Monthly Archives: April 2014

weight loss

How to change behaviour:what you eat/exercise

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I think Nike were right.  Just Do It!  According to the guy who wrote the book on barefoot running,  called Born to Run, Nike were wrong about footwear,  that wearing cushioned running shoes actually causes injuries.  This is basically to do with the idea that the human body was designed to run and a part of  that design is our foot seeking feedback from the  ground that we are running on, to guide our footfall.  Cushioning gets in the way of this feedback.   I am currently running in Nike Frees and I love them-very light, but somehow feel like not as hard as running barefoot.   The only time I have been injured from running is from stretching pre-run or when the guy in the store sold me running shoes with arch support, which I didn’t need.  I was training for a marathon at the time and not surprisingly developed achilles soreness.

By the way not everyone is built to be a long distance runner, some poeple are sprinters:  horses for courses.  I know some of you will think you are neither, but the bottom line is the more you move, the more you are capable of  moving.

Anyway, that is all an aside.  What this blog is about is, how to change.   If you are going to ‘just do it’, you need strong motivation(in my view 90% of the story: most people who give up smoking or drinking alcohol just do it themselves; just make up their minds, no counselling, no drugs/medication, they just wanted to).   In fact, there is evidence that for giving up smoking, nicotine replacement makes it harder to give up, not easier to give up.

The more we do something the more we want to do it.  There is an old saying, “actions speak louder than words”.  This is so true.  Actions trump thoughts, trump feelings, trump bodily sensations and trump  meaning or perception.   We are very habitual animals.   Because we live in the sort of world where it is very easy to get short term pay- offs for doing bad things , it is very easy to  develop bad habits-habits that are not good for us and sometimes not good for other people.  If on top of that we are mixing with people who are promoting these bad things, either in a virtual internet world or in person, we can quickly think it is ok to do stuff, that previously we wouldn’t have approved of.

The upside of actions trumping everything else is that actions are the things we have the most control of.  Our thoughts and feelings and bodily sensations seem to come from nowhere sometimes and they are upon us, before we even know it!   Our actions are much more under our control and I would argue that the name of the game is to have them completely under our control.  I have spent a long time working with men who act violently.   One of my messages to them is if  you act calmly, even though your thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and perceptions are violent, over time the thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and perception will fall into line with your actions.  Actions trump everything else.  Nike, “just do it”.

Why would you take the actions you don’t want to,  when every other part of you is screaming out not to?    Why would you not eat the chocolate, milk coffee, eggs and bacon and steak, that every part of you wants to eat?  Why would you not roll over in bed  in the morning rather than go for a walk or a run?   Because you don’t want to continue down that path,  you want to take the action because you are motivated.    The good thing is, that the more you take the action the easier it gets.  Here’s the crazy thing: the more you take the action like eating different food or exercising the more enjoyable it becomes!   In fact if you didn’t take those actions you would miss them and feel no good!    We are creatures of habit, we enjoy what we do:  the more we do it, the more we enjoy it.    This is especially true for eating well and exercise as there are real physical and pyschological benefits, that come from this independent of the habit and your perception.    Unfortunately, there is always a lag between starting to take the action, the development of the habit and the benefits that come from it.   For someone like me anyway the benefits of practicing guitar for example, take quite a while to show up, whereas the benefits of eating well (not poisoning yourself with too much fat, protein, salt and sugar and not depriving yourself of enough fibre and vitamins and anti-oxidants from plants) and exercising show up pretty quickly(the experts reckon give yourself three weeks).

Unfortunately also the pleasure gained by eating the chocolate and the cheese and rolling over in bed and not exercising are immediate and the pain of these choices may not show up for decades either in early death or the pain(physical and pyschological) of perhaps decades of ill-health.

One good way to tackle it is to set yourself short term goal of eating well and exercising for three weeks and then re-assess.  What have you got to lose?  At most three weeks!  What have you got to gain: your health, energy and enthusiasm and a big investment in your future.   I  don’t know who said this but “time and tide wait for no man”.   Unfortunately,  most of us need a kick up the bum, some sort of crisis, before we make changes.  Why wait until you are diagnosed with a chronic illness?   If you are currently well take a look around you at your workmates,  family and friends and see what state they are in and get some motivation!

