The Memory of Roses

George Will has written in achingly poignant prose about the long decline of his aged mother into the oblivion of dementia and the final release of death. He wrote as beautifully in prose as a great poet writes in verse, impelled by a theme that is rarely matched in its grip on our souls. It fills the heart with inexpressible sadness, having known something of grief, as we all have, or will.

We can love people -- opt to love them, volunteer -- who are not worthy of love, humanly speaking. No need for elaboration. It’s a provocative enough statement, for all that betrayal might seem almost commonplace. And we drag ourselves away from such and such a situation trailing most of our courage and all of our hope behind. And being human, imperfect in our capacity for tranquility, we might be infected with rage like a low-grade fever. Self-pity? Yes. It comes with an awareness of our flaws. But who even has a right to an opinion on the matter of the secret flaws in someone else's secret heart? All this is the negative.

And if the ones who work havoc were to fall into the hands of their victims? Best not to speak of it. But the one, the ones we have loved, despite their betrayals? Of course we're angry. Here’s what we must tell ourselves: "I did not love, that it might turn into hate. I did not sacrifice, that it should bring only loss." To love is an act of will as much as a sort of pit into which we fall. This is what it means when we are told that love does not fail. It’s not that the flame doesn’t scorch but that its light doesn’t fade. The outcome of love is not assured, but its reality should never be in doubt.

High-sounding sentiments however about the unfailing character of love have little merit if they have no effect in the real world. But we do need soft phrases sometimes, as we need soft touches -- they are comforting to us. It isn’t only monkeys that clutch onto each other when the skies grow dark. It’s a picture of ourselves. We are created to love. We were made that we might count ourselves less, that someone else might be more. There is no race that knows no expression of this truth.

It isn’t something that needs to be written in a holy book. It’s written in our hearts -- incised, rather, in deep and ragged gouges. This too might make us angry. What sane person wants more pain? But can it be helped? Honestly. We must, must love, and it hurts the way a little child cries when stung or struck. But we cannot escape our nature any more than we can change our destiny -- or rather, as fools and saints attempt, change the destiny of someone else.

George Will reminds us of the words of J.M. Barrie: God gave us memory that we might have roses in winter. How lovely a thought. Someone wisely said that pain comes to pass, not to stay. It calls to mind the fact that even in our wrath, we may forgo our demand for justice and discover almost out of vacuum a capacity for mercy, and forgiveness.

So, after a long and blessed life, an old woman may descend into the darkness and indignity of senility. Her character so carefully built-up over the decades might fall away as cities succumb to earthquakes. What is left remains only as a mockery. But it doesn’t remain forever, and when she finally passes from sight, that dimming light must flair up bright as garden sunshine. So might we hope.

In this same way, we can only hope ... if we can hope ... that those who have passed beyond our sight after having shed darkness upon our world like Satan in his fall, might with the passing of time enjoy a sort of dementia of an evil character -- where repentance works its transformation and nobility is found where only betrayal has been seen.

It cannot be that the world is destined only for decay. There must be some counterbalancing force, where the agony of watching those we love reduced almost to animals, is matched in some measure by the redemption of those who started life as animals, but who discover the very purpose of what humanity is. This would be grace, and a sort of justice too. For to be human is to be condemned to love.

You see the point. We speak here of health and of fitness. For what purpose? That we might be a more excellent sort of animal? It is an easy thing to hold out cliches of love and betrayal -- how wise we might seem. But honestly. What matters? We arrive at the answers we believe by traveling through our lives like fishermen dragging nets. Perhaps we come up with hope, and courage. But it takes strength. We grow strong by enduring trials. The trials of exercise and of diet are easy, then, and a good starting place. That's the point.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

More re Diet

Diet. It's so hard. It just always needs reinforcing. There are so many conflicting, contradictory ideas about it. Carbs? Fats? Proteins? The correct ratios? Their effects on health and performance? Well, the health aspect of being vegetarian, or at least of having a very high proportion of the diet as vegetables, is established and beyond debate. But what about athletic performance? There are anecdotal claims that vegetarian athletes who switch to animal foods increase performance. The methodology is nonexistent at this point, but the claims are made. Are they true?

It could be that performance is enhances by the metabolic byproducts of meat -- uric acid, say, acting as a toxifying stimulant. Or by hormones, both artificial, from commercial and factory-fed beef, and also natural hormones, left in the flesh from the terror of being butchered. Yes, all that adrenaline could act as a performance enhancer -- stimulants will do that. At the expense perhaps of long term health, but if it's only about short term performance, well there you go.

Like coffee. Caffeine definitely increase the availability of fat to be used as an energy source with distance runners, and presumably other athletes. But we are reading more and more about adrenal fatigue -- the over-activity of stress hormones. It would be a counterpart to pre-diabetes, where the pancreas is forced to over-produce insulin, because of a dangerous lifestyle. It's imbalanced, it's damaging to long-term health, and it's unnatural. Stimulants, including meat, are or may be performance enhancers. Well? If that's okay, what's wrong with steroids? Extreme example. Draw the line back where you will.

It's just a theory, the stimulatory effect of meat, invented to answer the possibility, the anecdotal possibility that switching from vegetarian to meat-eating yield results. It needs to be investigated.

And let's look at protein. It is said that animal proteins are dangerous simply by being like those proteins we ourselves make. If you introduce a similar but alien protein into your bloodstream, your body produces antibodies to destroy it. All well and good. But if those alien proteins are too similar, your body learns how to attack itself. Auto-immune disease, thank you very much. It's a theory. But it makes sense.

