Change can be hard. Once you get used to thinking, believing and acting a certain way, anything else is tough at best and unimaginable at worst. But one day it's time to make a U-turn where you're used to a hard right. Don't look back. You might get salty.
I have a client whose husband one day, many years ago now, quit drinking and drugs just out of the blue. There was no lead up. There was no hitting rock bottom. He never attended an AA meeting. He doesn't talk about it. He's never lapsed. He's never relapsed. He just looked around his junky apartment one day when coming out of stupor, and he said, "is this what I want my life to be?" Now it could be said that he didn't spend enough time examining his pathology. He didn't face the underlying cause. But in some ways, a lot of ways, he's better off because of it. He never accepted a label of "alcoholic," "drug addict," "loser," "piece of trash." So he never had to run from the label. He never had to look back at the label. He never had to think he was an unchangeable X. He just moved forward, one foot in front of the other. I think this is a critical piece of the ancient Hebrew story about Lot's wife. Following divine ordinance, she's fled her old life. But she looks back and is turned to a pillar of salt. You can't say the feeling isn't familiar. If you look back on an old time, an old you, a mistaken place, you can feel the saltiness. It's unsettling. And what place have you, thinking about a road you've deliberately chosen not to travel? I like to picture any repeated thought or behavior as a trail through a thicketed woods. As more and more traffic travels that same trail it gets worn very smooth. There are no more vines in the way, no more logs in the path, no more brush to remove. It's open, unimpeded and free. Picture a superhighway where there once was the first wagon creaking and thunking over frontier grasslands. The same thing happens with the action potentials in your brain. Over time, as you travel that same trail, it becomes virtually effortless for your brain to run the same sequence. To think or behave a certain way becomes as flowingly easy as your most familiar trip to work, school, or your favorite hangout. Sometimes you arrive and aren't even sure how you got there - it's so easy. It's like reading that last sentence. You don't even think about the word "sometimes," let alone the s sound, o sound, m sound, e sound, t sound, i sound, m sound, e sound or adding them together and then interpreting the meaning. In an instant you read the first three words of that sentence as a unit and fit them into the context of the ensuing sentence. It's preconscious. It's habit. Every moment of every day the vast majority of our responses are pre-programmed to be instantaneous and require very little energy. So when the time comes to think, believe, act or behave a different way... ugh, it's like a badly plotted city construction detour. It takes longer. It's less efficient. It's frustrating. It's angering. It's not natural. It's not fair. It's not right. It's not good. It's just wrong. It just shouldn't be that way. It can even feel like you're going to die. It hurts. It's an affront to your very identity. It's a breech of your rights. It's the worst thing imaginable. It's unconscionable. But in some cases, it's the only way out. If that's the case, the worst possible thing you can do is look back, longing for the way you once lived, lusting for the easy road you've decided not to take, hoping for some justification to run the same neural circuit you know so well. I recently heard a speaker make a very good point about temptation. We are a temptation-heavy culture. After all, we're capitalists, the best darn ones who've ever existed on planet earth. Making capital hinges on temptation. Heck, advertising is little more than a tempting allure. But to be tempted is not the same as giving in. Watching a Coca Cola commercial is not the same as drinking a refreshing Coke. But it is tempting. As such, if you don't want to drink Coke anymore, maybe you shouldn't even subject yourself to temptation either. If you are committed to turning from Coke, you've got to commit to turning from the temptation of Coke too. It sounds extreme, I know. But the extreme can become the every day. It's just another trail to mow down. Yeah, it's uncomfortable. But it'll become effortless. In my household, we don't fight temptation when grocery shopping anymore. Being gluten free is preconscious. There's no internal conflict purchasing only fresh food. It's become the worn path. It's become the easy trail. Now, it's hard to make some of the wrong nutritional choices, because they've become so unfamiliar. When people tell me they had bread, or pasta, or beer, I just say, "they still make that?". It's partly a joke. But I kinda mean it. Unfortunately most people aren't going to help you turn your back on your old life. We tend to vilify the dieter among us. We tend not to abstain from alcohol when our friends are struggling with addiction. There's some sort of social premium on accusingly stating "I don't understand why you...". More effort is put into "I don't understand how..." as a debate device than in actually trying to understand people. We tend to say "be who you are" to those of us grappling with change. It's a nonsensical statement by the way. No one IS anything. Like a river, we are constantly flowing, changing, widening or thinning in spots, getting deeper or shallower here and there, smoothing rocks or pulling off sediment. You are always becoming, but never are. I don't say this as some sort of transcendental hokum. It's true. Every moment you are sloughing off dead cells, making new replacements. Outside of a few exceptions (I.e. - neurons in the cerebral cortex, some heart cells, etc.) there isn't a cell currently in your body that existed ten years ago, nor one that will exist in another ten years. So what exactly are you labeling? Nothing permanent. Nothing more than a process which can be changed this instant. Nothing more than a trail which will be different one day in the future, just as it didn't exist one day in the past. And the new “you” need no longer be salty.
