Risk

Earlier this month, my dad who is 79 years old and currently the oldest pilot in the country certified by the FAA for low-level airshow aerobatics, performed in the Fort Worth Air Power Expo, alongside the US Navy Blue Angels.  He performs snap rolls, barrel rolls, hammerhead stalls and a lucy-goosey maneuver called a Lomcevak that looks like the plane has lost all control of itself. 

Some people think he’s crazy to be doing such things.  He’s an excellent, experienced pilot who has been flying for decades. 

He has always told me that you can never really avoid risk in life.  You examine it, you take action to minimize it, you weigh the rewards and then... you go for it!  

What does risk have to do with weight loss?  Here’s my premise: if there were no risk involved, we would simply eat the precise number of calories needed to fuel our day, exercise to the optimal point of health and poof!  That’d be the end of it.  None of the back and forth, up and down, excuses; no meetings, backsliding or regrets.  We’d just do it.

We see the body and the associated lifestyle that we want; why do we not simply reach out and take it? We want that sleek figure, the one with no extra handholds, the one that looks like it could do any physical feat in the universe.  We want to have energy, sleep well and, let’s admit it, ladies... we’d kinda like to be admired for our physical beauty. 

What stops us?  What is the risk we're avoiding?  We’re very complicated, but could it be that some part of us is afraid to be living “that” life, in “that” body?  We say we want all that energy and activity and admiration, but are we also a little unsure about what we’d do with it if we got it?

I have seen over and over and over, many too many times for it to be coincidence, people who lose impressive amounts of weight and just as they’re about to reach their goal and make that lifestyle permanent... they turn back.  You Weight Watchers, you’ve seen this happen, right?  Someone is on the verge of a major goal and they stop coming to meetings, and it’s never a good outcome. 

What is that thing that makes us turn back from the very thing we’ve worked so hard to get?  Have you done this: made progress and when you realized you were succeeding, somehow scared yourself back to your original weight?

We all cling to the familiar.  It’s why Americans travel thousands of miles to experience Europe and end up eating at McDonald’s.  It’s familiar.  It may be oil-laden, too salty and drip all over your suitcase, but it’s home.

Would it help to acknowledge and think about the risk?  What is it, on the other side of the weight loss line, that scares us?  Are we afraid to lose the weight because we might gain it back and disappoint everyone… especially ourselves?  Do we think that bread and chips and cookies really might be the only things standing between ourselves and despair?  Do we fear to lose friends when we start behaving differently than we used to?  Does that sleek lifestyle look like something we can’t really sustain, something that is meant for someone else?

Do we want to end up at McDonald's for the rest of our lives??

Give it a think.  We’ve all got something in our closet that is keeping us from claiming the lifestyle we really want.  What might it be?  What is the real risk?  What can you do to minimize the risk? 

Then it will be a matter of weighing the risk against the reward... and going for it!

Springing

Carrizo Plain, northeast of SLO

Even on the central coast, where winter lies lightly upon us, there is something magical about spring. 

The first day of spring fell last week; did you notice?  Go outside today and breathe in deeply; take spring in.  There are scents in the air, new colors, and I am not kidding about this, the birds sing louder.  Go quiet and listen.  It is something about their mating habits, I believe; their songs are quite insistent.

Spring is a force of nature.  In our automotive, technological, white-noise lives, we may not notice, but when the whole top half of the planet is doing a wake-up dance, it will have its effect on us whether we notice it or not. 

Our bodies, inasmuch as they are part of the natural world, are also awakening to spring.  It just happens.  We don’t cause it; we can’t regulate it; it just is. 

We can rejoice in it, though!  We can make the most of it.  

When winter, even California winter, begins to recede, we come alive in a way that is different from all the rest of the year.  Our “hibernation” instinct goes dormant.  Have you noticed any lessening of your appetite?  That often happens very subtly in the springtime. 

Do you notice that your interest in fresh fruits and vegetables is sharper?  Are you a little more prone to choose something fresh than something processed?

Are your feet beginning to get restless?  That slightly uneasy feeling you may have... could it be yourself wanting to get outside and work your body a bit?  Could it be a craving for more fresh air, more sunshine, more walking? 

Everything that happens naturally as a result of springtime is great news for those of us pursuing health and well-being.  The forces we’ve fought against all winter... early drowsiness, craving for comfort food, that “slow” feeling that keeps us inside under a blanket with a book in our hands... are in retreat. 

And now, we feel a little call from the outdoors.  Suddenly, a hike sounds like a really pleasant idea.  The produce aisle has more colors, berries are coming back.

