse the heartburn that keeps it away from enjoying a good burrito before it died from arteries clogged by the General Tsos’s Chicken served next door. But keep in mind, Craig, that Tabasco kills the taste of all things e. coli but sadly not the symptoms. Drink the cheap tequila – the aftermath can be blamed on a hangover
In the glare of summer sun, the infestation of bugs on a curbside rat* carcass outside one of Craig’s favorite Mexican restaurants looked more like a little beach party which made me wonder if I should rain down a cloud of spray-on sunscreen to keep the little buggers from sunburn. In light of that and every other now-evident dingy detail, I couldn’t help but wonder if this whole neighborhood could use a pressure washing in spite of it’s nearly constant dousing of rain. Can you imagine a whole street of people shivering and clinging to their fluffy hotel towels handed to them like Red Cross supplies after getting a hearty pressure-wash and a scrub from concerned soccer moms who carpooled over from their orderly cul de sacs on an emergency mission? I think Eastside moms would be happy to don pink lapel pins and do it as a fundraiser for breast cancer awareness. They’d get sponsored by other soccer moms with slightly busier schedules or allergic reactions to the mandatory latex gloves. Though it would be fun to watch, I’m reminded of my 1940’s bathroom fixtures with their shiny, slick coats long scoured away and realize that pressure washing wouldn’t bring back the luster. Personally, for the sake of the visual environment and knowing that I couldn’t blame the rain today, I wouldn’t have minded if one crisply dressed mom sorted out my bed head while I waited in line for coffee. I suspect they’d lob off the last four scraggly inches at the direction of my friend Josh who’d seize the opportunity to right a wrong. (I think it bothers him more than he’d say though what he said was, “you should cut this off” as he wagged a chunk of it at me distastefully. Maybe that actually does capture his level of 'bother'.)
I was instead distracted by a text message that read, “HA HA I JUST DID THE ON THE TOILET SQUAT POOP.” All-caps courtesy of the author. My reply was “Cleanly? Props either way but extra points for accuracy. Your descending colon is in love with you right now.” As I’ve mentioned, most people wander away from me at parties almost immediately in hopes of finding less horrifying conversation and a little nosh, what’s left is an assortment of characters that send text messages like the one above. This one in particular might require a little background:
I once dated a man who routinely stood on the toilet seat while making deposits because, as he said, modern toilets are designed for a deconditioned population who can’t squat fully. As a result, our colons are straining at awkward angles that don’t accommodate our mechanics. Fascinating. You can see why I was smitten. I may have shared this fact with a number of people and at some point many of them lost my number and stopped returning calls. The few that are left obviously have the kind of social schedules that allow time for excremental experimentation and the sharing of results.
Since I read Fiber Menace, I’ve been particularly distracted by the end results of my nutrition. My concern for input has been entirely eclipsed by my focus on output. This, as you can see, is something I’ve been sharing with friends of like interest which you’d assume would be nobody. But unlike this particular gentleman with scientific leanings, I’m unwilling to dedicate any of my efforts in the direction of bathroom circus acts given the incident in a Bed and Breakfast outside London when I was six. After a long drive, my sister beat me to the bathroom and neglected to mention that the toilet seat was unanchored. She must have calculated my results with glee knowing that, at my height, my feet would barely touch the floor and she waiting until I started my urgent business to fling the door open and watch my panic as the seat began to slide starboard while I tried to cling to the toilet paper holder. Amid the whir of a rapidly unfurling roll of paper, the result was a mid-stream Sit ‘n Spin experience that left me forever uncertain of toilet seat stability. Is it odd that uncertain footing is the only reason I find the concept of squatting on the toilet seat out of the question?
My efforts have been in other directions. I have been drinking a daily bottle of Kombucha which was a recommendation of Jennifer Adler, my favorite dietician, brewer of bone broths and apparent purveyor of concoctions. Kombucha as defined by Wikipedia is, "the Western name for sweetened tea or tisane that has been fermented using a macroscopic solid mass of microorganisms called a "kombucha colony," usually consisting principally of Acetobacter-species and yeast cultures." When I sent one of my clients, a long-time sufferer of psoriasis, to her she recommended that he drink a bottle a day. I decided that perhaps I could benefit from the good advice.
First it’s important to know that I chew yogurt and could never tolerate pulp in juice. I get confused by viscosity and texture so the floating nonsense in kombucha throws me off. Frankly, I don’t consume anything with that consistency unless I’ve offended a waiter and, in those cases, I’m unaware of the unsolicited contribution. Now, there's not a lot of floaty nonsense but what exists is the kind of thing you're accustomed to spitting out not swallowing. When I notice the content, I suffer a moment of confusion and a desire to choke.
"Each time the kombucha culture goes through the fermentation process, it creates one new "mushroom" layer, or zoogleal mat, which will form atop of the original. After three or four layers have built up, the tea will become sour and taste somewhat like sour cider." Zoogleal mat - I'm not sure I could have made up a word that sounded that gross and it brings me right back to visions of the welcome mat in the aforementioned bar scene. My only contribution would be to change gleal to gleet. Um, sorry - moving on.
When I sipped a bottle disdainfully during an at-home training session with a client, I felt compelled to share about it mainly because she was beginning to take the look on my face personally. She later tried a bottle and described the smell as ‘vile.’ And her pronunciation was so uniquely British. Her inflexion captured a true repugnance that doesn’t translate with an American accent. In fact, I suggest that you go back and read ‘vile’ again with a British accent in order to capture the mood here. In New England, we can generate the same intensity with the expression, “it smells like ass.” We’re a classy bunch. (By the way, using that phrase in the Northwest will make you even less popular. Most Seattleites will at very least claim they lack a frame of reference.)
Wikipedia blames it on the acetic acid. "Acetic acid, which gives Kombucha that 'kick' to its smell and taste" says the post and I say 'kick' is entirely subjective and depends on who's doing the kicking and whether or not you saw it coming.