Another problem is in the composition of the meat people eat. First, you cannot use protein. Nobody every used protein. It's useless. That why we digest it. We break it down into its constituent amino acids, and use them. Now here's the thing. If we eat meat, it's fair to suppose that the ratio of amino acids the meat yields is comparable to the meat, muscle, of our own bodies. So, yes, meat could go to make muscle. But there's a problem with the reasoning. The meat/amino acids that we might use does/do not go just to make muscle. Our bodies use amino acids for a host of other functions. Amino acids are used to build every hormone we have. They are used as peptides, as neurotransmitters, as the building blocks of bone and hair and fingernails and organs and, well, everything. Everything that gets done in your body is done by proteins. It's not about meat. Proteins are robots, that travel throughout the body and get things done. See? You are guaranteed to get exactly the WRONG ratio of amino acids, if you rely on meat.

What is the ideal proportion of essential amino acids? It's unlikely that anyone knows. But we can be sure it's not that of any meat. Milk, perhaps? Human milk? But you do not plan on doubling your weight in the next few months, do you? Because that's what milk is designed to do. So milk is the wrong ratio too, for adults. It must be, must be, some admixture of plant materials. What recipe? Who knows.

That's why we advocate eating as wide a variety of plant nutrients as is convenient. You don't know what you need, but your body needs it anyway. So give it a chance to choose. You don't need to have every nutrient at every meal. It's not about loading the stew up with absolutely everything. Indeed, that may be a bad idea. Digestion is a very very very complex thing. We know this because there are as many neurons in the gut as there are in the brain. From this we might conclude that digestion is as hard a thing to figure out as calculating the orbit of Neptune. No worries, our gut can do that. But let's not make it unnecessarily difficult.

So consider those dietary supplements, the powders that have every fruit ever heard of, all in a single tablespoon. Sounds pretty good, right? Maybe. But that's like 112 different plant families that your body has to figure out how to digest and absorb, all in one sitting. Sure, it can be done. But it seems like a strain. Like stimulants would be a strain. Like adrenal fatigue would be a strain. Like pre-diabetes would be a strain. Stress is okay. Distress is bad. How about getting all those nutrients over a few meals, or a week, or something like that. Rather than glut yourself, for all that the portions are small.

It's not about being perfect. It's about being sensible. Sensible diet, sensible exercise. Since you are made out of what you eat, it seems like starting with diet would be smart.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

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CrossFit Burbank

Stuff

Catch that show about “Hoarders”? Lots of anxiety and catastrophizing. “I feel like just leaving and never coming back.” Yeah, sure, you’re going to go kill yourself because people are exasperated with all your mess and crap. You’ll just disappear from the planet. It’s not the hoarding of course. It’s the mess. If it were organized it wouldn’t be hoarding. It would be collecting. It's more than just some reluctance to throw out anything that might possibly someday be somehow useful. Pathological.

But really, it’s not the stuff. It’s the mess. It’s really important to stay on top of it. Especially with boys. Two rules. First, have a place for everything. All the papers -- work, academic, finance -- all the books, dishes, jackets, shoes, toys, games -- they all have a place. Boxes, chests, closets, hampers, drawers, cupboards, shelves -- these are places, for things. Armoires. Credenzas. Highboys. Whatever. They don’t have to be neat in their place, but they have to be in their place, and out of sight. Their place is not on tabletops, chairs, beds, floors, floors under beds. Their place is not, ever, on a surface. Surfaces do not count as places. Things are either out of sight, or on display. It’s more a matter of judgment than of taste. And when they get messy in their place, out of sight, well, once a week, places get a going over. Sunday evening, after dinner and before family time. It's a part of family time.

Second rule, no mess at bedtime. Never let it get out of control. You do that by having a procedure. Whose ever bedtime it is, there’s a few minutes before that, for spot check. You know what you’ve been doing. If it’s kids, they don’t know what they’ve been doing. So there’s a checklist, formal or informal. Of course kids want to do a sloppy job. It’s not bad, it’s human. But there’s accountability too.

Too much stuff? Not enough places? Really, that's not hard. Decide if you want to be a hoarder. Keep what you need, keep what you like, but don't keep what you might perhaps someday maybe have a use for possibly. It's like paint cans. When you repaint, many years from now, is it going to be the same color? Really? Liar. Buy less than you want. It's more than you need. One fellow had the rule, anything that wouldn't fit on the one shelf in his garage, had to go. Severe, but it worked. He had one big place, rather than a lot of more specific ones. It worked for him.

Too much mess? There's the Mount Vernon technique of housekeeping. It's such a big place, how do you clean it? Start in a corner, and work out. It's a system, and systems get things done. Doesn't have to be the best system ever, or the most efficient. Just effective. No search-and-rescue grids required. Overwhelmed? Schedule time. Do it in pieces. Make it a project. Ask for help. Hire someone. Just get it done.

It's important because people form judgments. Family overlooks it. Friends make allowances. Strangers don't care, or shouldn't. Social workers write reports. But everyone has opinions. And if there are kids, well, there it is. We want them to benefit from our excellence. Sadly, they have to deal with it all.

That’s it. Two rules. Have a place, and use it. But that's how it is with everything. A few rules, just common sense, and chaos becomes cosmos. This is how God created the universe. With a rule, a unified field. Light. Then a lot of separating.

