I saw another one. A commercial informing you “It’s not your fault.”
This one was how a “bad” hormone (cortisol) is to blame for you being fat.
I’ll get back to that in a second. First I want to deal with “It’s not your fault.”
As a coach, my duty is to facilitate change by asking strategic questions and proposing alternate strategies depending on the answers to those questions.
As a consultant, I directly propose methods and protocols for reaching the clients goals.
As a trainer, I build and implement programs to make the changes and goals a physical reality.
Where in those scenarios is blame a factor?
I’ve been taught that a coach, consultant or trainer is sought out only when the client has an irrational passion or experiencing pain or urgency and has already made an attempt to resolve it themselves. Okay, now I have a client who has a need and I have tools to help them fulfill that need.
So where does the question “Who’s fault is it” come from?
Who cares whose fault it is?
It isn’t actionable. If a person is dwelling on who or what is to blame for their situation, whether it is body composition, marital problems, financial situations or male pattern baldness, you are using energy that could be better steered toward DOING something.
This is a marketing tactic that is, in my opinion, manipulative and subversive. It steers attention away from the more pressing issue of responsibility.
Is it your parent’s fault, the school’s fault, your spouse’s fault, your children’s fault, your metabolism’s fault, cortisol’s fault?
I DON’T CARE.
I care about what we can DO about it.
In almost every situation fault or blame has NO relevance to a positive outcome. None, zero, nada.
Only by grasping responsibility for “What now” is progress made.
Now about that cortisol. This is a good example of an outright falsehood in advertising.
Cortisol is NOT a bad hormone. It is responsible for proper glucose metabolism via regulating insulin release, regulation of blood pressure, immune function, breakdown of fats and proteins, and inflammatory response among many others.
What IS bad is too much cortisol. This usually occurs from excessive stress, stimulants (such as caffeine), overconsumption of simple carbohydrates or sleep deprivation.
Would it not be more effective to manage the CAUSE of excessive cortisol?
But that would mean eschewing the path of fault or blame and taking responsibility.
I LOVE uphill! It’s new territory. It’s exhilarating. It’s better than where you were.
When you’re strong you can leap or run or stride and make amazing progress. When you’re not strong you can rest or you can carefully pick your path and slowly ascend. But you’re going UP!
Why do people conclude that an “uphill battle” is a negative?
When an cyclist climbs a hill in the Pyrenees, or a mountain climber climbs Kilimanjaro, or Everest or K2, what do they do next?
Look for another hill to climb!
Embrace the hill. Don’t look at it as an adversary. Make it your friend, even your lover.
“It’s hard.” Okay. So?
You’ve done hard stuff before.
Difficult doesn’t make it a negative. It makes it more rewarding.
I know people with Masters degrees who are considering a doctorate. The fact that it is difficult doesn’t even enter into the equation.
I know Marines considering another tour.
Why join the Navy SEALS? It’s hard!
Elite age group athletes considering pro? Mothers considering another child? Tradesmen considering contracting? Clerks or engineers considering their own business? It’s hard!
All are uphill battles and should be celebrated!
You want a negative? Knowing you could have, but didn’t because it was “hard.”
That doesn’t always mean straight uphill. There are rocks and bears and glaciers in them hills. Sometimes the path is blocked. Sometimes you have to step back and regroup.
Uphill? Oh yeah!
Have you taken on a daunting task? Let’s celebrate!
Why?
Because it’s an uphill battle and the air is better up here.
I was asked a question this morning that I felt I needed to share with my readers and clients.
“In your opinion, regarding weight loss/fat burn…when on the treadmill… do you think you burn more fat and increase your metabolism by alternating fast/slow pace. Like medium speed for one minute then jog for 30 seconds, etc.?”
The short answer is … yes.
The problem is — the results on a treadmill are going to be slow and minimal.
There are many takes on the work/rest protocol and most are effective. They ALL incorporate strength exercises.