*Regarding the rat, I’m sure it just paused to peek in the windows and curse the heartburn that keeps it away from enjoying a good burrito before it died from arteries clogged by the General Tsos’s Chicken served next door. But keep in mind, Craig, that Tabasco kills the taste of all things e. coli but sadly not the symptoms. Drink the cheap tequila – the aftermath can be blamed on a hangover
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Gut Bomb
There are people who can pour a beer straight down their gullet. They’re popular at Frat parties. My friend Shmi can do that with a Grande, nonfat, 190 degree, two-Splenda latte. Oddly, she’s not that popular at Frat parties. Maybe it’s because she can’t roll a quarter down her nose and bounce it into a cup with any predictability or maybe because Frat parties simply don’t serve up the kind of persnickety coffee order that would allow her to shine. Either way, I always get a kick out of watching her do it on Sunday afternoons while my coffee disappears in slow sips between the play-by-play analyses of both of our lives. What that actually sounds like at the next table is that I describe the blind, hapless stumble I took through my week and she manages to rephrase it as graceful, practiced choreography performed for an approving audience. That takes abundant creativity and most of the afternoon.
By the time we run out of coffee and conversation, our bellies are equally empty. But since I’m the kind of carnivore often caught standing over the sink eating red meat out of the palm of my hand and she’s the kind of vegan whose food is always certifiably soulless, we have a hard time finding a common nosh. After the pretense of internal struggle, I sometimes buckle to her wheaty whims only to find myself with a mouthful of Mighty-O Donut - Local and Vegan - thinking, “Hmmm, these really aren’t very good.” It’s a real shame considering the cost.
From what I can see, my little Indian friend has a iron-clad gut fitted to her fire-proof esophagus but my dainty little system can be leveled by a sugary confection like a blow dart from five paces. The roiling belly usually starts at around midnight and gets incorporated into a bad dream featuring rabid monkeys that spend most of the early hours jumping on my middle while munching donuts and grinding crumbs into my quilt. I awaken as rested as anyone who teases wild monkeys might, with low energy and a sterile gut. Given all the ways to commit crimes against gut flora, you may all be waking to your own sea of stagnation or perhaps just smelling like a monkey’s plaything which, by the way, is a different diagnosis but equally unfortunate.
Most people don’t pause to consider that the antibiotics taken on purpose and the no-so purposeful second-hand dose they get in animal products thanks to the liberal lacing in animal feed to ensure meat and diary makes it to market, continue to kill bacteria including your all-important belly buddies even after you’ve macerated them. And if you think keeping a pet gold fish alive is a challenge, try keeping a gut terrarium flourishing with a food allergy like mine. That midnight rumble in my belly is the sound of an entire population being massacred. The least I could do is erect a memorial monument in my duodenum.
It’s this bacterial infantry that not only forms normal, moist stools (sometimes the word ‘moist’ is just icky) but it also enables the destruction of pathogenic material, manufactures essential vitamins, protects the intestinal walls, and develops and regenerates tissue. Without this teeming environment, you can’t absorb the nutrients in your food and you begin to suffer from the maladies of malnutrition. But no matter how many billions of one-celled soldiers you have in your army, they’re no match for a Mighty-O if you can’t gut it out against an allergen.
In fact, there’s a lot of things that can cause that kind of genocide including protein deficiency, excess dietary fiber, intestinal acidity, diarrhea, heavy metals , silverware, mercury from amalgam fillings, food coloring, environmental pollutants, colonics and, as mentioned before, antibiotics and allergic reactions. Some of the items on the list are easy enough to explain. Intestinal acidity occurs when pancreatic ducts get blocked usually by too much indigestible fiber in the duodenum; diarrhea flushes flora; heavy metals and amalgam fillings are toxic; silverware and food coloring has antibiotic properties; and colonics are silly for obvious reasons. It’s the protein and fiber that require a little explanation courtesy of our good friend Konstantin Monastryrsky, in Fiber Menace:
Protein deficiency – intestinal flora derives its energy and plastic nutrients not from food, but from mucin, which is secreted by healthy mucous membranes. Mucin is a glycoprotein – a molecule that bonds glucose with amino acids. Gastric and intestinal mucus is formed by combining mucin and water. Mucus protects the lining of the stomach and intestines from mechanical damage, enzymes, gastric acid, astringent bile, and food born pathogens. The deficiency of the essential amino acid threonine, for example, curbs the body’s ability to produce mucin, and correspondingly, bacteria’s ability to function and procreate.
Excess dietary fiber – The byproducts of fiber’s bacterial fermentation (short chain fatty acids, ethanol, and lactic acid) destroy bacteria for the same reason ethanol, and lactic acid) destroy bacteria for the same reason acids and alcohols are routinely used to sterilize surgical instruments – they burst bacterial membranes on contact. And that’s how fiber addiction develops; as the fermentation destroys bacteria, you need more and more fiber to form stools. If you suddenly drop all fiber, and no longer have many bacteria left, constipation sets in as soon as the large intestine clears itself of the remaining bulk.
Under other circumstances, the absence of intestinal gasses might be cause for a sense of superiority around your uncouth and noisy friends but, in this case, it’s just a symptom of a sterile gut along with the more obvious constipation. What isn’t so obvious is that frequent respiratory infections, asthma, bronchitis, chronic rhinitis, post nasal drip, nasal voice, sinus congestion and allergies might be a tip off too. Deficiencies in Vitamin K, which is a byproduct of bacterial metabolism, can show up as hard to stop ordinary bleeding and bruising while deficiencies in Vitamin B12 produced by intestinal flora causes numbness and tingling of hands and feet, shortness of breath, chronic fatigue a sore mouth and tongue and mental confusion.
