A Truly Awesome Video

Thanks to Dr. Deah for introducing me to this truly awesome video:



A few random thoughts:

I have pretty much banished fat talk from my own personal discourse. It's sometimes difficult, but it can be done. The next step, though, is challenging fat talk that others engage in. I have yet to consistently do so. You may recall, I tried it once recently (see this post) and it went over like a lead balloon. I admit that this was when I was in the throes of a Graves disease relapse so my righteous indignation was perhaps overshadowed by a strident, shaky delivery. Oh well. I shall keep trying.

I actually know a former fashion model who is still stick thin and who, despite trying for years, never did get pregnant. Yes, it happens to women of all sizes.

Anyway, enjoy the video and stop the fat talk!

Why I Love Dr. Blair

Last week, I went to hear a talk by Dr. Steven Blair, a world-renowned researcher on the role of physical activity in maintaining good health. Dr. Blair has done extensive research on physical fitness and reducing heart disease and is one of the most cited exercise scientists in the world. Last week he was awarded the Bloomberg Manulife Prize for the Promotion of Active Health. Click here to learn more about Dr. Blair's research and his tips for healthy living.

I was told that the talk I heard will be available on the website, but I don't think it's been posted yet. It's well worth watching and I'll keep an eye out for it. As soon as it's posted, I'll provide the link. But in the meantime, here are my impressions of what I heard...and saw.

Readers who are dedicated weight-loss mavens are probably scratching their heads and wondering how this short, portly gentleman could have anything intelligent to say about good health. The man is FAT. And everyone knows that FAT = UNHEALTHY. Well, my impression of Dr. Blair was that he radiates energy and excellent health. I assumed he was in his early 60s. He's actually 72. His face shines, he's got a pleasant, strong voice and there's not a trace of breathlessness or any other indication that his weight is slowing him down.

In fact, Dr. Blair was, up until recently, a dedicated runner. His wife, who was in the audience, and looks like your aunt Rosie or your wonderful grandma who had that nice comfy lap you sat in as a child, continues to run. Dr. Blair now "only" walks 5,000,000 steps a year. Yes, that's 5 million steps. It works out to an average of 13,600 steps a day. Definitely not someone who lets the grass grow under his feet.

But now, on to the talk:

Dr. Blair's message was clear and simple: your state of health depends first and foremost on whether or not you regularly engage in physical activity. And the physical activity you participate in does not have to be excessive or "hard core" in the least. In countless studies, morbidity is reduced by 50% simply by engaging in 30 minutes of moderate physical activity, five days a week (Dr. Blair also suggest two sessions per week of strength training). Those who engage in significantly more exercise will further reduce their morbidity by 10-15%. In other words, those two hours a day of heart-pounding, sweat-producing running, weight lifting, rowing, rock climbing, karate, etc. etc. will make a relatively minimal difference in your health. It's the 30 minutes of walking (and no, you don't have to speed walk, just try to walk fast enough to pant a bit but still be able to keep up a conversation), housework, gardening, swimming or whatever gets you up and moving that will make you truly healthy and enable you to remain bright-eyed and bushy tailed as you age.

He cited countless studies to support this contention and I'm not going to go over them here. I'm not fast enough at note taking to have recorded everything he said. Again, I'll post the URL as soon as it's put on the site.

What really thrilled me about Dr. Blair's talk, though, was when he got angry. On several occasions, he referred to the weight "cartel" that's desperately trying to convince us that the only true measure of health is weight. It was thrilling to hear him debunk this myth. He clearly stated that fitness, not the lack of fatness, keeps us healthy. He railed against the bias and discrimination that overweight people--himself included--are subject to. I specifically asked for his opinion on the State of Georgia's campaign to fight childhood obesity, which features posters of sad looking fat children with captions that muse about their longevity (likely to die younger than their parents), their eating habits (overeating, not big bones, made them that way) and future health problems (diabetes). Dr. Blair said that he didn't know about this specific campaign, however he believes that such attitudes simply foster discrimination and do little to improve health.

The last question of the evening was the one "everyone had been waiting for". After giving an entire talk about the fact that all the research points to a strong link between being unfit and being in poor health rather than any link between simply being overweight/obese and being unhealthy, a relatively slim woman raised her hand and asked, "but can you really be obese and fit?" Calmly, Dr. Blair asked her whether you can be thin and unhealthy, thin and nasty, or thin and unfit. He said we should forget about weight and stop focusing on it. Essentially, he asked why we continue to flog a dead horse (my words, not his), in other words making weight loss our foremost (if not only) goal, when we know that the vast majority of those who lose weight can't keep it off and--more importantly--it doesn't play a critical role in improving health. He said that we should be concentrating on healthy eating, stress reduction and improving fitness if we want to see a real improvement in our health.

