WHEE (Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise) is a community support diary for Kossacks who are currently or planning to start losing, gaining or maintaining their weight through diet and exercise or fitness. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are working on your weight or fitness, please -- join us! You can also click the WHEE tag to view all diary posts.
Peek out from under the fold to see today's review of an ancient Greek fable and how tried and true common sense, along with doing your homework, listening to yourself, facing facts, conducting research and listening to the experience of others, can produce lasting and measurable change in regaining health, acquiring or reacquiring fitness. If this battered, semi-old turtle can gain on the hare, then you young turtles can certainly get there too.
*The Tortoise and The Hare*
There once was a speedy hare who bragged about how fast he could run. Tired of hearing him boast, Slow and Steady, the tortoise, challenged him to a race. All the animals in the forest gathered to watch.
Hare ran down the road for a while and then and paused to rest. He looked back at Slow and Steady and cried out, "How do you expect to win this race when you are walking along at your slow, slow pace?"
Hare stretched himself out alongside the road and fell asleep, thinking, "There is plenty of time to relax."
Slow and Steady walked and walked. He never, ever stopped until he came to the finish line.
The animals who were watching cheered so loudly for Tortoise, they woke up Hare.
Hare stretched and yawned and began to run again, but it was too late. Tortoise was over the line.
After that, Hare always reminded himself, "Don't brag about your lightning pace, for Slow and Steady won the race!"
Now, this fable, passed down from the Greek slave and storyteller Aesop (7th century BC) is among the most well-known, most-taught, and universally recognized morality fables in Western culture. It has a counterpart in Native American folklore as well (The Turtle and the Eagle). So considering how many millennia this home truth has been kicking around, we MIGHT JUST GET IT. But sad to say, when it comes to health and fitness, most of us just don't get it. We turn to fad diets, insanely unrealistic workout plans, expensive gym memberships, more expensive and sophisticated exercise equipment (got to get a Wii Fit and a Bodybugg)!, but the undramatic truth is, returning to health, making permanent lifestyle change, is a matter of curbing compulsion to lazy habits, putting all four claws to the ground, and plodding onward at a sustainable pace.
The lies we can tell ourselves about how to short-term maximize our way into instant fitness is fed by the fast-food, convenience culture that got us into this fix in the first place. Pre-packaged, processed food is easier and faster to prepare than chopping vegetables or making a home-made soup from fresh ingredients. But it is neither healthier nor better - only easier and faster. Expensive gym memberships are fancy and easy to sign up for (if you have enough money, of course), but they are neither better than simpler, free exercise, nor do they create motivation to just do it. Running burns more calories than walking or speed-walking, and so does bicycling. But it is not superior exercise, and burning calories is not the single be-all and end-all of a fitness plan. Endurance, strength, and healthy habits that fit your lifestyle and obligations, rather than distort or compromise them, are not only more sustainable but also create less of an impact on those who count on us for other things, and for the other aspects of our lives that we seek to perpetuate by regaining our health and getting into shape.
But there is another reason to approach things the way the turtle does: it is less dangerous. why not do the riskier behavior? For the DailyKos demographic, which skews to age 40 to 55, (Baby Boomers primarily), there are some damn good reasons: injury, illness, the too-late-learned lessons of prenatal drugs our mothers took before the FDA's role in regulating pharmaceutical safety was expanded in 1962 by the Kefauver-Harris Amendment to the Federal Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C), which passed after an FDA regulator flagged Thalidomide as potentially dangerous and kept it off the American market, but not before thousands of American doctors gave out free samples of the anti-nausea (and teratogenic - monster-making) pregnancy medication which produced horrific results in infants throughout Europe. I have a German friend who had to undergo surgery for her extra toes and fingers as a result of her mother's short-term use of Thalidomide. She was very lucky. But other prenatal nausea drugs, such as DES, got through. My older sister, born in 1955, who died of leukemia and metastatic cancer at age 35, was exposed to DES in the womb because a doctor gave my mother DES for nausea.