Finding a new community to populate your suddenly sterile stomach is a little more complex than my usual advice to lick doorknobs for a routine immune boost. Posting a listing for free room and board to wayward organisms on Craig’s list won’t get the job done either. But you’ve already done your gut an injustice if you don’t habitually smooch livestock on the nose, fling dung for distance, and caress every surface at the Greyhound bus station all without washing your hands. It’s called the hygiene theory and we’re living in a world where our sterile guts match or sterile environments. In fact, aside from our unfortunate lack of incidental contact with bacterial sources, the fact that formula fed children miss their first infestation from breast milk and adults with appendectomies lack a place to store their starter culture to boost their count when their tank is low, doesn’t make things any better.
By the time we run out of coffee and conversation, our bellies are equally empty. But since I’m the kind of carnivore often caught standing over the sink eating red meat out of the palm of my hand and she’s the kind of vegan whose food is always certifiably soulless, we have a hard time finding a common nosh. After the pretense of internal struggle, I sometimes buckle to her wheaty whims only to find myself with a mouthful of Mighty-O Donut - Local and Vegan - thinking, “Hmmm, these really aren’t very good.” It’s a real shame considering the cost.
From what I can see, my little Indian friend has a iron-clad gut fitted to her fire-proof esophagus but my dainty little system can be leveled by a sugary confection like a blow dart from five paces. The roiling belly usually starts at around midnight and gets incorporated into a bad dream featuring rabid monkeys that spend most of the early hours jumping on my middle while munching donuts and grinding crumbs into my quilt. I awaken as rested as anyone who teases wild monkeys might, with low energy and a sterile gut. Given all the ways to commit crimes against gut flora, you may all be waking to your own sea of stagnation or perhaps just smelling like a monkey’s plaything which, by the way, is a different diagnosis but equally unfortunate.
Most people don’t pause to consider that the antibiotics taken on purpose and the no-so purposeful second-hand dose they get in animal products thanks to the liberal lacing in animal feed to ensure meat and diary makes it to market, continue to kill bacteria including your all-important belly buddies even after you’ve macerated them. And if you think keeping a pet gold fish alive is a challenge, try keeping a gut terrarium flourishing with a food allergy like mine. That midnight rumble in my belly is the sound of an entire population being massacred. The least I could do is erect a memorial monument in my duodenum.
It’s this bacterial infantry that not only forms normal, moist stools (sometimes the word ‘moist’ is just icky) but it also enables the destruction of pathogenic material, manufactures essential vitamins, protects the intestinal walls, and develops and regenerates tissue. Without this teeming environment, you can’t absorb the nutrients in your food and you begin to suffer from the maladies of malnutrition. But no matter how many billions of one-celled soldiers you have in your army, they’re no match for a Mighty-O if you can’t gut it out against an allergen.
In fact, there’s a lot of things that can cause that kind of genocide including protein deficiency, excess dietary fiber, intestinal acidity, diarrhea, heavy metals , silverware, mercury from amalgam fillings, food coloring, environmental pollutants, colonics and, as mentioned before, antibiotics and allergic reactions. Some of the items on the list are easy enough to explain. Intestinal acidity occurs when pancreatic ducts get blocked usually by too much indigestible fiber in the duodenum; diarrhea flushes flora; heavy metals and amalgam fillings are toxic; silverware and food coloring has antibiotic properties; and colonics are silly for obvious reasons. It’s the protein and fiber that require a little explanation courtesy of our good friend Konstantin Monastryrsky, in Fiber Menace:
Protein deficiency – intestinal flora derives its energy and plastic nutrients not from food, but from mucin, which is secreted by healthy mucous membranes. Mucin is a glycoprotein – a molecule that bonds glucose with amino acids. Gastric and intestinal mucus is formed by combining mucin and water. Mucus protects the lining of the stomach and intestines from mechanical damage, enzymes, gastric acid, astringent bile, and food born pathogens. The deficiency of the essential amino acid threonine, for example, curbs the body’s ability to produce mucin, and correspondingly, bacteria’s ability to function and procreate.
Excess dietary fiber – The byproducts of fiber’s bacterial fermentation (short chain fatty acids, ethanol, and lactic acid) destroy bacteria for the same reason ethanol, and lactic acid) destroy bacteria for the same reason acids and alcohols are routinely used to sterilize surgical instruments – they burst bacterial membranes on contact. And that’s how fiber addiction develops; as the fermentation destroys bacteria, you need more and more fiber to form stools. If you suddenly drop all fiber, and no longer have many bacteria left, constipation sets in as soon as the large intestine clears itself of the remaining bulk.
Under other circumstances, the absence of intestinal gasses might be cause for a sense of superiority around your uncouth and noisy friends but, in this case, it’s just a symptom of a sterile gut along with the more obvious constipation. What isn’t so obvious is that frequent respiratory infections, asthma, bronchitis, chronic rhinitis, post nasal drip, nasal voice, sinus congestion and allergies might be a tip off too. Deficiencies in Vitamin K, which is a byproduct of bacterial metabolism, can show up as hard to stop ordinary bleeding and bruising while deficiencies in Vitamin B12 produced by intestinal flora causes numbness and tingling of hands and feet, shortness of breath, chronic fatigue a sore mouth and tongue and mental confusion.
Finding a new community to populate your suddenly sterile stomach is a little more complex than my usual advice to lick doorknobs for a routine immune boost. Posting a listing for free room and board to wayward organisms on Craig’s list won’t get the job done either. But you’ve already done your gut an injustice if you don’t habitually smooch livestock on the nose, fling dung for distance, and caress every surface at the Greyhound bus station all without washing your hands. It’s called the hygiene theory and we’re living in a world where our sterile guts match or sterile environments. In fact, aside from our unfortunate lack of incidental contact with bacterial sources, the fact that formula fed children miss their first infestation from breast milk and adults with appendectomies lack a place to store their starter culture to boost their count when their tank is low, doesn’t make things any better.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Water Torture
The Albertson’s in Green Lake finally succumbed to whatever terminal illness was eating it alive. Before it did, I ducked in once or twice on urgent errands only. Its funk felt contagious, and the folks I saw shopping generally looked as if they’d already been infected. I think the entire place was built with asbestos, painted with lead paint and further enhanced by exotic molds growing under the bread isle next to wayward shopping lists on post-its. Yes, it was downright cursed and you always had the ‘I shouldn’t have ducked down this alley’ kind of feeling. Now that it’s closed, I’m not sure where you’d go to buy refreshments that wash away the taste of methadone or that feed the kind of munchies one tends to get after posting bail.