Hearing Dr. Blair speak was a wonderful experience. But it was depressing too, knowing that his message of regular, moderate physical activity for fitness and good health is being absolutely drowned out by the weight-loss cartel. It is truly a tragedy that so many people spend so much time and physical and mental energy chasing the mirage of the so-called healthy BMI while often totally ignoring simple, positive activities that have been shown to have a much more significant and lasting effect on their health.

The Earth is Flat and Other Truths and Heresies

The earth is flat. We all know that. If the earth weren't flat, the level you or your handyperson used to hang that picture in your living room or install your new kitchen cabinets just wouldn't have worked.

If the earth weren't flat, people living in the prairies wouldn't be able to see for "miles and miles" (as The Who used to sing).

If the earth weren't flat, people in Tierra del Fuego would be standing on their heads all the time. For that matter, so would we, seen from the perspective of Tierra del Fuegans.

Right? Right! Wrong.

The thing is, any four year old (at least living in the First World) has seen a 3D version of our world in the form of a globe and knows for a fact that the world is round. Although some people still belong to the Flat Earth Society, I think there is a very broad consensus shared by both lay people and scientists alike that our planet--the world we live in--is actually round.

Notwithstanding this truth, I suspect that over the years, many people were even burned at the stake for daring to say that the earth was round and not flat.

In fact, it took thousands and thousands of years for humankind to admit to this simple fact. Why? Because our eyes don't lie...even though they do.

Controversy is a normal part of the human condition and today's controversial, "out of the mainstream opinion" often becomes an accepted, scientific fact, though it may takes centuries to do so.

Take global warming, for instance. It seems quite obvious to me that global warming is a real phenomenon. As I look out my window this January morning and see the brownish lawn and leafless trees that forty years ago marked the beginning of winter--not the middle, as is the case today!-- I feel quite sure that global warming is something to worry about. But then again, for many (including, I suspect, some of you reading today), global warming is still just a theory--and a very questionable theory at that.

What does all this have to do with weight?

Here's my opinion, based on what I see as the most serious, honest science: when it comes to asserting that losing weight is the only legitimate path to good health, we're still living in the Middle Ages and the world is still definitely flat.

"Common sense" tells us that the lighter we are, the healthier we are. "We all know" that obesity is a sure sign of ill health. "Everyone knows" that there is an obesity epidemic raging out there, and that "for the first time in human history" our "significantly fatter" children are set to live shorter, sicker lives than their parents or grandparents. "You can't deny" that people just weren't fat a hundred years ago.

So says the mainstream. So say Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Dr. Dukan, the myriad of weight loss companies out there, the newly slim stars who shill for these companies, the newly re-fat stars who now shill for their own weight loss systems that THIS TIME will make them finally and irrevocably thin because WE ALL KNOW without a shadow of a doubt that SLIM = HEALTHY.

If I had a penny for every time that I read or heard, "I'm losing weight to get healthy", I'd be a rich woman indeed.

In fact, if I had a penny for every time I repeated this mantra to myself, I wouldn't be worried about paying for my kids' education or making sure I have enough money to retire without having to live on dollar-store pasta, canned sauce and cheap, yellow, chemical-laced margarine on white bread.

Unfortunately, and despite a growing body of research to the contrary, our society has reached the apex of the slim = healthy mania. We are bombarded with this message. The media, the "experts", our mother-in-law, our doctors, our friends and neighbours all know the truth. And the truth is that you are fat because you are a lazy, ignorant, weak-willed Twinkie eating slob and you are unhealthy (if not today, then tomorrow or next year) because you are fat.

Remember: all the above is TRUE. And please keep in mind: the earth really is flat.

Tonight, I'll be attending a talk by Dr. Steven Blair, a professor in the Department of Exercise Science at the University of South Carolina and winner of the "Bloomberg Manulife Prize for the Promotion of Active Health". The talk is entitled "How 30 Minutes a Day Could Save Your Life". I'm really looking forward to going and intend to take copious notes. Then I'll report back on why when it comes to weight and health, the earth is actually not flat, no matter what our eyes (and the media and our friends and neighbours) tell us.

Stay tuned.

Paul Campos's Latest Article

Professor Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth, has published an excellent article on why shaming fat kids for their weight will not make them thin.

Read it here.

One warning though: do not read the comments, 99% of which go even further with the shaming and blaming than the vile anti-childhood obesity campaign in Georgia that he is writing about. If you haven't realized it already, all fat people are lazy, gluttonous slobs. Or so the comments tell us.

I just wanted to cry...or perhaps rip their smug throats out.

Read the article. Skip the comments. Do your blood pressure a favour.

2012

Like all good bloggers, I feel the need to recognize the new year and say something profound and thought-provoking to get us all on our way. LOL

Seriously, I wish you all a wonderful new year. May it be one of health, peace (both personal and worldwide) and self-acceptance for one and all.