Go outside!  Be a part of this wonderful process of spring that comes to us each year, renewing our spirits and bodies.  See if you can feel the whole natural world waking up.  The wildflowers will soon be out in force.  The bees and hummingbirds are revving their engines.  The hills are getting greener. Everything is growing. 

If you have an ache in your heart, take it outside for soothing.  If you have a lowness of spirit left over from winter, let nature minister to you.

Even if you have been outside every day this past winter, go outside today with fresh eyes and a fresh heart.  There is something wonderful happening out there, and we are a part of it. 

Today, be springtime!

Filling the Hole

If you’ve ever studied art history, or visited a medieval cathedral or read Dante, you have come across the concept of gluttony being a sin.  A deadly sin, no less. 

In our own modern culture, gluttony is more a picture of the Good Life, enshrined as a standard for holidays like Mardi Gras, Thanksgiving and SuperBowl Sunday, when all good citizens eat until the buttons pop.

How did we make such a long leap, from capital sin to near-virtue?

I could make my case against profiteers, but that’s beside the point.  The only thing that really matters here is us, and how we can make better lives for ourselves. 

Most of us are carrying a lot of shame around overeating.  We may even do it in secret, late at night with no one around, and then go to some trouble to hide the evidence from our families.  We’re embarrassed, but we do it. 

I’ll bet every single one of us has been at the grocery store, seen someone we know down at the far end of the aisle, and done a quick sweep of our basket to see if there’s anything incriminating in there.  Maybe thrown a jacket over it, eh?   

We compare ourselves to magazine ads and movie celebrities, and come up so far short, it’s like they’re a whole different species. 

So what do we need with the idea of sin??  We’re already ashamed!

Here’s the great thing about sin: it has an answer.  

If all we ever are is ashamed, and we can’t pinpoint the source of our eating compulsions and we can’t get rid of them and try over and over again and nothing is working... that is a prescription for despair.  It all seems hopeless.

But if we think of sin as a force in the world that is eager for our destruction, we can easily see it as the enemy.  In my Christian worldview, it genuinely is the enemy; it is a personal power who would like to keep me from reaching joy in God, out of jealousy, perversity and spite. 

Whatever your world view, I think we can all agree that there are forces at work that pull us away from our highest good. 

Perhaps overeating is one effect of those forces. 

Overeating, first of all, chips away at our self-respect.  That may be its very worst harm.  We don’t go out into the world as much. Our capacity for doing good is handicapped because we’re not there; we’re hiding.  Our relationships are diluted because we don’t want anyone to know what’s deepest inside.  Shame is a powerful captor.

When overeating leads to overweight, then our health is at risk.  We deny ourselves the pleasure of activity, of moving freely in this beautiful world.  Our lives are narrowed by illness or incapacity, then shortened. 

Do you see why a good and loving God might not want that for his precious ones?

So we come back to sin, not in terms of a punishable crime, not one more thing to be ashamed of.  But sin as a danger signal, as a sweet and loving parent saying, “Don’t go there; you’ll get hurt.”

I think the root of overeating for many of us is the lack of love at some point in our lives when we badly needed it.  Someone failed us or wasn’t there, and the wound is still inside, crying to be filled up. 

As long as we keep ourselves to ourselves, not allowing Love to come in our secret doors, we continue to overeat.  No wonder; we’re trying to fill that hole!  It actually makes a whole lot of sense.  We’re behaving very understandably if there is no Love in the world that cares for our ultimate good.

Whatever your religious beliefs, somewhere in them is a loving power.

You have to follow your own path to that love.  Do something this week to more firmly connect with the power of Good.  Find a book or a prayer or perhaps a childhood memory of a time when you were connected to the source of love.  Stay there awhile and let yourself be loved. It's harder than it sounds. It may even sting. Stay with it. It will begin to fill in the hole. 

The Crucible

Tomorrow is it, the day I’ve been waiting for.  Tomorrow, I take my newly-carved feet out to the track for a running workout. 

Well, alright, I won’t be exactly running.  More like shuffling.  And I only get ten minutes on my feet.  But it’s a start.  It’s the open door back to the life I love.

I’m pretty excited!

I’ve been in this incubator for a long time now. 

It’s got me thinking about those periods that come to all of us, when we’re, for one reason or another, unable to live the life we want.  Grief, illness, injury, loss of a job or a friend.  Something is taken away and we’re startled to find ourselves living at half-mast.