This grocery store was so desperate that you could buy cases of Top Ramen and have nearly enough money left over to treat the inevitable fatty liver at a walk in clinic. On my final errand, I stood in line worrying whether the crazy muttering man ready to check out in front of me would open fire armed with some concealed weapon and a clearly hostile relationship with the rest of humanity. If he did and I ended up being first to ‘check out’, would my friends always wonder if I had some sick bag-a-day Funyun habit that I hid from the world by getting my fix where nobody would ever recognize me. And even if they pried from my hands the emergency box of tampons that cleared my name, that Albertson’s would still be a stain on my obit.
The problem is, the overpopulated promenade that is Greenlake, will inevitably mourn the loss of a last-resort restroom in which to duck. That was likely the only other reason you might find yourself there. Back in the days when I was overhydrated, I loved stores like that where you could rush in and not have to ask for a code or walk around with a key attached to a garden gnome. Mind you, unlocked restrooms require precision hovering especially when you're peeing like a racehorse, but the hyperhydrated have given up the right to be particular.
Thank God I gave up the gallon a day habit many, many years ago. First, most of my water bottles were about as sanitary as sucking up street puddles with a bendy straw; second, my bladder was wussy and cried like a girl and third, leaving water bottles to stew in the car or under my arm so that the heated bottle would brew a carcinogenic tea seemed counterproductive to my whole ‘live long and prosper’ life plan with an ‘Into The Wild’ style retirement. Though I’m not overly religious, I also had a hard time buying the statement that when you’re thirsty it’s already too late. ‘The spiritual being of your choice’ did a fine job of orchestrated endocrine systems as well as all that other complex mush of guts, how the heck would thirst - something key to our survival - be the glaring bug in our operating systems? It was all an evil conspiracy by Evian was all I could figure.
In truth, we can link this right back to the Department of Agriculture who, if you haven’t noticed by now, is clearly trying to kill us. Big strapping corn-fed folks produce big piles of corn-fed poop (pause here until my sister stops laughing and we can move on) and we needed to do something to keep all that fiber moving. That monster bran muffin? Yeah, I’m going to need that with a large coffee – black, a liter of water and perhaps the lifestyle section of the paper.
If you read Omnivore’s Dilemma you know all the grain wreaks havoc on a cow’s digestive system and we’re not fairing much better with our Supersize McTurds. Though I live in a neighborhood where the next comment will start a hearty debate, our colons are not meant to accommodate such girth. Without all that fiber, nobody would be drinking all that water but now we’re being ravaged by both. And the reason there’s no book called ‘Pooping for Dummies’ is that after the urge hits, it all seems pretty straightforward with no powerpoint presentation necessary. Once you’ve flushed away the evidence, there's nobody around to tell you that you’ve been doing it wrong. We’re all pretty much operating under the assumption that all’s well that ends well, so to speak. Let’s all drink to that.
The water issue comes down to the chirping of the sound-byte ‘eight glasses’ without anyone really examining what that looks like. Konstantin Monastyrsky, who explains the issues with hyperhydration in the book Fiber Menace, breaks it down like this:
“A person weighing 70kg [155 lbs] requires at least ca. 1,750 ml [59 oz] per day. Of this amount ca. 650 ml is obtained by drinking, ca. 750 ml is the water contained in solid food, and ca. 350 ml is oxidation water. If more than this amount is consumed by a healthy person it is excreted by the kidneys, but in people with heart and kidney disease it may be retained.
As you can see, only 1,400 ml (47 oz), or about six glasses of water, are required every day from food and drink in almost equal proportion. The rest – the hidden oxidation water – is derived from the body’s internal chemistry.
Also, please note one crucial point: 1,750 ml is equal to about seven and a half glasses of water. This is where the initial round figures of “eight glasses” (1,890 ml) originally came from. What Human Physiology makes plain is that only 650 ml, or about two and a half glasses of water ‘is obtained by drinking’. Not eight, as we have been told to drink. Here’s another excerpt, this time from the Merck Manual of Diagnostic and Therapy, which is considered the gold-standard medical reference source and “must have” manual for any physician and researcher worth his or her salt. The Merck is even more miserly and specific:
. . . a daily intake of 700 to 800 ml is needed to match total water losses and remain in water balance . . .”
So if you’re walking around like Sponge Bob Damp Pants, what’s the impact other than your blunted IQ caused by the habitual reading of public bathroom graffiti and the potential Hantavirus you picked up off the doorknob? Here’s the laundry list provided by Monastyrsky:
Constipation: Potassium is a principal electrolyte, responsible for water retention inside human, bacterial, and plant cells. Overhydration causes the gradual loss of potassium through urine. Potassium deficiency, not shortage of water, is the principal reason behind stool dryness. The dry stool causes constipation because it is hard, abrasive and difficult to eliminate.
Kidney disease: It doesn’t take a medical degree to understand that kidneys pumping two, three, four or five times more water than normal will wear out faster. (The resources of our internal organs was determined by evolution long before Coke, Pepsi, and bud came on the scene.) Kidney stones in particular are associated with calcium deficiencies that may result from either a deficiency in one’s diet or from loss related to overhydration.
Urinary Disorders: Urinary infections are a common side effect of overhydration. With too many carbs and too much water in the system, urine alkalinity drops, acidity goes up, and the bladder and urethra become hospitable to pathogenic bacteria, which have an affinity for an acidic environment. Elevated glucose in the urine from too many dietary carbohydrates greatly stimulates these infections by providing plentiful feed for pathogens – a warm, dark bladder becomes just as hospitable to bacteria as a sweet-and-sour Petri dish.