HERE’S MY MAP FOR CHANGE

  • get really clear about why you want to change: what you want to leave behind and what you are heading towards: your destination.  This is the important bit, the motivation.  If you are really clear about why you are motivated to change, why you don’t like where you are  headed at the moment and why you want to end up in a different place and what that looks like, it will be easier for you to keep on track with the other challenges of the change process, as there is no doubt changing is a challenge.  If it wasn’t a lot more people would do it!
  • change  habit-identify the biggest problem behaviour and start the opposite behaviour or find ways to interrupt the problem behaviour
  • resist urges/temptation-realise  thoughts and feelings come and go,  like summer rain-wait them out
  • keep thoughts on track with new direction and block old  habitual thinking - oppose habitual thinking with slogans of your own making, that fit with your destination-make these slogans about building something not about stopping something
  • support: who can  help in a crisis or as part of noticing change
  • change picture of self

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genetics and health

genetics is not destiny

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I recently was travelling in  Nepal and discussion around the dinner table turned to health, as it was likely to do, as Julie and I are vegan and healthy, so in some ways this is a challenge for people.  A lot of people have a lot of chronic illnesses and take a lot of medication, or their close family members are in this camp-even amongst people who are walking in Nepal.  Just being  vegan and healthy can be taken as a criticism of them or  make people feel on the back foot, as they may take the implication that  their illness is their fault.   Whilst the biggest contact with the environment that anyone has is through the lining of their stomach, it is perfectly normal in this society to eat badly, so there is no personal failing involved in doing so.

During this dinner conversation I did make a remark, which was probably unwise, when one member of the group stated, eating scallops cooked in bacon fat, from the morning eggs and bacon was to “die for”.   I said, that ironically that may well be the  case!   He rightly pointed out he was 75 and I was yet to get there.    Another member of the party weighed into the debate, finding out the age that my parents died, which was mid-70’s stating that “it didn’t look too good for me then!”     This would be true if genetics were destiny, which in the case of the illnesses common in Australia, that are responsible for killing the most people and reducing the quality of life of the most people, is certainly not the case.

These illnesses doing the most damage are diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, cancer and lung problems.    The genes that influence  these things are not genes like the genes for eye colour or getting Huntingdon’s Chorea-these genes are dictators, you have the gene, you have the eye colour or the disease.   The genes that influence our most common diseases, causing the most pain and suffering are heavily influenced by environment-what you eat.  Every mouthful we eat affects how our genes that we are stuck with are expressed: that is, how much influence they have over our health.  What we eat can increase the activity of some genes and decrease the activity of some others.   Everybody  knows that the outcome for a gene, relates to it’s interaction with the environment.  This is how natural selection works-those genes which fit with the environment the best have more chance of being passed on to the next generation, by the species surviving and procreating.  What is not so well known, is that the environment affects how that gene is expressed or how much it is active, by that species interaction with the environment during its lifetime.   Genes are not set in stone at birth  and will continue to act like that over our lifetime: they respond to the environment they are in and the biggest interaction with the environment, is through our stomachs and the food we eat.

My case example, proves nothing but it may illustrate the point.  My blood pressure in January this year was 126/80(first number is pressure immediately after the heart pumps and second number is pressure immediately before it pumps again).   This blood pressure is high but not seriously so.  In my 30’s ( I am now 60) my  blood pressure was 140’s top figure and I can’t remember the bottom figure.  I was vegetarian but like a lot of vegetarians I ate a lot of dairy: milk, full cream yoghurt and cheese.  Both of my brothers have high blood pressure and eat a normal western diet.  I have been a vegan for around 10- 12 years.   I haven’t had the genetic testing but it seems likely that all three of us brothers have a genetic predisposition to high blood pressure.  At least for the last ten years I have not been supplying the right environment for the genes responsible for  my predisposition to be expressed, at least to the degree that it would have been otherwise.