The issue of complex, modern pharmacology, contaminants and chemicals in our water and food, are an enormous challenge, particularly to the pre-regulation Baby Boomer generation, and corruption of the FDA's purpose by pressure from pharmaceutical companies such as G.D. Searle's Donald Rumsfeld (YES, HIM!) getting a free pass on licensing and marketing to the diet food industry the dangerous low-calorie sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet - nothing nutra about it, friends!) shows that the FDA has not protected Americans from dangerous food additives and drugs, particularly in recent decades of deregulation. It serves us ill to try to win the race against overeating and unhealthy consumption of foods by drinking gallons of Diet Coke because we can't live without the fizzy.
In 1996 I remember reading an article in a Minneapolis newspaper about a rat study presented to the FDA on aspartame: the level of cancerous brain tumors in the rats in the aspartame-fed group was 900% of the control. I tried to imagine, at that time, a 900% increase in brain tumors among American dieters. As a result of concerted effort (but after a solid 20 years of pumping aspartame into the diet-conscious American population) the diet industry has looked to find alternatives that had a less grim profile, and aspartame is being replaced in diet foods by Sucralose (it's made from sugar!), known commonly as Splenda. The chemical heritage of Sucralose is, however, not much less grim than that of aspartame - it was discovered in the course of seeking a less toxic insecticide alternative to DDT. Mmmm, insecticide anyone? Kills bugs AND your liver and kidneys too!) The problem with sucralose is that your body does not recognize it as a toxin (even though it is) and it is rapidly absorbed as food - even though it isn't.
This diversion into the discussion of toxicity in drugs and diet additives was purposeful, because as those of you who have followed the past several weeks of my diaries have read me complain regularly, one of my biggest challenges in meeting weight-loss and exercise goals was persistent back cramps. And last night, going through my mail, was an extended Patient Information Sheet (now required by regulators) which I do not remember ever having been included, although it must have been, with a refill reminder for my blood pressure medication, Cozaar - a patented brand-name drug manufactured by Merck. Cozaar is a potassium salt, and along with the "most common side effects" that my doctor did not warn me about, was back pain. And I've been having one of the most common side effects of my daily BP medication (which I take a large dose of daily), for 14 months. Since I already take a large dose of NSAIDs, my doctor also should have known that there is a possible interactive or multiplicative effect between this potassium salt compound, potassium toxicity, and my NSAID arthritis medication. D'OH! And the doctor who made this prescription did so as a knee-jerk reaction to my having one of the most common side-effects of the generic drug lisinopril, which can produce a nagging low-level cough, which was irritating my latent asthma. I'd be better off with the cough than the crippling back pain!
But had I pushed and pushed myself through the pain, rather than back off to a more modest walking pace, had I done the hare method of dangerous, risk-taking extreme fitness rather than gently easing the cramps and slowly, steadily increasing my overall endurance, I am not sure I would have been able to see that despite my muscle improvements and greater endurance in walking, the back pain has never gone away, and in fact increased throughout the day once I took my morning medication. Common sense. Research. Paying attention to my body. And compensating for what I have now come to understand is a complex drug manufacturing system and medical establishment that does not look deeper, does not ask careful questions, and does not fully disclose to patients what they get. And I am a graduate-school educated professional in the information industry, who got A's in Chemistry in high school (and won the American Chemical Society award at the state science fair - for a project on salts!) No ignoramus, me. But if it were not for CVS Pharmacy doing its level best to compete in customer service against the Walgreens/Walmart marketing monster and sending out customer information, I would not have taken the next plodding step on regaining my fitness by setting the drug aside and resuming the search for another alternative to combat hypertension.
I've gone on way too long here, but maybe some hard facts on why slow and steady STILL wins the race 3,000 years later might convince some of you to try these methods and get some results that will help you, every day, as you plod your way along to success and longer life.
I leave you with a photo from my walk in Moir park yesterday, because despite the back cramps I still managed to walk 2 miles without having to stop and catch my breath (one mile each way):
And now for the obligatory Diary Sign Up!
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