Point? It's not about messy stuff. It's about being in charge. First, most, of yourself. Health and fitness. Because we are not our stuff, and we are not the place that our stuff is in. For purposes of this discussion, we are our bodies. Don't have a messy body. Don't be a hoarder of body stuff. You know, fat. Fungus. Yeast infections. Impacted fecal matter on the colon wall. You know, stuff. Don't do that. How? Two rules. Sensible diet, sensible exercise.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Human

Poignant isn't the right word. Compassion, pity, sympathy, empathy -- not it. What ever it is though, about futility, we feel it. We feel it about fatherless kids, sometimes even enough to try to do something about it. To a lesser degree, hopefully, we feel it about fat people.

Futility. A concrete noun that carries with it an abstract feeling, if you feel it. Let's avoid a detailed retelling of the insanity cycle of doing the same thing expecting different results. Broadly, calorie restriction slows metabolism up to 45%, stopping calories from being used as energy, storing it instead. Lethargy and cravings.

Of course there is some character issue involved. A little bit at least. It's the industrial carbs that gets the obesity cycle started. Everyone knows not to eat those sorts of things. Chips and cookies and things in bags and boxes, of whatever flavor. It's the stuff parents don't want kids to ruin their appetites on. A sort of folk wisdom. What, it doesn't apply to adults? But since we're answerable only to ourselves, in actuality, we eat what we want. Character, then.

But that's what's behind almost every problem. You married an unworthy spouse because you were attracted to unworthiness. You lost your home to foreclosure because you were adolescent with credit cards. You lost your job because et cetera. Not about blame, though. We have problems because we're human.

The fat problem is about what we eat. There are people who eat once a day, and spend no small part of it on the treadmills, and they don't lose the fat. It's the carbs. The industrial carbs. Refined, denatured, powdered, fried. Pre-digested. What are we, baby birds? Instant bloodsugar means instant hyperinsulinemia means excessive fat storage and consequent lack of energy. Industrial carbs means an excess of the raw materials that are essential in forming fat. Don't eat the industrial carbs and you will starve your fat instead of your immune system. Seems like a good deal.

But appetite is what it is. Even with the actual sure knowledge of what the problem and its cure are, some shocking number of people will continue as they are. Smoking through the hole in the neck. At which point, futility largely decouples itself from compassion. Perhaps not though. Judgment hardly does any good at all. It serves justice only, if anything. Justice is an abstract.

As for fatherless children, well, isolation is our natural state. If we fill the void with comforts, it cannot be a surprise. High on the list of first-learned-words, is "mine".

Even good boys need to be bad sometimes. Bad, in the sense of disobedience. Find a way you can get away with it. Because otherwise it's always about being good, and that's not possible. Not fully human. It's not healthy. It's about a safety valve. An assertion of individuality. Yes, we want them to be above criticism. We want them to receive the praise of strangers. But on the other hand, those are the children who get into windowless vans idling by the bushes in big parks. We have to practice being disobedient. Sometimes it's actually the responsible thing to do.

There it is. Responsibility. Adults must be responsible. Fitness, nutrition -- health -- these are duties. So.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

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CrossFit Burbank

Academic Standards

The inevitability of calories. All nutrition orbits around that star. But aside from a glaringly obvious relationship to thermodynamics, how much information does the term contain? Every doctor knows that the body is a mystery. Sure, science and all that. Get numbers on the problem. Metrics -- it’s like money … so good. But some people don’t get well, when all the numbers demand that they do.

Sometime in the nineteenth century they figured out there was such a thing as protein and fat and carbs, and how much heat was released from each when you burned it, whether in a crucible or metabolically. No, really, it is important to know that. But it’s not something we should run our lives by. Since that time, we’ve learned a few more things. Like about hormones, say.

We keep using calories as if it were a meaningful concept because it’s a simple number that measures a real thing. That’s very good. But not all real things are meaningful. There exist books that, say, give brief biographies for the peers and nobles of Great Britain up until the mid 1860s. Of limited application. Is there some way of expressing useful nutritional information in a simple way? A grade? ORAC value, glycemic index, available energy content (with a nod to DIT and fiber)? Bioavailable protein? Bioavailable mineral content? Something where you don’t have to be a brain genius to be able to make a decision? Something where crafty marketeers can’t up the score by dumping some vitamins and fiber into their cotton candy? -- like every breakfast cereal?

That’s a lot of info. Looks like a grade isn’t enough. A report card. That’s too much. Not easy. But we can’t just express it as a ratio, dry weight over calories ... sugar would get a grade of ¼, grams over calories. So does a granola bar. Hm. Broccoli is 29 grams over 98 calories. Call it 3/10. In other words, sugar is 25%, broccoli is 30%. Does that seem reasonable? Because that’s what the current system thinks is important to tell us. As if 100 grams of one carb is the same as 100 grams of another. That’s just insane. Is the math right? Because something here is insane.

Point is, calories are like women. All the same.

Oh, is there something wrong with that idea? Not all women are the same? It hardly seems possible that sophisticated men of the world could be wrong about this. But in the vanishingly small likelihood that it is wrong -- and the idea is both absurd and offensive -- maybe the world is wrong about calories. It’s just barely possible.

Absurdity, of course. A thing has merit because of its particular qualities, not because of imposed judgments and sloppy assumptions. Nutrient-dense / calorie-poor foods are manifestly superior. Empty-calorie foods are drugs -- non-nutritive substances that manipulate hormones.