The direction we are going in healthcare( disease mongering?) at the moment in terms of genetic testing is part  of the high tech ‘solutions’ that we are applying to health, which are incredibly expensive and will prove to be a dead end.  All they have achieved so far is enabling sick people to live longer and often longer with an impaired quality of life.   The other thing this approach achieves is to create more patients, as people can become a part of the  sickness industry even before they have any symptoms or anywhere near any symptoms.

Genetic testing is pursuing disease rather than pursuing health.  Pursuing health is easy and free: get out in the sunshine, sleep well at night time, eat well and move.  Pursuing disease is expensive and is the realm of experts and takes us further down the path of the patient as the passive recipient of care.   The solutions provided by the sickness industry to your perceived level of genetic risk to a disease will be what the sickness(health) industry provides: medication and surgery.

For information on how to effect the expression of your genes by exercise and what you eat, see, “Turn off the fat g enes:the revolutionary guide to losing weight” by Neal Barnard from PCRM(see link in side bar)

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nepal -Mt Everest

 

 

mental health

eating well, Frantz Fanon and John Butler

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Recently I read somewhere that eating well could be considered an act of resistance-resistance to the dominant ideas about meat, eggs, diary, fish, processed factory food and takeaway fast food,  as what food consists of.    Resistance to being normal and travelling down the normal path in life.  This normal path is be overweight to varying amounts, to have one or more chronic conditions, to respond to these chronic conditions by taking ever more medications and at least for now, to live longer but with an ever greater burden of sickness and decreasing  quality of life.

To not follow  this path, takes a deliberate act on our parts.  This is where Frantz Fanon and John Butler come in.  In 1961, Fanon wrote a book titled The Wretched of the Earth about colonisation, at the time when anti-colonial movements were starting in Africa.  He drew attention to the fact that it was important to de-colonise your mind as a first step in freeing yourself-from the oppressors, the dominant ideas, the colonisers.   He pointed out that it just wasn’t your country  that the colonisers had taken over-they had taken over our minds: how we felt about ourselves, what we thought was important, what we gave value to, what gave us pleasure-in other words, we don’t have to be controlled and policed by the outside, but we are controlling and policing ourselves from the inside.   This fits also with Foucault’s ideas about power.  So, Fanon argued that when the colonisers have taken over our minds we think about ourselves as they think about us and we want to be like them.  He was referring to the black people of Africa taking on the coloniser’s ideas that they were inferior to the whites and should stay in a master/slave or servant relationship.   In the colonisation of our minds we have taken on the idea of the big companies that we are worthless, we have no inherent value, but we can accrue value by getting and having things-buying and consuming.  The culture of consumption:always having more, getting more pleasure.   This is partly why people are always happy to add something to their diet, that is the latest fad to cure all ills, like fish oil for example.  But they are not so keen to take things away from their diet, which is curious as the problem with people’s diets is too much fat,sugar and protein: excess not deficiency.  Our biology sets us up to seek pleasure and consumer culture blows that up or uses that propensity.   But nothing happens in isolation: every action that we take effects how we see ourselves and how we see ourselves effects every action.

John Butler the Australian muso has a couple of songs very relevant to these ideas:  Better Than and Used to Get High.   In Used to Get High, he uses the idea of  getting high from drugs as being out of touch with reality but in the chorus, hooks it right into food.

“I used to get high for a living, believing everything I saw on the TV

I used to get high for a  living, eating or the bullshit food that  they sold me”

So, have a listen.

used to get high-right click to open link in new tab and hear song

weight loss

weight loss: all or nothing or slowly, slowly catch the worm?

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So, what if you’ve made the decision: you want to lose weight, but you are not going to fail by going on a merry go round of dieting and giving in and putting it all and more back on again; you’re not going to commit yourself to a lifetime of extreme exercise.  You are going to do it by changing what you see as food: changing what you put in  your mouth, not how much.

