More about the comforts and discomforts of food
In the first place, I meant to post this link as part of the Comforting Food entry, and then got so overwhelmed by everything else out there, I forgot:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/10/nuffield-health-study-laziness *
More discouraging statistics:
One in six people would rather watch a TV programme they didn’t like than leave the sofa to change the channel if their remote control was broken
What? I can see picking up a book because you don’t want to move, perhaps because you’re covered with sleeping hellhounds, and because of course you always do have a book** within reach. But watching something you don’t even like because you can’t get your butt off the sofa? That’s not lazy, that’s sinister.***
More than half of dog owners (52%) did not walk their dogs
. . . And that’s appalling. That means that around 52% of our dogs are neurotic nutjobs, excepting a few Yorkshire terriers and Chihuahuas with big gardens, and the geriatric contingent who will only wake up long enough to glare at you if you suggest a stroll.†
Meanwhile, other good points around all this made by forumites:
Diane in MN writes:
The TIME article mentions a number of frequently-cited benefits of exercise, like a healthier heart and muscle tone and improved (or at least maintained) cognition††, but leaves out one obvious one: when you are exercising, you are not eating. . . . I tend not to feel hungry when I’m deeply involved in some project, especially something that involves physical exertion. People go to food for lots of reasons besides hunger, and I believe one of those reasons is because they just aren’t physically active enough.
Yes; that’s another aspect of what I perceive as my body telling me how much to eat. I suppose it’s a kind of body awareness that many of us only get by being physically active whether it counts as ‘exercise’ or not.
Fake Frenchie
I am overweight by about 25 lbs (33 lbs if you agree with my gyn that I should weigh less than I weighed in college when I was relatively thin). But, I have learned to live with these pounds, since when I try to lose them, they keep coming back.
This is a good moment to remark that Whatever You Do/Are You Will Be Wrong: I don’t know what standard your gyn is using, but by the standard NHS one I’m under weight. Piffle. I’m a small person with long femurs. I’m as appalled by the ‘size zero’ fetish as I am worried about the obesity epidemic—but one of my credos is that you don’t have to be thin and that anybody who is trying to bully anybody else with a one-size-fits-all chart ought to be . . . made to eat it. People are different. Pass it on.
I’m not disciplined enough to exercise at the house.
Insert a beginning-to-be-familiar McKinley rant here on the way our society is set up that to get ‘exercise’ you have to have ‘discipline’ and do something like join a ‘gym’. I wouldn’t ‘exercise’ either if it were One More Thing on the List. I have hellhounds. They ‘exercise’ me. They provide that final unwriggleoutfromunderable necessity to get out there and walk a few miles—aside from knowing that I’ll feel better if I do. Moral superiority isn’t enough. I need the blunt-instrument approach. A hellhound expecting to go out is a very blunt instrument.
This is what works for me. I don’t know what would work for you, or how hard where you live and what you do would make any attempts to build ‘exercise’ into your life. But I do feel that the world we live in makes physical activity counterproductively difficult, not unlike the way it makes raising kids difficult.
But I’m relatively happy so it can’t be all bad.
Bingo.
PS-I’ve never understood about endorphins. I ran for 2 months every day, and never experienced the endorphin high that my sousin went on about.
Some people get endorphin highs and some don’t. One of those many nasty life facts. You can’t even hold out eventual endorphins as a bribe to keep people at their Stairmasters. I will say however—which you will probably not be pleased to hear—that two months isn’t really long enough to know one way or another. I found it kind of snuck up on me, like ringing Stedman. Couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, COULDN’T DO IT, can’t dooooooo it stop torturing me . . . oh.
jmeadows
Boredom is a big thing. Even just sitting here at the computer writing or doing other work, I still don’t find myself hungry because I’m doing stuff.
Um. Well. I have these zero-calorie popped-corn crunchy things I eat when I HAVE TO PUT SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH!!!!! when, for example, Story in Progress is driving me crazy. This is one way to manage—ahem!—the patterning of having been over-oral in one’s teens. I suspect it’s another of those you-are-what-you-are things: I get endorphin highs, but I also get the munchies.
When I was in dance and worked out hard for usually two or three hours a day, I was never hungry right after practice. But by lunch time, no one get between that burrito and me.
When you’re fabulously fit the rules change, I think. I spent about a year pumping iron [sic] and my cough-cough trainer, which is to say the gym I belonged to had some guy there all the time it was open, and one of them to keep himself amused trained a few of us who were interested. He had all kinds of weird food things that had to do with how the body reacted under certain kinds of stress. But then he also trained people for competition which was not anywhere I wanted to go.
And besides, when you exercise, your metabolism (usually) goes up, so you can eat those extra calories. You need them to survive! It isn’t rocket science.
This is another thing that doesn’t look right to me about the TIME article. I don’t think individual live bodies necessarily behave the way laboratory-perfect scientific measurements say they are going to. The article says that your metabolism doesn’t go up enough to make a difference. But that’s not what my subjective experience of being more fit and less fit says, nor is it the experience of various friends who’ve also successfully negotiated the weight/exercise/life struggle.
I never got [endorphin highs] from running, either. Even when I was in top shape and had to run every day to keep it up, I never got it. Running killed me. I don’t know if it was a mental thing or what, but I could dance for 8 hours and feel awesome (if exhausted) by the end, but ten minutes running laps around the gym? No.
Yes, well, I can’t think of anything more boring than running laps for ten minutes around a gym toward some required maintenance level. I don’t think if you’re actively having a bad time, your endorphins are going to be able to get out of whatever murky little niches they live in—all the critter is connected, you know? Physical and mental and so on. You’re doing something when you’re dancing: you’re creating dance. You’re engaging with something. The teeny doors on your glands snap open and your endorphins come out to join the fun.