No, it's not just diet. Lots of actual work involved. It's a big-picture thing. Approach it with open eyes.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

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CrossFit Burbank

Tisquantum

That's "Squanto's" real name, in Algonquian. Tisquantum. That Indian who helped out the Pilgrims. The shortening can be forgiven -- Algonquian rivals ancient Elamite for its opaqueness. Nquitpausuckowashawmen. No, not glossolalia. That's how Squanto would have said, "There are a hundred of us." Tashuckqunne cummauchenaumiz? "How long have you been sick?" Yep. Tough language.

Of course Squanto could have numbered his tribe, the Patuxets, in several languages. In English, and in Spanish. Alas, there were not a hundred Patuxets left to count: all had perished, to smallpox. He alone survived, like some servant of Job -- as indeed he was, to the hardpressed Pilgrims. As for how long Squanto was sick, sudden fever took him the year after he had settled with his new tribe of pilgrims.

He must have been used to being snatched away. He wasn’t kidnapped just once, understand. In 1605, one George Weymouth whisked him away to England -- whether kidnapped or volunteered, history does not record. He labored for untold years -- well, eight or nine -- until returning to America in 1613 as translator for none other than John Smith. Set free as reward for his service, Squanto returned to his own tribe, only to be enslaved and taken to Spain -- kidnapped in 1614 by Thomas Hunt, a lieutenant of Captain Smith. He escaped to London where he remained until 1619 (interrupted by one odd excursion to Newfoundland), then he joined an expedition to America. There he found his family and tribe all wiped out.

Providence? To find an English-speaking Indian wandering the coast at just the right time to save the Pilgrims? Well, yes. But how many other Squantos have wandered the earth, who never found their mission? -- Jonahs who made it to Tarshish?

To know one's purpose is something to be thankful about. Father, mother, friend -- and to bring light and love not only to those you care about but to the stranger -- well, this is something in which we might make our own providence. The rest of it -- being kidnapped and orphaned and dying young and such -- we count as beyond our understanding, and trust in Providence to resolve.

Much fiction will have crept into the story of Squanto and the Pilgrims. Of course. It's not that it wasn't a good enough story on its own. It's just that the reality is complex, and myths have a happy simplicity to them. The tales of childhood are for inspiring us to emulate an example of excellence ... since there are hardly any real examples of excellence. Having heroes who actually lived requires a degree of selective blindness on our part. We give importance to what is admirable, and choose not to see the flaws -- or at least to down-grade them. This is as it should be. If we saw the chamber of horrors that is the heart of every human, we might never stop screaming.

So we have myths.

Is America everything it might be or that we wish it were? The question answers itself. The same holds when we inspect any ideal. There are no “ideals.” If they were real, they’d be “examples.” But part of living in the real world is understanding that it is hopelessly flawed. Well, not hopelessly. Fatally. Even in the face of the inevitable fatality of our biology, though - in the face of ultimate metabolic failure, we need not be hopeless.

And so we have Thanksgiving. It has its own mythology, as does Christmas. But for all that there is the fiction of Santa, there is the reality of saintliness. And for all that the Hallmark and Rockwell images may be nothing but a happy conceit -- of convivial Indians supping in sumptuous abundance with the dour wayfarers from across the gray waves of the churning seas -- yet they have the reality of vivid dreams, that might be true, for all that sunlight says otherwise.

The cherished dreams of our hearts have no guarantee of coming to pass. Every prayer of thanks must, must include a prayer of abject supplication, begging God that evil, or greater evil, should not strike us. So Job, and tragedy, and the loss of every loved one, teach us. So, as a nation we take a day, a single day, collectively to call to mind the many blessing with which we have been blessed. We recall that it need not be so. We understand that who looks for perfection is a fool. We understand that who accepts the inspiration of a myth honors the daylight the visions of night have promised.

We wish to all who read this a joyful and most blessed Thanksgiving Day.


Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

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CrossFit Burbank

Faults

There's a part of us that might ask, what's the use. Haiti will be as much of a basket case after that last particular act of God, like all the others, recedes into myth. Pity the land that is made a colony of the French. The poor are always with us -- most especially if they live in a culture of utter corruption ... as distinct from just the workaday corruption inherent in the human condition.  Sheesh.  We can't even take a Carnival Cruise without being tormented by fate.

Why watch the news at all. More chaos? More of the same. Just more concentrated now, in time and location, in this era of mass communication.  Wars and rumors of war. It matters, theoretically and actually, but if you don't know, say, any Haitians, any compassion one might feel is theoretical, regardless of how genuine. And catastrophe victims aren't everyone's particular cross to bear. It must be a good thing, to not bleed for every wound that overtakes humanity. That's what callouses after all are for.

So when Pat Robertson said, say, that Haiti had made a pact with Satan 200 years ago, and that hurricane was a sort of judgment, well, do we need to have an opinion about his opinion? One of the ways the biblical God deals with humanity is through its nations. Maybe it's true. It's no dumber than Danny Glover's statement on exactly the same topic: The earthquake came from God as a judgment because Haiti didn't do enough to save The Planet at the Copenhagen Climate Summit.  Remember that?  As if the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere could have done anything at all. Could it even afford airfare to Denmark? At least Robertson had documents to support his claim. God after all has acted judgmentally, in the past. It's surprising though that Robertson imagined he had access to the archives of Hell, to know the private arrangements between slaves and Satan. As for Glover, it's surprising he believed in this sort of God. Must be Goddess, he means.