In my opinion the treadmill is best used for warm-up and active recovery. I have been known to use it in inclement weather to get a run in but you lose too many physiological and psychological variables to have it as a mainstay. Strength exercises means anything from bodyweight to free-weight to exercise bands to kettlebells to machines (my least favorite).
On occasion, as a Fitness Professional, I get slapped back to reality when I get a question like this. We tend to get caught up in the latest discoveries or the best this or the newest that, when along comes a question on one or another of the most fundamental issues.
So the fundamental issue of the day is: Work/rest protocols for fat loss.
For something that has been around for such a long time, this sure has been getting a lot of press lately, and that’s a good thing. Because it works. It is effective. In fact it is VERY effective. The good new is, if done properly it takes considerably less time than the conventional gym routine. The not so good news is it’s tough. Especially at first. It’s a matter of exertion and recovery. People aren’t used to exertion. It’s uncomfortable.
While athletes have been using similar methods for decades, the intent was improving performance. Research has proven out that it is also very effective at boosting metabolism and burning fat.
Dr. Izumi Tabata and a team of researchers from the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo, Japan conducted a study, published in the journal “Medicine and Science in Sports & Exercise” in 1996. This groundbreaking study provided documented evidence concerning the dramatic physiological benefits of high-intensity intermittent training.
What has developed since is call the “Tabata Method” or the “Tabata Protocol”. In it’s purest form, you take one exercise, preferably an exercise that uses a large number of muscles (such as a squat), perform as many reps as you can do with perfect form for twenty seconds, then rest for ten seconds. Repeat 7 more times. You’re done. I mean REALLY done. It sounds so easy and it is so NOT.
4 minutes of exercise is all? That’s what most people who haven’t tried it ask. Most beginners can’t do it.
Not to worry. This is science, but it’s not rocket science. If you can’t do 20 seconds exercise / 10 seconds rest for 4 minutes, do 15 seconds exercise / 15 seconds rest for 5 minutes. Or 10 seconds / 20 seconds for 6 minutes.
You can add variables as well. Pick two exercises and alternate them (such as thrusters* and pushups). Or pick two and combine them (Burpee/pullup). Or even pick four, combine them and alternate them. The key is start with a baseline and constantly improve (less rest, more weight, more reps, etc.)
Strength and performance athletes have found this to be very effective for their overall fitness as well, especially off season.
I posted a guest article one of the best interpretations of work/rest that I have found here: http://fitnessheretic.com/?p=83.
An excellent exercise for Tabata is the “thruster.” Take two dumbbells and hold them at shoulder height. Squat down, pushing your rear-end back, keeping the dumbbells on the shoulders. As you rise up, press the bells to the overhead lockout position. You can either press as you rise or use the momentum to help “kick” the bells overhead. Keep your weight in your heals and go light on the weight until you know what you can handle!
He swims, he bikes, he runs, he meditates, he does yoga, he does winter quadrathlon, martial arts, he grows his own food in raised beds, he raises chickens for fresh eggs in the suburbs. He does this before, after and between a JOB and the rest of regular life and then he blogs about it. He’s onThe Outdoor Journey. http://www.theoutdoorjourney.com/
Can a species be overweight? Humans, by any measure of biological fitness, are highly successful, but what does being fit really mean?
by Theresa Pinto
Florida must lead the nation in wrongful child deaths and I cry each time I hear about a three month old starved to death by his mother or a 2 year old beaten to death by her dad. And it is usually at this time that I realize deeply my role, and perhaps my only true role, for my children is to make sure they survive and know how to ensure their own survival when I’m no longer around; to make sure they don’t drown in canals or get hit by cars or shoot themselves with a neighbors gun. I do want them to be polite and considerate and creative and fun and happy and to listen to good music, but really I just want them to live.