Digestive disorders: the more you drink right before, during, or within the first few hours after a meal, the more difficult and time-consuming digestion becomes, because it requires correspondingly more hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes to bring their concentration up to the optimal level. The high volume of liquid in the stomach is prone to causing heartburn, which results from the spillage of acidified content into the unprotected esophagus. Indigestion, or delayed digestion (gastroparesis) causes gastritis – an inflammation of the stomach’s mucosa, which may eventually lead to ulcers. Chronic indigestion may also result from a chloride deficiency, especially when excess water consumption is accompanied by reduced or salt-free diet.
Digenerative Bone Disease: a loss of minerals in general, calcium in particular. Leads to bone softening – osteomalacia in adults, scoliosis in young adults, and rickets in children. (Osteoporosis is a bone tissue disease, and not a mineral deficiency condition, as mistakenly thought by most people, including most medical professionals. A loss of bone tissue – collagen that makes up the bone matrix – leads to bone brittleness, not softness, as from the loss of minerals.)
Premature aging: Facial bones determine our overall appearance and create a perception of age that no makeup or plastic surgery can hide. Because of a comparatively low physical load, facial bones experience the fastest loss of bone tissue and minerals.
Muscular disorders: Calcium and magnesium are key regulators of muscle contractions . A deficiency of these two minerals is broadly associated with fibromyalgia, fatigue, cramps, tremors, involuntary flinching, and many other conditions that affect not just body muscles, but also the eyes, blood vessels, intestines, heart, womb, and all other organs that are controlled by the muscles.
Unstable blood Pressure: Hypertension and hypotension naturally follow water binges. First, as the volume of blood plasma increases from absorbed water, blood pressure rises. As long as the kidneys remain healthy, the excess is quickly removed, along with the minerals. As the minerals become depleted, the volume of plasma goes down in order to maintain its chemical stability, and low blood pressure sets in.
Back in the 90's I had an 'incurable' disorder called IBS which this book covers in detail but that had nothing to do with why I read it. I wasn't searching for information about IBS because I completely recovered from the 'incurable' disorder over ten years ago by eliminating grains from my diet and reducing my water consumption. The doctors, on the other hand, had recommended that I eat refined carbohydrates for their 'digestability', drink plenty of water and take prescription drugs for the rest of my life. I wonder now if the drugs where made from corn and manufactured by the Department of Agriculture.
No it's not why I read the book. Frankly, aren't we all just looking just for a compelling page-turner that leaves us peering into toilet bowls for the rest of our days and dumping factoids about feces at dinner parties? Oh, that explains it.
This grocery store was so desperate that you could buy cases of Top Ramen and have nearly enough money left over to treat the inevitable fatty liver at a walk in clinic. On my final errand, I stood in line worrying whether the crazy muttering man ready to check out in front of me would open fire armed with some concealed weapon and a clearly hostile relationship with the rest of humanity. If he did and I ended up being first to ‘check out’, would my friends always wonder if I had some sick bag-a-day Funyun habit that I hid from the world by getting my fix where nobody would ever recognize me. And even if they pried from my hands the emergency box of tampons that cleared my name, that Albertson’s would still be a stain on my obit.
The problem is, the overpopulated promenade that is Greenlake, will inevitably mourn the loss of a last-resort restroom in which to duck. That was likely the only other reason you might find yourself there. Back in the days when I was overhydrated, I loved stores like that where you could rush in and not have to ask for a code or walk around with a key attached to a garden gnome. Mind you, unlocked restrooms require precision hovering especially when you're peeing like a racehorse, but the hyperhydrated have given up the right to be particular.
Thank God I gave up the gallon a day habit many, many years ago. First, most of my water bottles were about as sanitary as sucking up street puddles with a bendy straw; second, my bladder was wussy and cried like a girl and third, leaving water bottles to stew in the car or under my arm so that the heated bottle would brew a carcinogenic tea seemed counterproductive to my whole ‘live long and prosper’ life plan with an ‘Into The Wild’ style retirement. Though I’m not overly religious, I also had a hard time buying the statement that when you’re thirsty it’s already too late. ‘The spiritual being of your choice’ did a fine job of orchestrated endocrine systems as well as all that other complex mush of guts, how the heck would thirst - something key to our survival - be the glaring bug in our operating systems? It was all an evil conspiracy by Evian was all I could figure.
In truth, we can link this right back to the Department of Agriculture who, if you haven’t noticed by now, is clearly trying to kill us. Big strapping corn-fed folks produce big piles of corn-fed poop (pause here until my sister stops laughing and we can move on) and we needed to do something to keep all that fiber moving. That monster bran muffin? Yeah, I’m going to need that with a large coffee – black, a liter of water and perhaps the lifestyle section of the paper.
If you read Omnivore’s Dilemma you know all the grain wreaks havoc on a cow’s digestive system and we’re not fairing much better with our Supersize McTurds. Though I live in a neighborhood where the next comment will start a hearty debate, our colons are not meant to accommodate such girth. Without all that fiber, nobody would be drinking all that water but now we’re being ravaged by both. And the reason there’s no book called ‘Pooping for Dummies’ is that after the urge hits, it all seems pretty straightforward with no powerpoint presentation necessary. Once you’ve flushed away the evidence, there's nobody around to tell you that you’ve been doing it wrong. We’re all pretty much operating under the assumption that all’s well that ends well, so to speak. Let’s all drink to that.
The water issue comes down to the chirping of the sound-byte ‘eight glasses’ without anyone really examining what that looks like. Konstantin Monastyrsky, who explains the issues with hyperhydration in the book Fiber Menace, breaks it down like this:
“A person weighing 70kg [155 lbs] requires at least ca. 1,750 ml [59 oz] per day. Of this amount ca. 650 ml is obtained by drinking, ca. 750 ml is the water contained in solid food, and ca. 350 ml is oxidation water. If more than this amount is consumed by a healthy person it is excreted by the kidneys, but in people with heart and kidney disease it may be retained.