Ah well.  All that is old news.  What, five or ten years ago?  Who can remember.  And here we are, racing around, if only mentally, trying to find meaning. Why why why did this thing this or that horrible thing occur? Sin, private or public? A cursed creation? Entropy? Randomness? Job and David and every human being capable of thought have looked for an answer. Jesus gave one. Why do towers fall on innocent victims? So that non-victims will repent. We are all object lessons, one to another. This may not be an entirely satisfactory answer. It's doubtful that there is a better one.

Take addicts, drug addicts. California legislators and other ne'er-do-wells have agitated for legalized pot. So they can tax it and use it and be all groovy and socialistic. Yes, to profit from drug sales is a sound fiscal policy. Of course. But regarding addicts, there is nothing at all, ever, under any circumstance, that one can say, or do, or cause to be done, that can change an addict into not an addict. There is no formula, no thing, no performance, that is the thing to do. Wisdom is doing what is appropriate. Sometimes it's appropriate to understand helplessness. Sort of a Zen thing, where non-action is most dynamic. The still small voice, heard, where the Voice from the Whirlwind is just noise.

God is not all-powerful. He cannot be untrue to his own nature. He cannot violate our free will. Chosen, yes, and choosing. Not a contradiction. Not even a paradox. Just something we can't understand. That's probably why God wants us to be like little children. We have to accept some things, not because faith is valuable in itself -- it's just necessary if we want serenity.

What was the number of Haitian dead? Up to five hundred thousand? -- but that isn't likely to be right. Fifty thousand? Out of a population of ten million. So half a percent of the population, killed in a single blow. One and a half million, if it were the USA. Seems like a lot. But everyone dies. We just prefer that the horror be distributed more evenly across time. We prefer our grief to be decoupled from horror, for all that when we are overwhelmed we become numb. A madman or bureaucrat might propose that we get the killing and dying done all at once -- more efficient and statistically less traumatic. But something in our actual humanity argues against this sort of logic. God, taking the long view, allows both perspectives free expression, that we may chose between them as we please.

Of course God cares. It must be that he wants us to care as well. That, and that we should repent.

What does this have to do with fitness, or health? Or addiction or helplessness? This is the world we live in. We can live in it as victims, slaves to fate, or as captains of our destiny. The weather is what it is, with its droughts and hurricanes. How we sail the waters or traverse the wasteland is up to us. We eat what we chose to eat. We exercise as we will. The result of these things is health, and fitness, or its lack. We can't chose our bones. But we do choose what hangs off of them.

That's all. Understanding this, our strength and our helplessness, earns us all the serenity we will ever be entitled to.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Letting Off Some Steam

Counterintuitive ain't the half of it. We seem to have gotten our understanding of obesity and weightloss from infomercials. Can that be possible? What about Oprah? -- didn't she lose a bunch of fat? And Robert De Niro -- he got fat on purpose for Raging Bull. So eating more will make you fat, and diet and exercise can lean you down. It's obvious. But controlled studies consistently invalidate this observation. Calorie restriction for the obese results in lower basal metabolism and decreased energy expenditure. Exercise increases appetite and for the effort provides a relatively insignificant energy expenditure. That's the clear conclusion from the studies.

It's not genetic, as we know from the obesity epidemic. If Americans were generally not fat 30 years ago, and three times as many are fat now, it's environmental, some behavioral change of diet, lifestyle, etc. It's genes responding, not demanding. So why is it happening? That's not the question right now. Now, it's why isn't it changing, with diet and exercise.

It's as if somewhere in the brain there is a silhouette of what it thinks we should look like, and the brain works to maintain that shape. That's not how it is, but as if. There is a gradual increase and excess of calories, however, that allows for the slow modification, adaptation of that image, so that slow fat gain can be sustained, whereas sudden change is more easily reversed. It's really a function of insulin -- but insulin is subject to homeostasis, even if an unhealthy one.

Undoubtedly meditation, visualization, affirmations can hack in as it were and edit that image, allowing for successful weight loss where a merely thermodynamic approach will fail. We can say will fail, because that's what the mechanistic studies show -- treating fat loss as a mere equation of positive or negative energy balance results in failure. The homeostatic silhouette gauge makes adjustments -- faster heartrate, more spontaneous movement, nervous energy, body temperature fluctuation, manipulation of appetite and cravings -- anything to waste or conserve energy, calories, fat. We know the mind-body relationship is controlled but not ordained by hormones -- the way a puppet is controlled by stings ... it goes beyond the strings. Point is, thinking matters.

The diet and exercise paradigm, to which every sensible person must be attracted, seems to be wrong. You'll have to look at your own life experience to see if it has worked. It's not a simple equation, energy in, energy out. If the body were a closed system, that idea would work. But it's not a closed system. There's leakage. It's not energy in, which is either stored or burned for purposeful metabolic functions. Such functions can be quantified, as body heat or lifting or locomotion or breathing or heartbeat or shivering. These are purposeful, and because of that they are predictable, quantifiable, and variables of an equation. The silhouette gauge is a randomizer, in that insulin may be set too high -- making you too fat. Why? Who knows. Aside from too many industrial carbs that is.

Think of the body as a steam engine, in an old fashioned train. A heap of coal, a furnace, and a way to get work done. Easy. Straightforward math, whatever the details. But then there's the whistle. The safety valves, that keep the boiler from exploding. It confounds things. Some people are always blowing their whistle. A lot of wasted steam. Keeps them lean. Some people let the pressure build until it's dangerous. Not on purpose -- it's just how the thing is built. Some engine cabs just keep filling up with coal, that doesn't get burned -- or the firebox has a problem, and the coal builds up there. You get the idea. Not an elegant analogy, but you can play with it yourself.