I suspect it’s a very individual thing. What works for others might not work for you.
Absolutely.
Mrs Redboots
Exercise may or may not burn calories but it builds muscle. And muscle is denser than fat – so you get thinner, even if you don’t weigh any less!
Yes. This is also true—or it’s true here on the ground, whatever the scientists/ weight charts say. And another argument against the Tyranny of the Scales. You’re much better off noticing how your clothes hang on you. As you get fitter—and here, finally, is a guarantee—your clothes will decorate you much more pleasingly. So pleasingly, indeed, that you may have to go out and buy more.
I’m overweight, but not nearly as badly overweight as I was immediately post-menopause; I have dropped 30 lbs or so since then. In an ideal world, I’d lose a bit more, but we don’t live in an ideal world.
Yes. Everyone who wants to beat up on themselves for perceived failures about this, that or the other thing, pin this to the wall where you will look at it a lot. We do not live in an ideal world.
I watch what I eat and skate several times a week (usually) and reckon I’ll just about do!
I am praying my experience of after menopause is going to be like yours: I doubt that this is one of the guaranteed outcomes. As well as being a small person with long femurs and not wanting to buy a whole new wardrobe, I have terrible knees: I don’t know where their limits are, but if I were obese, I’d also be in a wheelchair. But life on lettuce††† gets old. Has got old. Not being a rabbit and all.
. . . And I did want to get this in before I yank this fabulously over-long entry to an overdue close:
Lucy Coats
| Quote: |
| †† I’ve just been signing a Downing Street petition to stop the codex alimentarius from ruling my (and your) life. I’d give you a nice clear link at this point if I could find one, but I can’t. It’s a bit like the Google settlement: no I don’t understand it and any choice I make has a fifty-fifty chance of being the wrong one, but my gut instinct says that Big Brother is a bully. |
Here’s the link to the petition I was sent it a couple of days ago and have passed it to all I can think of as it’s a disgraceful piece of meddling uninformed legislation and the Hellgoddess’s gut instinct is correct and more than correct here.
And as AJLR says:
Thanks, Lucy.
–[who is] outraged at the possibility of having to give up my wintertime Vit D supplements
And I have to go read proofs.
* * *
* Remember Nandalia, from Ungleblarg, continued? The girl who, when she moved to the side of the path to get out of the way of a thundering horde of [two] hellhounds plus hellgoddess, went to the other side of the path from the rest of her family, so hellhounds and I had to thread a rather narrow, lumpy needle? And the mum said, in a quite mild, normal sort of tone, but obviously for my hearing, ‘oh, she’s useless’? And this bothered me enough that I put it in my blog entry? There were several forum comments agreeing that it was disturbing and hurtful to the girl—and I’ve had several private emails to similar effect: that they know how much it hurts because it was applied to them when they were children. Ugh. I’m really sorry this is familiar to so many people.
I don’t know how the ads work, so I don’t know if this one will be there if/when you click to read the article, but as I read this page, there’s an ad for the NSPCC—National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children^ for you non-Brits—of a little girl staring forlornly out at you. Over her head a series of banners flash: I hate you. Get out of my sight. You make me sick. You’re disgusting. You’re worthless. You’re useless.
Italics mine.
^ Yes, it’s one of the ones I subscribe to. It was one of the first I signed on for when I moved over here and started casting around for worthy British causes in arenas of human misbehaviour that I care especially strongly about. Child abuse would be on that list. Children are our future, for godssake. Reality check, you know? It makes me crazy that the default corporate/workplace attitude is—still—that kids are something you do in your spare time and they don’t want to hear about it. Who’s going to run your frelling company/factory/slower-than-light galaxy-crossing generational spaceship if your adults haven’t had time^ to raise some kids to be thoughtful responsible hard-working adults in their turn?
Rant rant rant rant. This is the point I was making in the Gould Academy speech that got me the standing ovation http://www.robinmckinley.com/etc/speech_gould.php so I know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s a problem. Sure, there are ways around this—I have a lot of friends with kids who have found various creative means by which to have both careers and healthy, interesting, well-brought-up children, but it has seemed to me looking on that it’s a lot harder than it ought to be.
Have I said all this here before? Brace yourselves. I’ll say it again too.
^ The Nuffield study also says: two-thirds (64%) of parents admit to always being too tired to play with their children. Which, I would hazard, isn’t only about laziness.
** Or twelve. Or forty-six
*** It looks like depression to me. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8230549.stm And being too tired to play with your kids, walk your dog—or get off the sofa to change the TV programme—could be either symptom or cause.
† There may be dogs that don’t need walking, and some of you out there may have them. But I would need pretty serious convincing. Generally speaking, if you sign on for a dog, you’re signing on for walking ’em. It’s not wholly unlike having kids: you have kids, you’re signing on for playing with them. Which is also part of the point, surely? Walking your dog should also be fun. It’s one of the reasons you got a dog. And I would have thought all that nappy-changing would drive you bonkers if you didn’t get also to teach it pat-a-cake and peek-a-boo and hang-gliding and violin.
†† This is one of those ‘and if this is what I’m like under optimum conditions’ things. . . . If I were a couch potato presumably I wouldn’t still be speaking in complete sentences.^ Or I wouldn’t be bothering to get off the sofa because it didn’t matter what I was watching.
Like I was a major carrot fiend when I was a kid. I still needed glasses by second grade.^^
^ I rarely speak in complete sentences. I run off at the fingers instead.
^^ I didn’t get glasses till the summer before seventh grade, however. Kids can be remarkably good liars.
††† It’s nearly this bad, yes. Because I have to save some calories for Green & Black’s, port blueberry bread, brownie shortbread, etc.
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