It essentially comes down to what we biologists call fitness, a far cry from the tears brought on by more and more bad news about children’s rights and freedoms. Not the pilates and gymnasium kinds of fitness, nor the tainted and genocidal concepts propounded by Social Darwinists, but the basic and instinctual assurance that my genes will be passed on at least through one whole generation. That I will probably have grandchildren someday and so on and so on. Fitness is, in more cold terms, a statistical measure of each person’s genetic success.
When I was eight, the last time I saw my father, he brought me a 110 film camera, a present clasped in his rough and tanned hand offset by his crisp white suit and black shirt with butterfly collar. He arrived in a white Caddy, which I later realized must have been rented, and took me and my sister to see “The Beast Master,” where I was exposed to my first ever, gratuitous titty shot. My memories are kept in small doses, vague and thin, punctuated by vivid imagery but lacking a continuity of events. This is one of those. And even though this was the last time I saw him, I have a specific feeling of happiness associated with this memory and an enduring love for the critically panned “The Beast Master.”
My whole childhood was basically uneventful, and looking back on it, a kind of trailer park version of the movie Avalon. I had misfortunes, like the time the Texeira sisters tried to spray me with the water hose and I had to seek protection from the overgrown and mannish Janice (another one of those particulate but vague memories, with nothing leading up to it and nothing following; just a sharp image of the two from behind Janice’s back). And I had moments of euphoria, such as the time I gave a belly-dancing performance for 100 unruly elementary students (I was one of their own) and was applauded and sought after as I left the stage.
My mother, after my father left, provided me with a stable and loving and disciplined home, with the help of her parents, even if she couldn’t afford to buy any film for my new 110 camera that I had placed like a trophy on the single shelf in my room. Our family immigrated from Italy in the early 1900s and two generations later, that village mentality, those so cherished family values were still strong. While other girls in my neighborhood dropped out of high school and walked around the block with protruding bellies not derived from eating too much, I stayed home and played Continental with my grandmother and then went on to college. Eventually, I did get pregnant, but long after my high school days and in the traditional manner, with a husband and a cramped one-bedroom apartment in the middle of a sprawling city. I was now the picture of biological success, my family’s evolutionary trajectory passing through me and on to my son, and Darwin’s theory racking up more points, except for the fact that my mother had adopted me and none of what is biologically hers is in me or my son. If not for her single daughter by blood, she would be considered “unfit” in the grandest of terms. My adoptive father leaving us was shattering, but how much more for my older sister, his “biological” daughter, who was not included in the trip to the movie theater? My own situation has become a web of indefinable biological success with the addition of a stepson who is “half” related to my daughter.
Certain countries, like Germany and Japan and Switzerland, have faced off with biological instinct and maintain a low replacement level, as in females are not having their 2.1 kids. Sometimes countries even have a negative rate of natural increase, so that more of the population dies than are even born each year. Social scientists have come up with all kinds of explanations for this phenomenon- the most probable being that as we educate women and offer more opportunities to them to extend themselves, they prolong having babies in order to improve their own lot in life. Or we could consider these countries a kind of experiment in evolutionary group selection, whereby the fitness of the entire country’s population is lifted by the improvement of each individual, even if ironically, the improved individual puts off having kids or has none at all. But this assumes that we are still given to notions of territory and race as definers of the “group” which is selected for, a controversial notion at best. People who study population know that industrialized nations have very low replacement levels, in which a certain level of fertility is maintained to keep the population static, compared to developing nations that need much higher replacement levels, due to things like lack of food or public safety or women’s rights. Developed countries around the world are slowly decreasing in population size and then the opposite of that are the ones who can least provide for their offspring but keep them coming for lack of knowledge and resources and usually in circumstances beyond their control. Maybe we are trying to find a perfect blend of age and wisdom that will allow us to raise the most fit children.
In nature, the nature we tend to view as outside of ourselves and good for esoteric ecological studies, we see this model a few times. Meerkats and Red-Cockaded Woodpeckers live cooperative lifestyles, so that some deny or just outright lose their will to procreate to help the more dominant ones rear their own. While our level of cooperative behavior is not nearly as extreme as these, we still exhibit altruism to a level that is seen as a minority position in the natural realm.