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The term "Type A" is a medical distinction for high risk cardiovascular disease patients. Psychologists expanded upon it to determine what behaviors or beliefs could also typify this personality. However, it's since been discovered that most of the research on Type A behavior was a not-so-thinly-veiled attempt by tobacco companies to absolve themselves of responsibility and blame smokers' bad health on their personality type (http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2012.300816). It should also be noted that for over thirty years psychologists and neuroscientists have generally concluded that even the idea of a personality type is inherently flawed, demonstrably false, and thinking of oneself as a fixed type is detrimental (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-buddha-was-introvert/201404/there-is-no-such-thing-introvert-or-extrovert). The best personality typing assessments out there fail the most basic of scientific requirements: reliable reproducibility (http://fortune.com/2013/05/15/have-we-all-been-duped-by-the-myers-briggs-test/).
Type A, as it's thought of in the zeitgeist, isn't real. It's unscientific. However, there is something which is real, and for which I believe Type A is code language: addiction - specifically, overcommitment to a given activity, like career or the workplace. This is, after all, the hallmark Type A humble brag: I'm a work-a-holic. Quite obviously this isn't a brag at all. It's a fairly depressing commentary on one's inability to have depth of character, breadth of expertise, balance in life and the cultivation of meaningful relationships or the wherewithal to maintain them. Identifying as a Type A is a real problem. The people who live the healthiest, happiest, longest lives do have some common traits, and none of them are what we typically think of as Type A. According to the Blue Zones (the National Geographic study of the healthiest, happiest, longest lived people), family first, sense of community and purpose, along with stress management and physical activity all feature heavily. Totally absent from the list is upward career trajectory or amassing a fortune. And that's why thinking you're a Type A is not good for you in the broad idea or abstract. But let's talk about it on the individual concrete level. In the past fourteen years I've encountered tens of thousands of fitness club members and would-be customers, and thousands of clients, and I hired and developed hundreds of employees. Sometimes people use the term "Type A" just to mean driven or passionate. Great. That's very helpful. However, among those who meant "Type A" as overcommitted to work, I can't think of a single time they succeeded at the majority of their stated goals with any staying power. And I'm not just talking about fitness. They're woefully depressed and depressing people, having yoked their self-worth to a single job, which itself may or may not be of any real value. Their internal integrity is worthless, because every time they say they are going to do something, a workplace demand will trump their own word. This is a slippery slope. Once someone learns not to listen to himself, he's become very skillful at letting himself and others down with regularity. To illustrate, consider the following. Several years ago a young woman who considered herself Type A came to me for coaching. She was a new mom with a one-year old. The woman couldn't stop calling herself a "classic Type A," proudly mentioning her attainment of a high level executive position at a Fortune 500 company. I didn't burst her bubble by telling her that I have lots of clients who are as or more professionally successful. I just let her have her moment. She was intense and high energy. As she began to outline for me a typical day, week and month, I realized that there was no way adding workout time to her schedule was going to be beneficial at this point in her life. She had just described a workday wherein she maybe spends 30 minutes with her baby at the end of the day. I told her my concern. But she assured me that she was now operating at a high enough level in her career that she could set the work hours, the meeting times and travel schedule more or less. In order to make it work, she required our appointments be at a specific morning time where I already had dependable regulars. Normally, I'd point someone like this elsewhere. My hope got the better of me, and I shuffled the calendar around for her. Our first movement assessment raised more red flags. She couldn't solidly perform a basic squat. This is no big deal. I see it all the time. But based on the way she had described herself beforehand, it was a little puzzling, given that she wanted to perform and claimed she was prepared for advanced workouts. It's a common theme among people who aren't even ready for beginner workouts: just push me. For safety's sake, you have to lay some ground work before the hardcore stuff. Due to recent child-bearing and sedentary lifestyle, pelvic floor musculature and hip stabilizing muscles are sleepy. It's common. I began to describe the path of initial corrective exercise, and she interjected, "but I was just doing hard workouts two years ago!" Within the second week, she was already cancelling and rescheduling due to early morning work meetings. These were the same meetings she promised herself would take a backseat to her new healthy