As you can see, only 1,400 ml (47 oz), or about six glasses of water, are required every day from food and drink in almost equal proportion. The rest – the hidden oxidation water – is derived from the body’s internal chemistry.
Also, please note one crucial point: 1,750 ml is equal to about seven and a half glasses of water. This is where the initial round figures of “eight glasses” (1,890 ml) originally came from. What Human Physiology makes plain is that only 650 ml, or about two and a half glasses of water ‘is obtained by drinking’. Not eight, as we have been told to drink. Here’s another excerpt, this time from the Merck Manual of Diagnostic and Therapy, which is considered the gold-standard medical reference source and “must have” manual for any physician and researcher worth his or her salt. The Merck is even more miserly and specific:
. . . a daily intake of 700 to 800 ml is needed to match total water losses and remain in water balance . . .”
So if you’re walking around like Sponge Bob Damp Pants, what’s the impact other than your blunted IQ caused by the habitual reading of public bathroom graffiti and the potential Hantavirus you picked up off the doorknob? Here’s the laundry list provided by Monastyrsky:
Constipation: Potassium is a principal electrolyte, responsible for water retention inside human, bacterial, and plant cells. Overhydration causes the gradual loss of potassium through urine. Potassium deficiency, not shortage of water, is the principal reason behind stool dryness. The dry stool causes constipation because it is hard, abrasive and difficult to eliminate.
Kidney disease: It doesn’t take a medical degree to understand that kidneys pumping two, three, four or five times more water than normal will wear out faster. (The resources of our internal organs was determined by evolution long before Coke, Pepsi, and bud came on the scene.) Kidney stones in particular are associated with calcium deficiencies that may result from either a deficiency in one’s diet or from loss related to overhydration.
Urinary Disorders: Urinary infections are a common side effect of overhydration. With too many carbs and too much water in the system, urine alkalinity drops, acidity goes up, and the bladder and urethra become hospitable to pathogenic bacteria, which have an affinity for an acidic environment. Elevated glucose in the urine from too many dietary carbohydrates greatly stimulates these infections by providing plentiful feed for pathogens – a warm, dark bladder becomes just as hospitable to bacteria as a sweet-and-sour Petri dish.
Digestive disorders: the more you drink right before, during, or within the first few hours after a meal, the more difficult and time-consuming digestion becomes, because it requires correspondingly more hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes to bring their concentration up to the optimal level. The high volume of liquid in the stomach is prone to causing heartburn, which results from the spillage of acidified content into the unprotected esophagus. Indigestion, or delayed digestion (gastroparesis) causes gastritis – an inflammation of the stomach’s mucosa, which may eventually lead to ulcers. Chronic indigestion may also result from a chloride deficiency, especially when excess water consumption is accompanied by reduced or salt-free diet.
Digenerative Bone Disease: a loss of minerals in general, calcium in particular. Leads to bone softening – osteomalacia in adults, scoliosis in young adults, and rickets in children. (Osteoporosis is a bone tissue disease, and not a mineral deficiency condition, as mistakenly thought by most people, including most medical professionals. A loss of bone tissue – collagen that makes up the bone matrix – leads to bone brittleness, not softness, as from the loss of minerals.)
Premature aging: Facial bones determine our overall appearance and create a perception of age that no makeup or plastic surgery can hide. Because of a comparatively low physical load, facial bones experience the fastest loss of bone tissue and minerals.
Muscular disorders: Calcium and magnesium are key regulators of muscle contractions . A deficiency of these two minerals is broadly associated with fibromyalgia, fatigue, cramps, tremors, involuntary flinching, and many other conditions that affect not just body muscles, but also the eyes, blood vessels, intestines, heart, womb, and all other organs that are controlled by the muscles.
Unstable blood Pressure: Hypertension and hypotension naturally follow water binges. First, as the volume of blood plasma increases from absorbed water, blood pressure rises. As long as the kidneys remain healthy, the excess is quickly removed, along with the minerals. As the minerals become depleted, the volume of plasma goes down in order to maintain its chemical stability, and low blood pressure sets in.
Back in the 90's I had an 'incurable' disorder called IBS which this book covers in detail but that had nothing to do with why I read it. I wasn't searching for information about IBS because I completely recovered from the 'incurable' disorder over ten years ago by eliminating grains from my diet and reducing my water consumption. The doctors, on the other hand, had recommended that I eat refined carbohydrates for their 'digestability', drink plenty of water and take prescription drugs for the rest of my life. I wonder now if the drugs where made from corn and manufactured by the Department of Agriculture.
No it's not why I read the book. Frankly, aren't we all just looking just for a compelling page-turner that leaves us peering into toilet bowls for the rest of our days and dumping factoids about feces at dinner parties? Oh, that explains it.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
We'll See
Craig and I discussed the workout I was about to do as if we were deciphering a home-brew recipe for explosives we found in a last-page hit of a Google search. Details may have been lost in translation and there were skipped steps that only those who didn’t need a recipe would recognize. If you were eavesdropping, you’d peer over to count fingers and check for burn scars before you’d decide if we knew what we were doing. Pointless speculation on your part but then most speculation is pointless.
Our afternoons are all about ‘Exercise Lab’ and not ‘Exercise Theory’ and there’s a whole lot to be learned by just tossing ourselves into a workout to see what will happen. This isn’t navigating a summit bid for Everest where a corpsicle becomes a frozen monument to a miscalculation. In this case, my remains will not be a human speed bump in the path of smarter, fitter or luckier climbers on their way to the top. At worst there will be war stories that conclude with grimaces and haunting memories. “Yeah, that? Don’t do that,” I’d say emphatically, flagging folks away from the scrawled formula on the white board.
Experience is handy here, especially since Craig and I actually have some, but there’s a whole lot of unexplored territory between my quest for world domination and this nagging shoulder injury. Even at this level of training, it’s tempting to do more of the same with comfortable adjustments that accommodate my limitations, but that ends up feeling a lot like I retired from competition to skate in the Icecapades. Nothing wrong with that but I’m a little too competitive for a comfy schedule filled with the kind of barbell jazzercise that makes me feel like I’ve been fed-exed to hell only to find it’s one big circuit of ‘Fight Gone Bad’.