I remember days in my surgery recovery, waking up in the morning, and groaning!  Every day was so much work; just getting bathed and dressed took most of my day’s allotment of energy.  And then I had to face another day of doing precisely none of the things that I am accustomed to doing.  (Yes, it was fun for a few days, but the luster wore off quickly.)

Brave friends tried to tell me that the universe had something to teach me, that I would look back on those days as “privileged.”  I didn’t bite any heads off, but I didn’t exactly believe them, either. 

Brave friends, you were right!  From the other side, I can see that it genuinely was a great privilege, one that most people never get (and wouldn't ask for): the experience of being stripped down.  When you can’t DO anything, you have to come to grips with your simple BEING. 

I don’t say that it’s comfortable, but it’s an experience I now see as priceless. 

Two great men who, in their ways, changed the world for the better were formed by periods of forced bedrest: Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola.  Both were military men, understanding themselves as men of action.  That was their self-identity, and self-identity is a painful thing to be stripped of, more painful than losing a foot or a leg. 

Everyone knows Francis and the legacy of love he left.  Ignatius became a deeply religious man, whose “spiritual exercises” have formed millions of people over the last 450 years.  The society that grew up around him, the Jesuits, gave the world a fine man we now know as Pope Francis. 

Both Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola were shaped in the crucible of injury or illness.  They entered the sickroom as soldiers; they emerged as something quite different. 

The “sickroom” is a good teacher.  It takes away so many of our props that we are forced to look at our hidden foundations. 

As grateful as I am for my period of recuperation, I don’t recommend surgery as a journey of spiritual awakening!  No, there is something less costly and closer to hand. 

It’s called Lent.  And it begins this Wednesday.

Lent is a deliberate submission to a stripping-down of your person.  We give up some pleasure or crutch in an offering that says, “I’m a little nervous that I  may not be able to function without this thing, but I'm open to possibilities.  I’m ready to be taught more about who I really am, though I may not like the answer entirely.  I'm willing to rely more on goodness and love, and less on myself.”

Some of you have been practicing Lent your whole lives; others may have stopped after childhood, and some may have never practiced it at all. 

I encourage you to think about it.  It can be a transformative experience.  It’s not really about giving up a particular “thing”; it’s more about simply giving up.  Giving yourself up to what God wants for you: richness, blessing, love.  Giving up the urge to control some small aspect of your life. 

I don’t know the significance of me getting my run back on Tuesday, the very eve of the season of self-denial.  Just as I’m preparing to enter 40 days of austerity, I’m receiving an extravagant gift.  It’s one more lesson in giving up control.  Our God of love knows better than I. 

I wish you all a wonderful Lent, whether it is your tradition or not.  Use this season of blessing.  Let Love in.

Ultimate Triumph

I was recently asked about the title of my blog.

The phrase comes from a speech that Teddy Roosevelt once made.  See what you think...

“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these, wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”

How do those words strike you?  Exciting, shivery wonder... or dreary, difficult drudgery?

When I first read them, they made me want to go charging up a hill at high speed and break into an Italian aria at the top!  A mission! A purpose! A victory!

Maybe that’s because I know a little bit about Teddy Roosevelt, so I understand the heart that expressed itself in those words.

Did you know that he was a sickly child with severe asthma who suffered near-fatal attacks over and over in his childhood?  He was a fragile little creature not expected to reach adulthood. 

But he had a curious mind and a great love of nature and a tenacity that drove him beyond his illness.  He read voraciously and became a student of life.  He put himself on a regimen of exercise to build his strength, and after having been bullied by some older boys, took up boxing lessons.

Roosevelt became a naturalist, an author, a soldier, an Amazon explorer, a larger-than-life, ebullient optimist.  He had adventures enough for half a dozen movies.  I’ll let this picture tell the story... he’s riding a bull moose (not known to be one of nature’s pussycats) across a river.  Umm.  File that under “D” for Danger.

The “strenuous life” was all there was for Teddy.  If he hadn’t taken that attitude, he would have been dead before his 18^th birthday.  Instead he had a glorious adventure of a life.  It was full of setbacks and heartbreaks as well, but it was a resplendent life.

When we limp along in ill health, we’re missing the wondrous exuberance of a full life.  This culture is not looking out for our health!  If we don’t take personal charge of what we eat and what we do with our bodies, we will be that sickly child that gets beat up by life.

And it’s hard work.  That’s the bottom line, and the real reason for my blog.  Weight Watchers, bless its corporate heart, tries very hard to make weight loss pleasant and palatable for the greatest number of people.  But we can sometimes be lulled into thinking that it is therefore going to be easy.