One idea is the all or nothing.  Go cold turkey(no irony intended-speciest speech, a frontier I have not yet tackled)  This approach is clean out your kitchen, get all processed food out of the house and don’t ever bring any back.   This approach will take a bit of planning as you may not know what to cook if you are not cooking meat.  So, you will need to talk to people or research some recipe books or the good old internet to get some ideas.  On the one hand, it’s really simple.  A truck load of fresh fruit and vegetables along with staples of rice, beans and lentils.  Unlike eating animal products which are high in fat and therefore strong in taste, these items are very low in fat, but have there own subtle and interesting flavours.  You will probably need to buy some different spices from what you have been using( an added bonus is many spices are very high in anti-oxidants, which are the chemicals which combat the cancer producing chemicals, free radicals which are produced by our body, by converting food back to energy).

The upside of this approach is that you are already at your destination and you have to just ride out the adjustment of maybe missing some foods, learning to cook differently and waiting for your taste buds to catch up.  And it is not just your taste buds but also your brain chemistry which will need to catch up.  So, you may go through a few weeks of not enjoying your food as much as you used to.  As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ve never enjoyed food as much as I have since I have become vegan, precisely because much more thought and  care is put into cooking, as you are not relying on the meat for the big hit.

If you have been eating a lot of processed and takeaway food as well as meat, dairy and eggs the fat and sugar in these things are addictive and causing a spike in the release of dopamine, the pleasure neurotransmitter.(Neurotransmitters are chemicals which ‘talk’to the next cell in the brain).  Your brain will have got used to this level of stimulation so when you swap to a  whole plant food diet, the pleasure you get from it may be diminished compared to what you were used to previously.   This effect will vary with how bad your diet was previously.  The worse your diet in terms of takeaway and processed food(anything from a factory) the bigger the effect.  However, within a few weeks, you will be getting more pleasure from your food than ever before: the pleasure of the taste but also the pleasure of knowing that every mouthful is good for you!  Helping your immune system, helping your energy levels and helping your mood.  The cold turkey approach is the approach recommended by Dr John McDougall(see link).

The other approach is slowly, slowly catch the worm.  This is the approach recommended by Dr Neal Barnard from PCRM(see link).  The idea is to transition to a healthier  diet by adding in foods that you like that are whole plant foods.  You can do this by adding more plant foods to any meal or preferably adding some whole plant foods meals to your week.   A friend of mine had irritable bowel syndrome  and I suggested she add more fibre to her meals(no, not metamucil but the stuff only found in plants).  She added steamed vegetables twice/week and her irritable bowel improved just on this minor change!  She was the sort of person who didn’t cook much  and lived off of take away and cooked chicken from the supermarket.  The thinking behind the slowly, slowly approach is:

  • you get a chance to experiment with and enjoy non-meat -non animal product meals and realise that they are not from outer space, or only for hippies or something
  • even though it may only be a small change, you are likely to feel better
  • if you are overweight, you are likely to lose some, which is rewarding.  A whole plant diet leads to weight loss as it is high in fibre and low in fat.  Fat on your lips is the fat on your hips.  Fibre has many benefits for the body(detox, production of good bacteria in the gut) but in terms of weight loss it takes up a lot of space in our stomach for no calories!  So, beans for example are very filling.
  • from little things big things grow-so trying it out, you might do more of it, as it has been good

Julie and I are still  making alterations to our what we eat, even though we have been vegan for many years.  Some of these changes are health based, like recently reducing oil to very low levels and some of them are new ingredients, that are added into the mix.

So, which approach should you use: all or nothing or slowly, slowly.  Naturally it depends a bit on your personality and how clearly you are seeing animal and processed foods as poison.  If you are really clear in your mind that these foods are poison, you will probably go the all or nothing approach.     Even if you are not totally convinced you still might want to give it a go-what have you got to lose?  If you want to go back to your old ways, they are not going to stop making animal and processed foods, so it’s not as if it is a fork in the road of no return.  If you are not totally convinced you might want to experiment slowly and see what you think:  make sure you put some though  into what you are  going to cook so that it tastes good and you give yourself a chance.

It is useful to have snack foods as there is nothing you can buy on the run, from petrol station/deli that is any good for you.  I have never eaten so many apples as I do now!

Yours in health

 

Gary