It’s funny how an injury was the best thing to shake me loose from a routine I didn’t know that I had established. Now that I’ve gotten passed the ‘wishing on a star’ phase of ignoring things and waiting for fairy godmothers with magic elixirs, I’ve gotten down to the business of ‘screw this.’ There’s a lot that I can do other than more of the same. After all, didn’t ‘more of the same’ sort of get me into this mess? While I continue to heal, I’m off to explore all the areas marked ‘there be dragons’ on the fringes of my limited map of movement.
It’s no big surprise that injuries that worsen over time and repetition fall into the category of ‘overuse’ which, under different circumstances with better execution, would simply be called ‘practice.’ By the time I realized I was injured, it was my areas of ‘expertise’ that were my biggest joy and yet the source of searing, startle-me-awake pain. That presented me with an overwhelming opportunity to focus on all the stuff I never do and therefore have no real clue about in regards to my proficiency. Focused, that is, after a few sessions of hearty, dug-in ‘why-me’ style belly-aching.
As a trainer, this presents some interesting challenges in terms of writing workouts and sometimes I have to mix cocky self-assuredness with random guesswork like some day trader dealing in speculation. My new mantra has become “we’ll see” followed by a shrug. Weight either leaves the floor or it doesn’t, missed lifts either crash around me or they don’t and I either tear through something or get mired in the muck of a skill that needs work. Tasting every flavor of failure has become hugely amusing and so what? When did we become so significant about the success of every exercise and every movement that each workout gets graded by a complex point system like we’re competing for some figure skating title?
And here’s where the speculation comes in. I’ve been around CrossFit long enough now that folks who reveled in cavalier chaos are now trying to sneak in formulas and failsafes. We were once a bunch of try-anything mavericks and now, in a quest to one-up one another with results, we’re building in a lot of idle speculation. Don’t get me wrong, speculation is a natural part of the process. But just ask the stock broker how much it matters when he competes against a chimp every year to choose a portfolio and with the help of his vast expertise comes in second to the random pointing and squealing of his simian counterpart. Sometimes the most reasoned speculation offers nothing more than idle wheel-spinning.
You’d think we’d learn a lesson. When it comes to nutrition, we counted speculation as actual data and stuffed it down everybody’s throat until we all got fat. Looking back - if anybody ever bothers anymore - we speculated and discounted every bit of contrary data as an anomaly. One cart lap around the extra-wide isles of Costco on a Sunday afternoon should provide pounds of data that we’ve been doing things horribly wrong and yet greater than 60% of our population gets lumped together as some kind of statistical anomaly that can’t be counted because they supposedly don’t care enough about their health to eat less. Idle speculation on my part, but something doesn’t sound right with that theory.
Some of you missed the revolution in fitness when we unplugged ourselves from all the machines designed around our speculation. The nautilus equipment, the heart rate monitors, the VO2 max machines and everything Joe Weider tried to sell us between the pages of Muscle and Fitness had us so focused on the micromanagement of minutiae that we failed to notice that folks weren’t getting any fitter. It’s understandable. We were all wearing thongs at the time and I think we can all agree that they were distracting.
Before Weider, you seemed savvy if you knew the chest pad on the seated row wasn’t a back rest. After awhile, you couldn’t survive a conversation at the smoothie bar unless you could differentiate branched chain amino acids and said ‘Pecs and Tris’-day like it was another word for Tuesday. I remember being frequently tanned while not a muscle on me flexed unless I could name it. My body looked just like my big 80s hair – all puffy and shaped up front with obvious flat spots in places I couldn’t see in the mirror. I also remember that things ached and if you saw me when I wasn’t moving, I only sort of looked like I could play a sport.
CrossFit plucked us out of the monotony of periodization and the boring death march up the dumbbell rack in 2.5 pound increments. Now that CrossFit has been around for awhile though, I get the feeling sometimes that some folks are trying to Weider the hell out of it. Didn’t we already micromanage human health thanks to Weider’s empire of flexing goons and supplement swallowing lab rats? Now I’m beginning to hear a lot of ‘always/never’ arguments in my community about what works and it just makes me suspicious of still more speculation. Luckily I got hurt and it made me question where I was going with my training.
Glassman liberated us when he chalked up crude geometry and explained the black box – chaos goes in one end, sciency stuff happens and exceptional athletes spit out the other side. He made fun of the scientists in white lab coats waxing theoretical about exercise while sucking up resources trying to explain things. In the meantime, his monsters of metal manufactured sweat and proved ideas with outcomes. But instead of being content with their new found freedom, it seems that some coaches just had to tinker. They took apart their black boxes, they tried to understand the mechanisms, they pimped the gears, and they bragged about how much better there box was than anybody else’s. I was afraid I’d have to supplement mine with branched chain amino acids just to keep up. But isn’t this a new round of micromanagement where exercises get marked with a definitive ‘good’ or ‘bad’ stamp or placed in an arbitrary hierarchy? Isn’t that how we got swept away and strapped into apparatus in the first place?
If Grapefruit diets and Pec Decks could teach us anything other than how to weather heartburn and deal with shoulder instability, they would teach us that limiting our options often limits our results. Sometimes we’re so sure we have everything figured out that we fail to consider any conflicting data or look at our results objectively. In the end, getting injured was an opportunity to look at where I was lacking and what my weaknesses were. Now, I’m living, breathing and training in that space.
Our afternoons are all about ‘Exercise Lab’ and not ‘Exercise Theory’ and there’s a whole lot to be learned by just tossing ourselves into a workout to see what will happen. This isn’t navigating a summit bid for Everest where a corpsicle becomes a frozen monument to a miscalculation. In this case, my remains will not be a human speed bump in the path of smarter, fitter or luckier climbers on their way to the top. At worst there will be war stories that conclude with grimaces and haunting memories. “Yeah, that? Don’t do that,” I’d say emphatically, flagging folks away from the scrawled formula on the white board.
