The Healthy Homemaker?

Those that know me also know I am not crazy about the word "exercise." It sounds so official. It seems synonymous with "gym membership." It sounds disagreeably sweaty. 

In recent years, it had come to equal "skinny," but that is not true. It is, however, one with "health." In the Blue Zones, the advanced aged spend hours moving, but in the process of everyday chores. 

I have discovered—to my shock—that I am a cheerful domestic. I like pottering about the house, setting it to rights, doing loads of laundry (although my ironing needs improvement), windexing, chopping vegetables, etc. That's movement, right? Maybe not involving a spinning class, but I'll take it.  

 

Aaron Carroll reported last year (I've been sitting on this for a year!?) that while exercise does not help with body weight, it is the cure for everything else ("Closest Thing to a Wonder Drug"). 

I have not been alone in thinking that physical activity to improve health should be hard. When I hear friends talk about exercising, they discuss running marathons, participating in CrossFit classes or sacrificing themselves on the altar of SoulCycle. That misses the point, unfortunately. All of these are much more than you need to do to get the benefits I’ve described.

The recommendations for exercise are 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity physical activity for adults, or about 30 minutes each weekday.

Moderate intensity is probably much less than you think. Walking briskly, at 3 to 4 miles per hour or so, qualifies. So does bicycling slower than 10 miles an hour. Anything that gets your heart rate somewhere between 110 and 140 beats per minute is enough. Even vacuuming, mowing the lawn or walking your dog might qualify.

Vacuuming counts! Yes! 

TGIF

I once bought an active wear top because it was a pretty shade of blue, but returned it.

Battle of the Bulge: What Does Coke Do For You, Anyway?

"I don't exercise enough," he sighed with a fatalistic shrug. "Not like you."

"Me? Please. I don't 'exercise' exercise," I scoffed. 

"Yes, you do, you walk," he retorted. 

"Yeah, but not that much. I walk less now than I used to, and I weighed more then." 

He stubbornly shook his head. "It's because I don't exercise." 

I know it's because of what he eats. It would be impossible for him to haul around all those pounds if he was consuming the right foods. I have hit many a mental wall as I attempt to preach the Gospel of Produce. 

"It's exercise!" the masses scream, takeout, chips, and sugary pink beverages in hand. 

"Eat a cucumber!" I roar back. 

"Never!" 

 

Why this insistence that it's not the fault of donuts and ice cream?  

Recently, I have come across articles holding "Big Food" accountable for this belief; in order to keep peddling their quasi-food products, they need consumers to think that the fault lies in their unchallenged abs. 

Alice Park's Time magazine article on the matter: 

You may not have noticed it yet, but sodamakers are working hard to get you off the couch. On Aug. 9, a New York Times article revealed that Coca-Cola was quietly funding a group of scientists called Global Energy Balance Network that emphasizes the role of exercise, as opposed to diet, in fighting obesity. There's also Mixify, an advertising and social-media campaign launched by Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper, Pepsi and the American Beverage Association that suggests "mixing lazy days with something light, following sweaty workouts with whatever you're craving"—encouraging the idea that when you're active, you can afford to eat or drink whatever you like. . . 

"The notion that we can exercise away a bad diet is absolutely unfounded," says Dr. David Ludwig, director of the Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children's Hospital and professor of pediatrics and nutrition at Harvard, "and it's contradicted by many research studies." Indeed there isn't strong evidence to show that exercise alone—at least at the level that anyone other than a marathoner maintains—can help people shed pounds and keep them off. 

Park continues that people are starting realize this, and are curbing their soda intake, panicking sodamakers to encourage their product, brightly proclaiming those calories can be easily burned off. But not all calories are created equal, and excess sugar destroys the metabolism's efficiency over time. 

"If you're a toaster oven, then the calorie-balance model is for you," says Ludwig. "If you're a human, it's not helpful."  

There are a number of food-based documentaries out there; I watched Hungry for Change a few weeks ago, and felt like braying "Aaaaamen!" half the time (not all the time, half the time). 

Reluctant Yogi

It was in the dead of winter that I decided I needed some sort of exercise routine. The frozen weather had curbed my walking, and I was feeling as though my sedentary lifestyle was shrinking my muscles. 

But I knew my own requirements: No gym, no class. The bother of having to leave the house and be victim to a sadistic instructor—I think not. Secondly, nothing that was out to make me wheeze dangerously to the point I'm gasping on the floor. 