The point is that the calculations can't be valid if the system is not closed. How can people eat less and still be fat? First, metabolism is not even a steam engine, but rather a hybrid motor, that uses different fuels in a pattern we haven't recognized yet. Then, well, the system is not closed. What goes in? Calories? How meaningful is that? Something burned in a crucible is supposed to translate one-to-one into metabolism? Isn't that actually sort of an insane assumption? And once we have digested these "calories", they can be used only according to the mechanistic expectations of thermodynamics? We're all for thermodynamics. For mechanistic systems. The fact that fat people can eat less and exercise more than lean people confounds the issue, though, wouldn't you agree?

There's an engineer at the switch, and he operates according to rules that you don't find in elementary physics textbooks. He decides wheel speed and burn rates and heat and pressure and noise. He doesn't like to be starved, and he works at his own pace. How do you make him happy? Feed him right, and have a conversation.

That's all. That's all for now. Complex, and simple. Diet and exercise. We eat right for health. We exercise for fitness. Both matter, a lot. Food makes our bodies, and we use our bodies to do the things that life is about. Energy and movement. Diet and exercise. That's it.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Diet as Alchemy

The Surgeon General's Office instructs us that "Overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity." Oh. Well, case closed then. Never mind that most studies suggest that many who are overweight eat fewer calories than those who are lean, and may be as active. What does reality count in the face of authoritative pronouncements? There would hardly be any religions at all, if evidence mattered. And even less politics. And no atheists at all. Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time came thirty years ago and is now thoroughly entrenched. Never mind that in the past thirty years overweight and obesity have nearly tripled.

How can the new standard paradigm, of eat less and sweat more, be wrong? Never mind what kind of low fat and what kind of high carbs they tell us to eat -- is the theory behind it valid? Because if it's not, the implication is that we might, somehow, eat an unlimited amount of calories and not gain weight. Why, that way lies insanity! Calories have to go somewhere. It's physics, the conservation of matter/energy. Either exercise it away or store it as fat. Right? It makes sense.

If triglyceride fat, blubber, can only be formed in the presence of glycerol, what happens to excess calories without glycerol? Well, after general vitality is seen to, and the immune system, and recovery and repair from physical activity -- you know, the reason we eat -- the surplus, since it doesn't go to matter, must go to energy. Heat. That's science.

The simplistic thermodynamic analogy is not valid. True, calories must go either to matter or energy. But a calorie is not a calorie. The caloric value of food is identified by actually burning that food in a crucible in a laboratory. The heat generated is measured, and that's how many calories the food has. Never mind that we cannot digest fiber. That's confounding in only an incidental way. The point is that metabolism is not a crucible, for all that we make heat. It's not a simple energy in-out equation. There are various pathways that lead to multiple outcomes dependent on a number of variables. Well that didn't say a lot, and is quite obvious.

Calories are not about heat. Calorie is another of those misleading-therefore-useless words. What calories are actually about are raw materials, out of which possibilities are made. Thinking in terms of calories is like thinking in terms of carbon -- coal is the same thing as diamonds. Well, yes. And no.

Calories are not just a sort of element, that might happen to manifest as certain allotropes -- incidental forms -- like fats or carbs, as carbon has graphite or diamond, which are both pure elemental carbon. Protein, carbs and fat differ in their fundamental, their elemental nature, and that they burn as calories is as meaningful as the fact that they are made out of matter. Meaningful only because reality is what it is. Protein is as different from carbs as nitrogen is different from, well, carbon. Of course they do not behave the same in the body -- not even as calories.

Absent glycerol, then, triglycerides are not made. Fat would be present in the blood as free fatty acids. Maybe in the liver, maybe in cells, muscle or adipose, but not bundled up for storage. That's not such a good thing, having NO stored bodyfat. We may end up looking sort of skeletal, all hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked. Heroin chic. It's a look. Like the burlap-bag-full-of-yogurt look is a look, at the other end of the continuum. Somewhere between these two looks is a healthy compromise. But even given an excess of calories, absent glycerol there would be no overweight. You could eat until you just got too hot. Maybe you'd fall into a fevor coma. Maybe you'd spontaneously combust. It's science. But what studies do show is that diets of even 10,000 calories a day do not lead to excess bodyfat, when industrial carbs are limited. Industrial carbs -- those that lead to excess glycerol and chronically or acutely raised insulin.

Gracious. So much science. It's so hard. But if you are one of those nerdy geeks, or would like to be, all skinny, say, but somehow brawny too for purposes of this analogy and rather long and awkward sentence, well, then you are interested in answers both interesting and true.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Seduction

FW was listening to Satan one evening while working out.   "Oh FW, " said the Evil One in a silken and sonorous tone, "you poor thing.  This is so hard, FW, all this hard hard work.  It's so much.  Just go a little slower, FW.   It will be easier, and it doesn't really matter, a few more seconds.   You can make up for it with a strong finish.  Sure FW.  Save nothing.  At the end I really do want you to save nothing.  Full blast, FW, absolutely.   But FW, FW, don't exhaust yourself right now, for heaven's sake.   Be sensible, sensible, FW.  Exhaustion is dangerous!  You're very healthy for where you're at, FW -- you really look so good, for how you've treated yourself -- but blood vessels do burst.  And no one knows how hard it is, for you in particular, FW, and they won't even know if you take it a little slower, a little easier, not that you would ever go easy.  No one will know, FW, not that it's their stinking business ... and anyway they don't even feel sorry for you.  FW, is it hot in here or what?  Man is it hot.  They don't even notice how the sweat is just POURING off you.  And FW, isn't that noise a distraction?  But just keep plugging alone, I mean along.  Heh heh.   A little slowing each time is expected.  Oh!  FW! -- you're wobbling!   You almost STUMBLED, FW!   FW, you must REALLY be working hard.   Did they notice?  No, of course not.  So hard.  Too hard.  And FW, this is only four minutes!  Another twelve?!?  Ridiculous."