I do not have any resolutions to announce.

It seems to me that if you feel that a change is necessary or useful or just plain fun to implement, you should begin it whenever it seems appropriate and not on some mythical date like January 1st. As you know, I began implementing some important mental health habits about 6 weeks ago and, though I have not seen any earth-changing turnarounds in my life, I feel that I have set out on a better, healthier, saner road and will continue to travel on it to the best of my abilities. My physical health concerns are still there, but I am working towards accepting them with more calm and equanimity. This is really important.

This year started out a bit rocky for me. On New Year's Eve, I was feeling just slightly "off". We were supposed to have supper that night at the home of friends who have two small children and around 10 p.m. we planned to head over to a new year's eve party that we've gone to for several years running. My normal appetite just wasn't there, so I ate very lightly at our friends' place. I began feeling very cold, but thought it was just because they live in an old house (similar to ours) and kept the heat down to save on energy costs. I asked for a throw blanket and snuggled on the couch. We were having a wonderful discussion and time flew by. We missed getting to the party and toasted the new year with our friends.

By this time, I felt pretty crummy and realized that there was no way we were going anywhere else but home. Fortunately, our home was only a block away. We got in the door around 1 a.m. and I promptly went to the bathroom and threw up...several times. It was not pretty. I haven't had something like this happen to me in many, many years. It was probably some kind of 24-hour bug rather than food poisoning because I was the only person to get sick. I got up at 8 a.m. to take my thyroid medication, sat down in the bathroom, got the shakes and started sweating, got back into bed and by late morning I felt a lot better.

I barely ate anything yesterday and what I did swallow really burned going down. It made me wonder how bulimics manage to throw up on a regular basis. My oesophagus felt like it had been burned to a crisp and I had only had one barfing session.

The good news is that today I feel fine.

All the best for the new year!

NOT the answer...So what is?

First, thanks to the readers who commented on my Uncle Michael post. I'm glad his story resonated with you as it did with me.

So, now on to putting Uncle Michael's words to work. As you will recall, he said he had to calm down or he would die. And I feel the same way.

The best way to start explaining how I'm going about this hugely important task is to use Sally's words as my springboard. This is what she said (and I heartily agree):

"Antidepressants and tranquilizers are NOT the answer! "

Now, I don't want to tell anyone else how to handle their anxiety. Truly, far be it from me! We all have to find our own way, and if pharmacology is right for you, I won't stand in your way.

However, I know myself well enough to realize that taking pills is not something that really works for me. After my first, disastrous hip surgery, I got really, really depressed and with good reason. I started having a lot of trouble eating enough to simply nourish my body. Food was the last thing on my mind, even when my stomach was screaming with hunger. By the time my surgeon had confirmed that something was really wrong and that he was going to perform a revision, my GP had already put me on an anti-depressant. I knew that the best anti-depressant was having confirmation that I wasn't imagining things and that I really needed another surgery, but it was too late. My GP wanted to keep me on the medication until after the second surgery and I complied. What did it get me? Nothing but some extra poundage I really didn't need!

So, when I recently found myself in a deep, thyroid-induced depression, I knew that neither anxiety nor anti-depressant medication was not the answer.

In the past, right here on this blog, I talked about meditation and more specifically, breathing meditation to help keep me on a more even keel in a very stress filled life. But, to be absolutely honest, I didn't do anything.

This time was different.

As you know, I was in a very deep hole. I had a serious falling out with my work associates and left our group. My reasons, under different circumstances, could have been quite justified. I work in an extremely tense environment. But this has been the only work life I've known for almost twenty-five years and to a great extent, it's just the nature of the beast. You have to have nerves of steel to do what I do, and nerves of steel to deal with the prima donnas who make up a high percentage of people in my profession.

It was being hyperthyroid that took me over the edge, but as I tumbled, I realized that I had a lot of personal, long-standing baggage that made the tumble all the worse. I had to do something more than just take my thyroid medication and mentally paper over the hurt and the anxiety. I was NOT going to go on anti-depressants.

So what have I been doing?

Quite a while ago, I heard about Jon Kabat-Zinn, a well-known practitioner and proponent of "mindfulness" and I finally began to read one of his books on mindfulness, which focuses specifically on people suffering from illness and stress. There's so much and so little to say about mindfulness, being in the moment, not letting yourself be buffeted about by the world around you, ....I really don't know where to start nor what to say, so I'll be brief (after this very long introduction):

Read Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

This book is having a profound effect on me. I'm still quite recognizable, both in body and in spirit, but sometimes it's the little, yet deep changes that make all the difference. I'm keeping these changes for myself. They may mean nothing to you. However, your changes, no matter how small, can have a huge effect on who you are as a human being and how you move through life.