lifestyle. This is a familiar story. Like most self-identified Type A professionals, she fizzled. My colleagues in the fitness industry know this well. The best clients are driven people who are capable of leaving work on time, setting boundaries, and seeking some sort of human balance. These people keep their word. They work the steps. The worst clients are the alleged high achievers who don't really have anything else in the portfolio. Whatever they say is totally unreliable because it is contingent on their fluctuating perception of workplace demand; and they haven't gained the maturity to control it. Starting right after that same client's predictable departure, I changed something fundamental in my approach which has been profound. I began telling clients in their first consult that there is no such thing as Type A. You are going to have plateaus, setbacks, sticking points, possibly injuries and illness. All hell is going to break loose at home and at work. You are going to get audited. You are going to have some inexplicable health concern or an elusive ache or pain. You are going to lose a loved one. It's going to be tough. It's going to be challenging. Now what? Now how Type A are you about your fitness program? You're not. You're lost. You're demotivated. You're a quitter. What is going to happen when that inevitable day arrives? What if that day is tomorrow? Don't just hope and pray that day is years away. What if that day is later this afternoon? There are some lucky people who go long periods of time without any real challenge. Luck is not a strategy. What is your strategy for the worst week? By having this "face reality" talk, I've seen the self-proclaimed Type A clients last ten times longer than they used to. It's akin to the realization in child psychology that we aren't doing kids any favors by calling them smart. Instead, focus on the effort and work that brought about the success. In the same way that children can become increasingly risk-averse and progressively incapable of acquiring new skills by identifying as smart, adults can paint themselves into a corner by identifying as Type A. "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got." - Henry Ford If you want something different, you have to do something different. Thinking you're a Type A is the same thing you've always done. Thinking Type A is good is the same thing you've always done. It's time to do something different. Remember the ads: milk - it does a body good. Those must've been scientifically based, right? There is no possible way that lobbying groups played a role in that ad campaign. Also, it's just sensible that bones have calcium; therefore, we have to pummel the body with piles of calcium-rich foods, right?
Well, it turns out that milk is not the densest calcium-rich food. Various green veggies are. Whoops. It also turns out that osteoporosis and hip fracture rates are highest in the developed world with the highest intakes of calcium: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004072/. Hmm. That's weird, huh? It also turns out that very high calcium intake appears to be causal in cardiac event risk and arterial plaques: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170808145454.htm. The National Institutes of Health was loathe to admit this connection, but finally has, even though they long ago took to supporting the eat-lots-of-calcium mythology. Oops. Fat soluble vitamins (which we long ago removed from dairy in our low fat and no fat efforts) are actually responsible for how your body lays down bone matrix: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5494092/. Intense physical activity tells your body to build strong bones. This is probably at least a small part of the reason females have a higher propensity toward bone mass loss than males. We now know that perfectly healthy astronauts get osteoporosis within just a few weeks of weightlessness. So, again, loading the skeleton is of paramount importance. But then, there's this cute little piece of the puzzle that somehow everyone missed. Well, everyone in the mainstream medical and scientific communities missed it (and some still aren't up to date). Now, expert consensus agrees that higher dietary protein intake has a vital role in skeletal health: https://www.iofbonehealth.org/news/expert-consensus-finds-higher-protein-intake-benefits-adult-bone-health. The rest of us in the health and fitness fields who've long emphasized legitimately beneficlal and effective training and nutrition were talking about this while we were being readily naysaid ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Protein. It's been known forever to make up the vast majority of bone by volume. Yet, we strength coaches and trainers who recommended moderate to high protein were considered irresonsible, bro-science touting, and playing with fire with regards to kidney pressures and acid load. Whoopsie! I guess television commercials weren't infallable founts of perfect nutritional information. In a landmark breakthrough meta-analysis, data collection has shown that lifting heavy weights is a waste of time, and the greatest health and fitness outcomes are gleaned from really long walks and yard work. Celebrities and fitness models break their silence on what it takes to achieve incredible physiques: the secret is to avoid all intense muscle contraction and just do a lot of incredibly time-consuming cardio and low-level activity.