On and on he goes, Satan. Thing of it is, he's right. No lies at all. No lies this time. Even the "too hard" -- it is too hard, to do something faster than we can do it. But it's not too hard to do as fast as we can do it. Which this isn't. Satan loves the truth. He loves most of the truth. Sometimes it's all, or mostly, or at least some lies. You can't do it. You're not good enough. But he knows he has to stick with the truth, mostly. Because we can hear the lie, but we can be fooled by the truth. It is hard. There is another 12 minutes. The heat is unpleasant. If we save it now we will finish stronger. You shouldn't argue with what is true. It's just that in this particular circumstance, truth is invented by what you do. You choose your truth.

Just as you get started, remind yourself about mental attitude. That's a strategy that has to be practiced, trained. Start with a short workout. Develop a monologue, see what works, what's effective. It will be different with different people. It will be a trial-and-error thing, because not all theories are correct. There are workouts designed to identify mental techniques that work. There are p-factor workouts, there are positive attitude workouts. Because every champion understands at some level that he will succeed. No maybe about it. "Champion" is a confusing word, because we think it involves other people. Where most people are, they just have to beat themselves.

It's just psychology. Like the idea of sacredness, separateness. Every religion has it, in the solemnity of its rites. The High Priest of Israel, we read, would be struck dead if he entered the Holy of Holies with an impure mind, with his sins unatoned. That's why he entered with a rope tied around his ankle -- if he where struck dead in there, they could drag him out.

Application: attitude matters. Tai chi is not a form of exercise. It's a form of meditation. Exercise also may be most productive when it is a form of meditation. Because it's all about the brain anyway, its neurons and its hormones. And the brain is just the sponge that holds the fluid of the mind -- as it were. It's just a sort of meat. It is the servant, we are the master. Aren't untrained dogs obnoxious? Isn't it annoying when kids have bad manners and incompetent parents? And isn't it a huge mistake, when you listen to your meathead instead of your wisdom?

There are stratagems. A script, a visualization, a theatre-of-the-mind progression. "Incremental velocity". "Integral veclusion".  Heh.  Who knows -- the universe is ripe with potentialities. Music, for example, bypasses the mind and goes straight for the emotions and subconscious. That's why it's dangerous. The rhythm alone should make a difference, without even touching the subconscious. A matrix, a scaffolding, to organize unconscious energy. A cue toward a mental attitude. A way of keying into and associating with past successes -- picking up where you left off. Something to occupy the mind, other than failure talk.

It's simple and it's complex, exercise. If we didn't have any bad habits, we'd practically be perfect. In any case, the only voice we should listen to is the one that encourages us to excellence.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Unknowable Things

No one knows the difference between animal saturated fats and plant saturated fats. The palmitic acid in coconut oil and in beef is chemically identical. It’s just the ratios that are different. So, uh, well, it seems we do know the difference. There isn’t one.

No one knows the role of enzymes in digestion. We have the words, and how they’re used, but no one knows anything about how they're produced or excreted, and what happens to them afterwards. An enzyme is a catalyst, and catalysts cause a reaction without being changed by it, so theory suggests that enzymes are taken up again and reused. But no one knows how that would work. We know that various digestive processes occur at different parts of the small intestine, but no one knows what happens where.

So that’s everything that science doesn't know.

We think of diet and nutrients in terms of broad categories. Fats and proteins and carbs. It’s really not useful. Take protein. We can’t use it. We need dietary amino acids. But we only need eight or so -- the essential ones; all the others we can make ourselves. Why so vague about how many essentials? Some can be converted into others. Messes up the calculations. But current estimates are that you need only about 16 grams of the essentials, if you weigh 200 pounds, not obese. A bit more than half an ounce. Dude, that's like, totally, hardly anything.

There is a qualitative difference between plant and animal protein. No difference between the amino acids, but in the digestion process, huge. Putrefactive bacteria don’t feed on plants. Don’t you just love that word, putrefactive? Putrid. Mmm. Then, if undigested proteins leak into the bloodstream, there may be autoimmune problems. Point is, protein is not just protein.

Same with fats. Saturated fats are there just to supply energy. On the other hand, your skin can get softer, so delightfully touchable,  when you eat coconut oil. It’s a well-known beauty secrets. Yes, it seems something can be both well-known and a secret. And we’ve been through all that with omegas 3 and 6. No one knows if these are ever just metabolized for energy, or if they are used only structurally. So that will have to be added to the list of things science doesn't know. Then there are the hydrogenated and transfats. Poision.

Or carbs. Fibrous carbs -- good. Unprocessed carbs, good. Sugars and refined carbs? Slow but very real poisons. Or cholesterol. The term seems to be useless, when the distinction is not made about which particular cholesterol, HDL or LDL, or even subcatagories of LDL.