So what does it mean to be evolutionarily fit in human society? As a species, we have an ability to adapt and change that is not common, and our level of diversity in all things, internal and external, is great. Fitness can be measured financially, emotionally, socially, physically, intellectually, artistically. We basically vie for anyone who appears to be on top, based on what’s most important to us after a lifetime of gathering experiences that help us order our own priorities in life. But fitness is a paradoxical construct in itself, since the toll on a parent of raising fit offspring can range from miniscule, as in most of the reptile world, to the ultimate sacrifice itself. But in the end, there is still a tradeoff, however leveraged it might be by the fact that some part of the parent will persist. A type of female octopus will watch over her developing eggs to the point where she is too weak to defend herself and gets torn to pieces, dying a slow and painful death, just as her young ones swim off. Indricotheres, a group of gargantuan prehistoric land mammals, gave up five years of their lives to pregnancy, nursing and raising her single offspring, only to carelessly and sometimes meanly turn them out as enemies when they were three. In other terms, Werner Herzog melancholically captures the futility of fitness as he films a penguin, wings akimbo, running towards the mountains for reasons unknown, dooming itself and any offspring to death.
Maybe fitness means all these things. Maybe it means none of it. But are we guided by the principles that seem to direct all of life around us and we just can’t stand far back enough to see ourselves through the same lens? Not that we lack control or free will, but that, however we want to define it, scientifically, religiously, instinctually, there is something more to our decisions than just the sum of our experiences and rationale.
In the end, what may be dictating to our subconscious is a craving to immortalize ourselves, whether through children of our own or our own exploits. For those who know me and my mother well, it is obvious I am my mother’s daughter, so like her in many ways for she has left her imprint on me in a manner that can’t be genetically determined. The divide between those who procreate and those who decide to self-create is not wide, and each in their way increases the measure of their fitness by our species standards because in any act of creation, there is an addition to the wealth of our species. As our emphasis on the ego and the inner journey and prolonging our individual lives, as the importance of “I” has grown, so has our fitness.
There are so many variables, so much we can’t see, and so many ways to expand the idea, find exceptions to the rule. It is too easy to bring in polemical constructs that seem to throw the equation completely off the mark, like abortion or gay marriage or fertility treatment or daycare. All the issues that sound the alarms of parenting and family in the modern day. And this too somehow weaves its way into the idea of fitness, that we each have our own idea of what makes us most biologically fit and translate that into present day societal values that are worth struggling over and fighting about.
What I know is this, that each time I look at my children, really see into their lives, sweeping feelings of depression and euphoria at the same time come over me. I wonder if their lives will have meaning and I don’t want to miss anything but I know I will. I am overwhelmed with love and devotion, as much as I am overwhelmed with feelings of imprisonment at times. And then I certainly decide that this reaction cannot be governed by my DNA. It becomes obvious to me that human biological fitness is no longer measured in strictly measurable terms. There are stepfathers who act like lions, taking out the previous lions’ young and those that take care of their new stepchildren better than most fathers do.
Taillard De Chardin, a theological philosopher once thought that humans were evolving into a kind of superorganism, as our numbers grew into the billions. Maybe the idea of evolutionary fitness was never always measured in purely DNA terms, maybe the idea of the selfish gene is incorrect. I immediately think then about the mother elephant I watched some long forgotten time ago on some long forgotten animal show who gave up her own life to stay with her weak and doomed son as her herd moved on in search of water during a severe drought, the same son she would have eventually turned out of the herd to fend for himself some day since he has no place in their matriarchy. And I am utterly at a loss to say what is guiding any of us.
Theresa Pinto is a writer, consultant and mother of four living in Miami. She is also the editor of LoudestGirl Magazine.
This was re-published here with permission.
To read this in it’s original context and other stimulating topics visit www.loudestgirl.com.