I decided on yoga. Ma had taken up yoga a few years previously, even though she shares my impatience for slow, deliberate movements. The first time she tried it, the main thought running through her head was "Never again." But she kept returning.

I rolled out a yoga mat. I searched On Demand for a beginner's program, and there was one, about an hour long. The instructor began to soothingly intone. 

About a 15 minutes in, I was groaning. But I also felt exhilarated, blood flowing into forgotten extremities. 

"Don't do the full hour," Ma warned. "You'll just get nimess from it." I thankfully stopped the soothing intonations after thirty minutes.

While my body complained for the next few days as muscles I didn't know I had grumbled, I somehow found myself in front of the screen again, executing the horrible Warrior II pose. I felt that the next day. 

"How long did it take you to like yoga?" I despairingly asked Ma. 

"About five classes." 

It took me less. I did the full hour the second time I tried. I then played it again twice, at which point my three-pack DVD set arrived. That one made me ache all over again, but I officially love yoga. Using the AM-PM Yoga for Beginners disc, I was surprised by a delightful tingling and glow from my shoulders. It felt wonderful.

Last winter Ma slipped on the ice and had a bad fall, so bad she instructed Ta to bensch goimel on her behalf. She insists that if she had not been taking yoga, the damage would have been much worse. 

I had done yoga just four times when I trotted out on a January morning to fetch the paper; the steps slid out from under my feet. Thank you, freezing rain. I managed to grab the banister, but felt a searing wrench in my back. I curled up at the bottom of the steps for a few minutes, gasping deeply before I felt brave enough to gingerly clamber back up. 

An hour later I felt no pain. I popped in another yoga DVD. 

My shoulders moaned the next day from the cobra poses, but my back was quiet.

 

Giddy with possibility, I then scoured the internet for more options. I purchased The Biggest Loser: Weight Loss Yoga and Tara Lee Elements of Yoga. I would recommend my first purchase for an official introduction, as these other two don't really get into detail how to properly hold positions.  But Bob Harper is great when one feels like one needs to push oneself, and Tara Lee's routines are thorough while being a reasonable twenty minutes in length (the discs in hers work upwards in difficulty from Earth, Water, then Fire. Many moves in Fire are beyond me). 

I only do yoga, currently, twice a week. In short order, I began to experience pleasant side effects. I'm calmer. I sleep better (especially after one of the PM workouts). I'm stronger—who knew that I had a bicep? A bicep!  I can flex it like Popeye! 

I'm sturdier. I never used to have stamina to stand endlessly, but now I'm a serene, steady, solid pillar. I feel, at least physically, less of a pushover. 

Also, although my weight stubbornly remained two to three pounds above my best the whole winter, I was still able to easily fit into my clothing without anything needing to be tugged. Ah, therein lies the benefit of exercise; not weight loss, but muscle tone. 

Namaste.

The Elliptical Won't Save You

"So, like, how much do you exercise?" 

"Exercise? No, not me. I try to walk as much as I can, that's it." 

"What, you don't go to the gym?" 

"The gym? Feh! I spit on the gym." 

"Wait, really?" 

"Yeah, really." 

"So how do you . . . " 

"I watch what I eat." 

"Oh." 

Conversation is dead in the water. 

I am adamant: When it comes to weight, exercise is not the way to go. Yes, exercise is necessary for health. Yes, exercise can tone. But exercise won't be the way to kick those pounds to the curb. 

Even before Aaron Carroll's article ("To Lose Weight, Eating Less Is Far More Important Than Exercise") was actually printed, it became the most popular e-mailed online, to the point that CBS This Morning picked it up. Tack that together with Aseem Malhotra's Washington Post article, "Take Off that Fitbit."

Carroll begins by referencing The Biggest Loser, in which morbidly obese individuals are mostly clobbered in the gym as they attempt to lose the weight. But as Carroll and Malhotra point out: 

1) Exercising burns less than one thinks. Sure, you can be lying there post-workout, wheezing and steaming, every muscle screaming, but you probably only burned off a cookie or two. 

2) Exercise makes you hungrier. I knew a gal whose trainer would put her through hell, and she would fall into the fridge whenever she got home. Kinda defeats the point.

3) When losing weight, the metabolism can slow as the goal gets nearer. Many erroneously believe that the metabolism will get a burning boost through exercise. Research shows there is no correlation between the two.