It’s not.  And as long as we expect it to be and hope for it to be, we’ll flounder; maybe lose 5 pounds, relax, fall back into old habits, resentfully surrender again, lose that same 5 pounds... you know the drill.

It’s hard work.  It’s “toil and effort, labor and strife”.  It’s even “bitter toil” sometimes. 

And it is so worth it.  With all my heart, I wish for all of us that “splendid, ultimate triumph”... our health, the gift of being fully alive.

Read My Lips

Don't you inwardly groan whenever the subject of weight loss comes up?  In conversation or on tv or in a magazine? The mere mention of it makes me a bit melancholy.

We have a lot of resistance to the whole idea of weight loss and fitness, even though it's one of the things we want the most!  How can that be??

I think it's because our minds are at war with themselves.  There is the "comfort" part of us that wants to eat hot bread, salty chips and cookies until we're wrapped up in them like a warm blanky.  In the opposite corner is the "mature" part of us that wants to be able to move freely, wear cute clothes and be full of energy.

So doesn't it make sense to try to reconcile the two parts of our mind so that we're all-ahead-full in pursuit of our health goals?

That's why I think a big component of weight loss and fitness is your BRAIN rather than your body.  After all, your body just follows along with whatever flowchart your brain comes up with.  We may not be spending nearly enough time training our brain for weight loss, bypassing it straight to the body.

One of the easiest ways to engage your brain for weight loss is… reading.  Get some good books about health, fitness, weight management and scatter them all around your house, wherever you spend time: near your comfy chair, by the bedside, next to the computer, even in the bathroom.  Everywhere!  Then as you go through your day, pick them up and read a few pages while you're just sitting there.

Good books are Portable Game Changers.  If you were to read about weight loss three or four times a day for a few weeks, I fully expect you would lose some weight without even thinking too much about it, because your subconscious mind has been engaged.  It's deep down there, working away at a goal without you much noticing.  You have set it on its track by what you've read.

Obviously, you'll lose weight faster when you fully engage both your conscious and subconscious but the power of the mind is so great, I think you could lose weight on reading alone!

If you're currently on a dietary program, or you're tracking or otherwise formally attempting to lose weight, try adding books to your diet (read them, don't eat them) and see if it doesn't smooth the way.

There are tons of good ones but here's a quick tour through some of my favorites.

More reading, less eating!

The Month of the Kid

This month, February, I'm on a transformation expedition!  It's one month until I can take my new feet out on a maiden run.  I spent all last year working up to surgery and recovering from surgery, and soon it will be time to reap the benefits of surgery!  

To give myself the greatest chance of success in March (earliest date my doctor will allow me to try running), I'm spending February in concentrated, dedicated focus… highest-quality nutrients, in weight-reducing amounts, with strength and flexibility training and increasing aerobic exercise.  

That all sounds a bit UN-fun, so to balance it out, I'm going back to my childhood.  

Remember your own childhood?  When you were little, did you ever want sit still for hours at a time? Could you even be FORCED to sit still for hours at a time?  Would it ever have occurred to you to overeat as a recreational activity?  

Think about it.  What did you love to do when you were little?  What gave you the most excitement? Chances are it wasn't food. Chances are it involved the outdoors and had some element of physical activity… but we didn't call it anything as joy-numbing as "physical activity."  It was PLAYING, as in "I'm going outside to play" or "Can you come out and play?"  What are your best memories from your childhood?

I remember playing so intensely that our parents had to drag us in when the sun set.  I remember the freedom of finally getting a two-wheeler, and biking farther than my mom could track us.  I remember staying at the swimming pool so long that my fingers and toes were pickled, and belly-flopping until I was nearly flayed, learning how to dive.  

It seems that all the habits that sabotage our health developed much later.  As children, we were always on the go, and food was not something we really spent much time thinking about.  It just sort of appeared at the proper times.  We didn't have to think about calories or hedonic hunger or the food pyramid or fat grams or ghrelin or leptin or Points.

As children, we ate to live.  It takes an adult to think up something as weird as living to eat!

So I'm going back to my childhood this month.  This is my icon.  I'm remembering this little person, who never realized that the bike was too big, who was always looking for the next adventure, who only came in for meals when called, for whom bedtime was a serious imposition.

I wish you a month of play, too, as you remember the little person you have inside of you, who never had to think about pursuing a healthy lifestyle because you were too busy living it.