We all know that I made up the headline and opening paragraph. Yet, most people behave as if it were the truth. I've run into many individuals over the years who are under some delusion that things will get better if they don't pick up heavy weights. I haven't ever seen a single example of improvement with the removal of intense muscle contraction. It would be contrary to all research. Not a single fitness model or celebrity who gets in shape does so by avoiding intense physical activity. But people operate their lives as if it's going to be true. I don't recall hearing anyone say, "I'd love to have the body of a walker, gardener, or leaf raker." Activity is nice. And it's a really great starting point for the sedentary individual, in fact. But I'm telling you, 30 minutes of heavy strength training beats hours of sweaty activity. Over the course of 42,000 hours of professional experience, I've witnessed hundreds of fitness professionals work hundreds of thousands of hours with members and clients. I've seen many people train for marathons only to find themselves in worse shape. I've seen people gain weight even though they are outside doing activity every day. Nothing beats the outcome of a consistent practice of strengthening. Nothing. http://main.poliquingroup.com/…/Ten_Reasons_Everybody_Shoul… Charles Eugster was frail and decrepid at 87 years old. So he decided to start lifting weights. Within a few years he was considered by many the fittest old person on planet earth. At 96 years old he was sprinting and setting rowing records. He reversed aging up to a point where some of his white hair turned brown and he had a renewed libido: www.vice.com/en_us/article/nn9xzg/charles-eugster-fittest-oap-on-planet
He died at 97 years old. That fact saddens me. However, as you study what the guy really enjoyed in the last ten years of his life, it was incredible. He might've lived longer or shorter due to his efforts. That we will never really know for a fact. I think it's reasonable to assume he lived longer than he would've otherwise. But what we can know beyond a shadow of a doubt was that his enjoyment of life and capability in his last ten years was greater than the ten prior to that. His story is reflective of the possibility for all people. Increasingly, there are stories of late-in-life health and fitness starters who achieve something totally remarkable. They get better. In a way, they get younger. Dr. Terry Wahls calls this phenomenon "youthening." By her measure, when people genuinely commit to strengthening and certain nutritional protocols, they can turn back the clock about 10 years before they begin to "age" again. She's a genuine medical doctor and scientific researcher who reversed her own progressive MS which had her previously wheelchair-bound. So she isn't blowing smoke. Repeatedly over the years, I have run across a substantial mental health problem: discontinuing strength training for various BS excuses. Sometimes people stop because they "lose motivation." Sometimes they stop because they get "soooo busy." Sometimes they stop because they worship the scale and fixate on weight-measurement-idolatry to the exclusion of living healthily. Sometimes they get overzealous and tweak something, giving up, because, after all, "what's the point of healthy behaviors if I get some discomfort in the meantime?" Whatever it is, no matter how seemingly sensible, the cost of discontinuing is HIGH.
You can always get leaner if you're strong and functional. However, you cannot always get stronger and functional if you build into your mindset that strength and function aren't worth the persistent continuous investment of time and effort. None of the scary physical and mental degeneration is linked to aging, but rather linked to the fact that we get less active as we age and we accumulate damage from unhealthy living. Every day that ticks by without a concerted effort at improvement is a day which moves you closer to degeneration. Whether it be cognitive decline, osteoporosis, the hormonal imbalance which lends itself to obesity and disease comorbidities, time isn't neutral. As was shown in this study, you think you can "take a break" from taking care of yourself. That very thinking is your undoing. Caffeine is heart protective. This is the mitochondrial activity in cardiac cells as we introduce more caffeine.
Specifically, the amount of caffeine in four cups of coffee improves mitochondrial function such that cardiovascular damage is mitigated: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.2004408&fbclid=IwAR2AsG0XuEM73aG80fXgAWYLTzwb9kFa_B8qA6BcMlkC8QJRW5uauWEGvMk Disclaimer: this sharing of science is being done neither sensitively nor insensitively. It is merely the sharing of scientific research from which all people can be educated, and some may find applicable and some may not. I share science with no intent to praise or condemn anyone. No one needs to feel bad if they never drank coffee, don't drink coffee, won't drink coffee. I don't expect people to go back in time with this information. Even with this information, some may choose not to have caffeine; and they're totally free to do however they please. Some people with the genetic or epigenetic variants with limited tolerance for caffeine may not be able to glean this benefit. That's ok. No one is judging you. http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article… Every cell in the human body requires sodium and chloride for base functionality. So it stands to reason that we will improve biological function by restricting our salt intake, right? Yeah. It never made sense even when it allegedly ostensibly "made sense." Scientific American takes the subject to task here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/. They weren't the first to do it.