4) Despite busy schedules, the determined manage to ration time and effort to get to the gym, work out, clean up, drive home. But there would be better results in utilizing those same hours in planning healthy meals, shopping the perimeter of the supermarket, and cooking up some vegetable-based lunches and suppers. 

Carroll: Many people think of dieting as a drastic and rigid change, with a high risk of putting the pounds back on. What is more likely to succeed is gradual change, made in a much more sustainable way. I also don’t mean to make it seem that weight loss with diet is easy and exercise is hard. They’re both hard. The challenge of a slowing metabolism, and the desire to eat more, occurs in both cases, although dietary change still works better than exercise.

That's how I did it. Starting small, reprogramming my palate, shunning certain foods and embracing others, learning that whole stupid portion-control thing, which I still struggle with. But I'm a work in progress.

It's happened to me very, very few times: 

"So how do you do it?" 

"I eat vegetables, mostly." 

"Can you type it up and send it to me? You know, what your plan is?"   

For me, exercise is the devil; altering my diet is a much more attractive option. Very few others want to hear that exercise is not the messiah. I challenge you, then: Change one bad eating habit. Tell me that you don't see results in a month. 

Until 100, At Least

Dan Buettner researches longevity. He has discovered certain "Blue Zones," in which the populace enjoy 100-plus years of life. He recently came up with a follow-up, Blue Zones Solutions, to his earlier Blue Zones. 

One could think, "Sure, but Sardinia, Icaria, Okinawa? Isolated places, maybe it's something in the water." But there is a Blue Zone in the U.S., in California, an enclave of Seventh Day Adventists.
 
By emulating these Zonies, we can prevent illness, as opposed to treating them (and destroying the body in the process while going broke) after they come into being. 

There are a number of factors that Buettner has pinpointed amongst these Zonies, and as Jews, we meet most of them. Religion, red wine, prioritizing family, lock down a life purpose. 

But we suck in one area: Food. Seventh Day Adventists, following Beraishis, consume a plant-based diet. Humanity was only allowed to eat red meat following the Mabul; it didn't become mandatory. How many of us restrict our red meat consumption only to Shabbos and yontif? (The other regions probably have very little access to red meat in general, and ergo can't binge on it.) 

And on Shabbos, only ONE piece should be enough.

We eat TOO MUCH and BADLY. That, I think, is one of our major struggles in how to adapt to too much blessing as opposed to the previous too much suffering.

Each Blue Zone has different superfoods to their region; the U.S. version is salmon and oatmeal (I'll be selling oat bran in another post). Change is frightening, and hard, but if done slowly and gradually, you too could subsist on vegetables . . .  the way I do, wink wink.

Via thewannabechef.net

Buettner's plan is to subtly alter our environment to casually encourage healthier behaviors; non-exercise exercise and better choices in restaurants. A mayor of a meat-crazed town in Texas is attempting to apply those measures. A doctor in Finland rescued a region from themselves, but they didn't even notice the methods he used to do so. 

There is in our world a steady, yet slow rise in awareness that we have to alter our diet. It is a commandment to take care of these bodies we were given, and it is a violation to harm them in any way. But as we see from ineffectual takkanos, it cannot come from a distant authority, unless he has a magical way of enforcing it. 

On FYI's Arranged, the Roma parents that are marrying off their 18-year-old son cheerfully say that the age of 70 is considered ancient in their world, because their food is so unhealthy. Yikes.

Start with small, incremental movements. Pick one, stick to it for a while, then try another: Drink only water, as opposed to investing in soda and juices. Have red meat only on Shabbos. Cook a hearty and tasty bean soup once a week. If dining out is a regular habit, be smarter with the menu, or cut back a few times a month. Experiment with spices and herbs, abandoning salt and soup mixes as primary seasonings.

The Sardinians live on this soup.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing. In a short while, you'll see food differently, and feel better.

Hypocrite

"Are you outdoorsy?"

"Sorry?" 

"Do you cycle?" 

"Um, no." 

"Hike?" 

"Not really." 

"Rock climb?" 

"Are you serious?" 

"How about jogging?" His tone is almost desperate.

"Not a chance." 

"Gym?"

"Nope. Look, I'll be frank: I'm not a fan of sweating." 

He flopped back in his chair, annoyed. 

"I do walk, though," I attempt to reassure him, "back and forth from public transportation." 

He glared at me. "What? Who does that? Don't you drive?"