So, if you're looking for something--not something to make you lose weight, or help you burn more calories or rev up your metabolism or tone your abs--something to help you live your life with more calm and personal understanding, and less anxiety, read this book. It may not touch you, but if it does, and you find that it's made a positive change in your life, well, that will make my heart sing.

Read the book!!

Uncle Michael's Lesson to Me

My late uncle Michael had very high blood pressure. Dangerously high.

Lest you jump to conclusions, Uncle M. was neither fat nor did he eat junk food. Throughout his life, he was extremely slim. Born in Poland at the turn of the 20th century, junk food did not exist. Even though he lived in Canada from the end of the 1960s to his death in 2006, he never changed his spartan eating habits: he ate no junk food (I don't think he even knew what the term meant) and subsisted on extremely plain, sometime bordering on horribly bland, food.

Uncle Michael did not drive and until he became too weak to walk at the end of his life, he took public transit or walked everywhere.

In many ways, Uncle Michael was a paragon of "healthy living" and indeed, he lived to a venerable age, dying just short of his 93rd birthday.

Yet, Uncle Michael had high blood pressure. Why?

Years before his death, this is what Uncle Michael told me:

"I realized," said he, "that if I didn't calm down, I would die."

Uncle Michael did not live an easy life. He was born in a small village in Poland just before World War 1. There was a great deal of upheaval during his first years of life. In fact, the family almost ended up in Siberia due to the political activities of the oldest son (there were 8 children in the family and Michael was the youngest).

Michael was also severely short-sighted but no one thought to fit him with glasses. He actually had a terrible run-in with a barbed wire fence as a child since he didn't see it early enough to avoid running into it.

A quiet, artistic soul, he nevertheless followed his family's wishes and went to study engineering in France in 1939. He did not speak a word of French, but learned the language through dogged determination and did become an engineer. Of course, his studies were interrupted by the Second World War. As a Jew, he spent the war years travelling around France, sleeping in different rooming houses almost every night and often less than one step ahead of the Gestapo and certain death. He owed his life to several righteous Gentiles he met along the way.

After the war, Michael continued to live and work in France. He thought he had lost his entire family during the Holocaust. My father found him in the late sixties and they were re-united in Canada. Two other sisters (one who had come to Canada, the other in Israel) also survived.

Despite his education and professional qualifications, Michael never managed to find work as an engineer in Canada. He did various things to earn a living and finally went back to his true love, art, in his retirement. He painted, drew and sculpted for many years. He also went back to learning Russian when already in his seventies. In all, he spoke six languages. I always spoke to him in French.

So, in sum, Uncle Michael did not have an easy life. He had good reason to suffer from the anxiety that was no doubt at the root of his high blood pressure. He needed outside help (aka medication) to deal with his blood pressure, but he also realized that he had to work with himself to keep his mind from killing his body. This is the lesson Uncle Michael taught me, although I have only come to realize it all too recently.

Over the past few weeks, I have come to understand the power of the mind-body connection and its relationship to my thyroid issues.

First, please be disabused of the idea that the thyroid is a benign little gland usually blamed for difficulties in losing weight. No! It's a powerhouse and when it goes out of balance (in my case, making me hyper) it can wreak havoc and sometimes kill.

There are a host of symptoms associated with being hyperthyroid (Graves disease) but the one that I did not know about threw my whole life into turmoil: extreme anxiety. Like Uncle Michael and like my older son (who has an uncanny resemblance to Uncle Michael), I have a strong tendency to catastrophize. I think back on things I have done (or not done) and go into paroxysms of regret. I think ahead to potential disasters and fixate on them, whether or not there is any possibility that they may occur and whether or not I have any control over whether they come to pass. Put this aspect of my character together with a thyroid that is hereditarily prone to becoming hyper and you have a recipe for disaster.

In short, I worried my thyroid over the edge, catastrophizing events that had occurred and events that I feared would occur, and then I became psychologically unhinged. All the comments I made on my work and my colleagues were true. It is a difficult environment and many of the people I work with are divas who fly off the handle at the drop of a hat. However, my generally anxious nature, which helped to bring on the relapse of Graves disease and which then fed the flames of the Graves disease to the nth degree led me to the brink of a professional crisis that did not have to happen.

Recently, Uncle Michael's words about calming down suddenly resounded again in my brain.

Yes, I most certainly did need medication (and I'm still on it, BTW). I was physically in a dangerous situation. But I also realized that it was time to go within and confront my anxious mind and my catastrophizing ways. That is what I have started doing.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of the saga!

BIG P.S. I have heard from two readers who can't leave comments on this blog. If this is the case for you too, please leave me a message at ima.canuck at hotmail dot com. I'm looking into the problem.