Experience is handy here, especially since Craig and I actually have some, but there’s a whole lot of unexplored territory between my quest for world domination and this nagging shoulder injury. Even at this level of training, it’s tempting to do more of the same with comfortable adjustments that accommodate my limitations, but that ends up feeling a lot like I retired from competition to skate in the Icecapades. Nothing wrong with that but I’m a little too competitive for a comfy schedule filled with the kind of barbell jazzercise that makes me feel like I’ve been fed-exed to hell only to find it’s one big circuit of ‘Fight Gone Bad’.
It’s funny how an injury was the best thing to shake me loose from a routine I didn’t know that I had established. Now that I’ve gotten passed the ‘wishing on a star’ phase of ignoring things and waiting for fairy godmothers with magic elixirs, I’ve gotten down to the business of ‘screw this.’ There’s a lot that I can do other than more of the same. After all, didn’t ‘more of the same’ sort of get me into this mess? While I continue to heal, I’m off to explore all the areas marked ‘there be dragons’ on the fringes of my limited map of movement.
It’s no big surprise that injuries that worsen over time and repetition fall into the category of ‘overuse’ which, under different circumstances with better execution, would simply be called ‘practice.’ By the time I realized I was injured, it was my areas of ‘expertise’ that were my biggest joy and yet the source of searing, startle-me-awake pain. That presented me with an overwhelming opportunity to focus on all the stuff I never do and therefore have no real clue about in regards to my proficiency. Focused, that is, after a few sessions of hearty, dug-in ‘why-me’ style belly-aching.
As a trainer, this presents some interesting challenges in terms of writing workouts and sometimes I have to mix cocky self-assuredness with random guesswork like some day trader dealing in speculation. My new mantra has become “we’ll see” followed by a shrug. Weight either leaves the floor or it doesn’t, missed lifts either crash around me or they don’t and I either tear through something or get mired in the muck of a skill that needs work. Tasting every flavor of failure has become hugely amusing and so what? When did we become so significant about the success of every exercise and every movement that each workout gets graded by a complex point system like we’re competing for some figure skating title?
And here’s where the speculation comes in. I’ve been around CrossFit long enough now that folks who reveled in cavalier chaos are now trying to sneak in formulas and failsafes. We were once a bunch of try-anything mavericks and now, in a quest to one-up one another with results, we’re building in a lot of idle speculation. Don’t get me wrong, speculation is a natural part of the process. But just ask the stock broker how much it matters when he competes against a chimp every year to choose a portfolio and with the help of his vast expertise comes in second to the random pointing and squealing of his simian counterpart. Sometimes the most reasoned speculation offers nothing more than idle wheel-spinning.
You’d think we’d learn a lesson. When it comes to nutrition, we counted speculation as actual data and stuffed it down everybody’s throat until we all got fat. Looking back - if anybody ever bothers anymore - we speculated and discounted every bit of contrary data as an anomaly. One cart lap around the extra-wide isles of Costco on a Sunday afternoon should provide pounds of data that we’ve been doing things horribly wrong and yet greater than 60% of our population gets lumped together as some kind of statistical anomaly that can’t be counted because they supposedly don’t care enough about their health to eat less. Idle speculation on my part, but something doesn’t sound right with that theory.
Some of you missed the revolution in fitness when we unplugged ourselves from all the machines designed around our speculation. The nautilus equipment, the heart rate monitors, the VO2 max machines and everything Joe Weider tried to sell us between the pages of Muscle and Fitness had us so focused on the micromanagement of minutiae that we failed to notice that folks weren’t getting any fitter. It’s understandable. We were all wearing thongs at the time and I think we can all agree that they were distracting.
Before Weider, you seemed savvy if you knew the chest pad on the seated row wasn’t a back rest. After awhile, you couldn’t survive a conversation at the smoothie bar unless you could differentiate branched chain amino acids and said ‘Pecs and Tris’-day like it was another word for Tuesday. I remember being frequently tanned while not a muscle on me flexed unless I could name it. My body looked just like my big 80s hair – all puffy and shaped up front with obvious flat spots in places I couldn’t see in the mirror. I also remember that things ached and if you saw me when I wasn’t moving, I only sort of looked like I could play a sport.
CrossFit plucked us out of the monotony of periodization and the boring death march up the dumbbell rack in 2.5 pound increments. Now that CrossFit has been around for awhile though, I get the feeling sometimes that some folks are trying to Weider the hell out of it. Didn’t we already micromanage human health thanks to Weider’s empire of flexing goons and supplement swallowing lab rats? Now I’m beginning to hear a lot of ‘always/never’ arguments in my community about what works and it just makes me suspicious of still more speculation. Luckily I got hurt and it made me question where I was going with my training.
Glassman liberated us when he chalked up crude geometry and explained the black box – chaos goes in one end, sciency stuff happens and exceptional athletes spit out the other side. He made fun of the scientists in white lab coats waxing theoretical about exercise while sucking up resources trying to explain things. In the meantime, his monsters of metal manufactured sweat and proved ideas with outcomes. But instead of being content with their new found freedom, it seems that some coaches just had to tinker. They took apart their black boxes, they tried to understand the mechanisms, they pimped the gears, and they bragged about how much better there box was than anybody else’s. I was afraid I’d have to supplement mine with branched chain amino acids just to keep up. But isn’t this a new round of micromanagement where exercises get marked with a definitive ‘good’ or ‘bad’ stamp or placed in an arbitrary hierarchy? Isn’t that how we got swept away and strapped into apparatus in the first place?
If Grapefruit diets and Pec Decks could teach us anything other than how to weather heartburn and deal with shoulder instability, they would teach us that limiting our options often limits our results. Sometimes we’re so sure we have everything figured out that we fail to consider any conflicting data or look at our results objectively. In the end, getting injured was an opportunity to look at where I was lacking and what my weaknesses were. Now, I’m living, breathing and training in that space.
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