Though your clinician may still default to this now-defunct and archaic tactic of salt-restriction recommendation, it was never really en vogue in the first place; and their own organization, the American Medical Association, has repeatedly found that moderating salt intake shows no conclusive evidence of reduced risk of death: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/899663. Of course, if your doctors don't read their own publication, they can't know that contemporary science and medicine do not support the high-salt/increased-risk-of-cardiac-event fictional hypothesis. Like when kids learn Santa Claus isn't real, it's usually not enough to just hear that something is a made up fiction. We generally need to wrap our heads around how the fiction took hold as a truth in order to relinquish it back into the ether of mythologies and pseudosciences. Essentially, this little ditty goes something like this: Sodium is mostly held in a solution in the body. That solution requires fluid. More fluid means more blood. More blood means more possible pressure. Higher pressure has an association with increase health risk. Ergo, salt is evil. There are a lot of question-begging pieces to this seemingly-reasonable series of logic statements. The first one, of course, is that there is no mention of insulin or inflammation. Without insulin or inflammation, massive piles of sodium cannot acquire more solution. That is, in an absence of insulin and inflammation, we can't retain sodium in the first place. So we never get to the increased blood volume proposal. Thus, trying to address systemic inflammation via sodium was never going to work in the first place. In fact, because it is an essential nutrient, the very people who need to recover their health the most probably need MORE sodium, not less. Thus they get a double hit on their cardiovascular risk when trying to listen to the old dogma. Prepare for three shockers. One - if you drop carbohydrate intake, you drop insulin. Two - if you drop stress, you drop the need for increased blood volume. Three - if you drop weight... YOU ARE A SMALLER ANIMAL whose blood volume will never be as much as a bigger animal. As you do those three things consistently, inflammation is better controlled, and cardiovascular risk decreases or evaporates. The other ENORMOUS question-begging within the salt-myth is that the addition or subtraction of dietary salt has ONLY immediate effects of blood pressure. That is, your underlying levels of inflammation and these other things you might've heard about before called organs prevent blood pressure from going up or down in perpetuity. You can't just keep adding salt and keep raising blood pressure. It doesn't work that way. Conversely, you can't just reduce salt and keep reducing blood pressure. You have this funny system called KIDNEY function. If the signal you send to your body is "I can't manage stress well; I am overweight; and I am inflamed," good luck trying to trick it into reducing risk of death by giving it less sodium - this sodium, need I remind you, which makes life possible in the first place. Last but not least, like all other correlations in disease, we don't always know when correlation is causation or which direction the causal arrow points. Does it stand to reason that an otherwise healthy body magically creates high blood pressure; and that ONE SINGLE simple change leads to risk? Or is it more likely that a multifactorial unhealthy body is incurring damage that IS heart disease; and that disease is either causing increased blood pressure or your body is trying to address the disease via efforts which involve more blood volume? Of course, if the latter, not only will reducing sodium be futile, it may dramatically raise risk of death. That's to mention nothing of the many many many other systems in the body which of absolute necessity require copious sodium to function at all, let alone optimally. Carrying constant anger/outrage shortens your life.
There have been many studies reduplicating this. And there’s clearly a precedent for it among the longest lived people on earth. Pick your fights wisely; and be careful. It seems to me that an increasingly common trend online is perpetual offense and being incensed about every possible opposing opinion or statement. The only person paying the price for your irritation and inability to calm your heart is you. And it’s a very big price: your life. The medical research verdict is in: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/…/forgiveness-your-health-d… A brilliant but unfortunately-named article, since people can develop elevated blood sugars and insulin from bad stress management alone, not just diet.
Nonetheless, understanding receptor mechanisms in the body will lead someone to get a good handle on this link, regardless of epidemiological proofs. Think of it this way: the receptors which respond to alcohol become numb as you introduce progressively more alcohol into the body. The receptors which respond to caffeine become increasingly deaf to the signal of caffeine as you repeatedly bring in more and more. This is called tolerance/dependency/etc. The cells inside your brain receive energy via different pathways, one of which is insulin knocking on the door to let sugar in. If you repeatedly, persistently, daily, increasingly pound on the door of insulin receptors in the brain, you WILL deafen and deaden the receptors which bring energy into those brain cells. That disrepair IS neural degeneration. How much? However much you decide to do throughout your life. There was a case study several years ago about a man with Alzheimer's reversing his affliction with the introduction of coconut oil into his diet. A lot of people picked up on this tactic with varying degrees of success or failure. Once again, this is where a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. To re-upregulate receptors will take more than bringing in some ketones from coconut oil. It will require heavy and intense (and INCREASINGLY heavier and more intense) exercise to create specific enzymes which can allow the brain cells to grow again, clear cell waste again, reverse the degeneration, etc. It will require starving the already-chemical-dependent brain cells of their drug - sugar - for a long enough period of time to reset the down-regulation. It will require a fair bit of fasting efforts so as to amplify autophagy and clear the "rust" on aged and damaged cells. It will require commitment to solid sleep and reliable sleep and wake times. It will require some serious processes to reverse the accumulated damage which we call Alzheimer's or any other degenerative affliction. Or... today, before you have Alzheimer's or dementia or some other neural degenerative disease, you can start introducing those things in modest measure so as to lower or eliminate your risk in the first place. https://www.theatlantic.com/…/the-startling-link-be…/551528/ |
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