So if there’s confusion about what to eat, well, common sense has to play a pretty big role. Because you probably haven’t been told about nutrients at any level smaller than protein or fat or carbs. And these studies that are done, measuring the effect of dietary carbs, but that don’t make a distinction between fibrous and refined … useless? Or that talk about high or low cholesterol, but nothing about the ratios. Or that measure protein in the diet without any understanding about the intestinal microzoa that cohabit with you as your constant dinner guests?

It’s a sort of information that is worse than useless. It’s information that is actually ignorance. Like nutrients that don’t nourish. Empty carbs. Dead proteins. Poisonous fats. Really. Couldn’t you just sit down and give the matter some serious thought, and come up with a sensible diet on your own, without the government spending billions of dollars building its pyramids that end up ruining the economy of your health? Heavens, that was an overly complex metaphor. Honestly though, does a cake really seem like food to you? And how is bread much different than cake? Does eating meat three times a day seem like a natural thing to you? From either an Evolutionary or an Edenic perspective? Does drinking bovine milk seem like a sensible thing for an adult human to do on a regular basis?

If you sat down and just puzzled it out, what do you suppose you’d come up with, as a sensible human diet? It’s not a trick question. It's one of those things science doesn't know. Too many contractions, between real science and garbage science. There is so much bias. It's a scandal.

Competence starts, or is it ends, with results. It's a sort of wading-through-miasmal-swamps thing -- moving through poison to get to health. It's about effectiveness. So?

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

How Things Work

It just seems so interesting, how the brain works, or the mind-body connection, or the CNS-PNS. However you'd describe it. It's just fascinating. Afferent and efferent nerves. Same as sensory and motor nerves. Only two sorts of neurons, inward and outward, to the brain or away. Inward is sensory, information about everything other than the brain, whether within the body or from the great wide world. Outward is motor, to get things done, either muscles or organs, somatic or autonomic. Neuron axons bundled in the peripheral nervous system are nerves; axon bundles in the CNS are called tracts. Isn't it fascinating?

The brain communicates with the body in only two ways: through motor nerves or through hormones. Nerves are a direct line, like telegraph wires. Hormones float through the bloodstream hoping to be picked up by cell receptors -- like fish and nets, without the hope. Isn't that interesting? In order to explain things, you need facts. Why does exercise make muscles grow? An exercised fiber becomes more receptive to hormones. Hormones are released when enough fibers are exercised. So it's central nervous system, and it's endocrinal. Obvious of course, but so interesting.

It's easy to gush -- it's so interesting.

And the way the CNS develops -- the brain and spinal cord. It starts as a sort of looped tube, eventually with, well, six parts, spinal cord and the five parts of the brain. A tube. See? It's not an addition thing, this development, not one part of the brain developing, then another one, more advanced, then yet another, and so on. New parts of the tube just appearing one day, or epoch. It's all there, inherent in the beginning. See? It's not an Evolutionary development. It all happens more or less all at once, with all vertebrates, the way you'd blow up a plastic bag. There is no fish brain and lizard brain and mammal brain. There are just bigger and smaller parts of the brain, depending on class. A fish's cerebrum is smaller than its eyeball. A rat's cerebrum is the size of its ear. Humans' fill up everything behind the eyes and up. But it's all the same basic plastic bag -- just different shapes.

That's the body, and the brain. Not quite the same as mind, or as some would have it, the soul. Think of it as music. Flute music. What makes it? The breath of the player? The shape of the instrument? Neither, alone. Both, but not only both. Music is not breath and flute -- that might very well be just noise. We are made by genetics and shaped by experience -- but we are not just both of these, together. We are not breath through a flute, not experience acting through genes. We are music. There is a musician, a spirit if you will, inspiring as well as respiring.

Well. It's about being excellent. Utilizing our gifts. We can't save anyone. We can help each other, though, help a human, with a body, achieve a level of physical excellence.  You do it, if you will. We help.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Boxes

It seems intimidating, at the beginning.

But it's not so much.

All honest effort is honorable.

We start at the beginning ...

and keep striving...

  

until we earn our rest.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Mindful of Small Things

God? Who is this "God" person people keep yammering about on TV and the radio? What proof is there of this "God"? Man, those religionists are so superstitious and unscientifical. Randomness explains it all.  Didn't they go to school, and learn all about science?

A horse fly. Horse flies are for killing. Who knew that they were beautiful.

Flies. Beelzebub is the lord of flies. But they can't be all bad.

The grasshopper. Very discreet -- deadpan.

A bee. And its pollen.

A harvestman. Seems to be missing a leg. Life is hard.

Jumping spider, male.

Jumping spider, female.

Body shot. She's hot.

Ladybug. Not a good name.

There are dragons -- Chinese dragons. They're just an inch long, is all.

Even a weevil -- such crasftsmanship.

You don't have to get along with God. But surely you must believe in him. Him. There has to be an explanation, for beauty. An explanation that isn't casuistic. But maybe there's no such thing after all.  Maybe rationality itself is random.

Anyways.

What matters is results. If you'd like to be beautiful as a bug, eat right, and exercise effectively.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Marketing

Are you sad?

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Who could resist such a compelling presentation?  It's irresistible.    But regardless of how subtle the message, it's results that matter.  Do what is effective.  We'll leave the rest for you to intuit, deduce, or stumble onto.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank