bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
I haven't seen my husband for several days and we both just got in a few minutes ago, me from visiting Kim in Iowa with the kids, and he from a plant trip.
I will write more about what it means to have exercise at the top of the priority list in another post. For now, let's talk about discernment.
A couple of days ago I posted about a particularly insidious barrier to prioritizing exercise for health: it can seem like a self-indulgence. For that reason, many folks who know the value of self-sacrifice forgo it.
It could be that we can't see that the struggle to prioritize exercise for health can be embraced as a form of sacrifice. It takes humility to ask for help; it takes selflessness, humility, and gratitude to give up or to de-emphasize our family's other commitments. It could also be because we prefer not to appear self-indulgent, prefer to tell ourselves we are being selfless by putting others first, when really we don't want to change. This last case trapped me for a long time.
But a large class of people—in my experience, mostly they are mothers—have a much more difficult struggle, because they are truly generous people with an acute awareness of their responsibilities to other people. They have good, not false, reasons that make it difficult to put their own physical health at a high priority. The needs of a newborn baby come first. The needs of several small children come first. A child with a disability. Or a tough. Getting the kids to piano and Scouts. Getting the homeschooling. A chance to let a hardworking spouse relax. Or aging parents to care for. A peaceful and lovely home. Or getting everyone to daily Mass. Being there for a close friend in trouble. Family meals prepared with care and enjoyed unrushed. Perhaps the pressure to bring in extra income. Or perhaps there is no other parent around, and everything's on you. Something going on right now (isn't there always?) and now isn't a good time. Maybe next month. Maybe next year.
If that's you, it's tough, because in truth, you might be right. Any one of those reasons, and innumerable others, might lead you to prudently decide that exercise can't be your highest priority right now. Maybe your health is actually pretty good overall, you're not at serious risk of any health problems, you get a decent amount of physical activity just trying to take care of all the stuff you need to do. Maybe for you it really would be self-indulgent to get some exercise. Maybe so. It takes real discernment to decide if it's time to give personal exercise its turn at the top of your priority list.
Because if you hope induced exercise will become a habit—and so sustain itself in times when you can't prioritize it as highly—make no mistake, it has to have a good long turn at the top of your priority list. It's just not realistic to expect otherwise.
(Exercise is a habit for me now. I fit it easily into my schedule. It isn't my top priority anymore because it doesn't have to be—if I have to miss a workout, it doesn't mean I'm sliding out of control or giving up. But that never came until our family spent a whole year with "Erin gets two workouts a week" at the top, and I mean the top, of our family's priorities.)
The proper point of view, when it comes to "getting what you need" vs. self-sacrifice, is service of the vocation. I assume most of my readers are married with children. It is right and good to get what you need to enable you to live out the duties of your vocation, for the whole length of your life.
A working man who has to support his family needs to eat enough good food, and take care of himself well enough, to be able to perform his job. Right? And since he has a responsibility to his wife and children, it's a virtue for him to take care of his body with prudence and temperance, that he may live a long life if he can. Right?
The same is true for Mom.
Long-term thinking is appropriate here. If you become disabled through a preventable illness—I am always thinking of Type II diabetes, which runs in my family—it puts that much more pressure on everybody else. (See the "aging parents" up there in the list of responsibilities?) And this is not to get into that culture-of-death "I-don't-want-to-be-a-burden" language. It's just to point out that a family works together to carry the load in a lot of different ways. One of the ways you can help later is by taking care of yourself responsibly now. Be there for your children, so you can support them as they find their own vocation and begin to live it. Be there for your grandchildren. Prudence.
* * *
When is it a good time to give personal exercise its turn at the top of the priority list?
When is it a good time to quit the habit of inactivity and start a new habit of giving yourself what your body needs to thrive?
"Sedentary lifestyle" is a major risk factor for excess deaths in the U.S. In 1986 it ranked third, behind cigarette smoking and obesity (and one would guess that sedentary lifestyle is also a risk factor for obesity!)
If you had the habit of cigarette smoking, rather than the habit of inactivity, when would it be a good time to quit smoking?
Even if quitting smoking made you irritable and hard to live with? Even if going to meetings and reading motivational literature and seeing your doctor took time away from your family? Even if the process of kicking the habit made you a Bad Mother while it was going on?
* * *
I can't tell you whether now is the right time for you to put personal exercise at the top of the priority list. But I would like to give you permission to consider it strongly possible that this is something you ought to do, not just for yourself, but for everyone who relies on you. That it's something you ought to do so that you can live out your vocation to the best of your abilities.
If you do prioritize exercise at the top of your list, even though you have a tremendous amount of real responsibility to other people, how do you embrace exercise as a sacrifice?
Simple.
Your sacrifice becomes pure self-discipline.
You make it really count.
You take the precious time allotted for your exercise, or for planning for exercise or traveling to exercise, and you don't waste it.
You stick to the commitment you've made.
You concentrate on building the habit, so it can become self-sustaining.
You offer it up.
You do it in love.
No kidding. You know that while I was losing weight, I read dozens of diet books, doling them out over the weeks to keep myself motivated, and trying to take something valuable out of each one. I’ve mentioned a few of the ones I found particularly helpful. But I’ve not gone right out and recommended the main approach of any of them. Till now.
A few days ago I wrote that I’d had a chance to skim through The Beck Diet For Life by Judith S. Beck, that I had seen some things in there that reminded me of myself, and that I would buy the book and write a longer review.
Well, I’ve got it. And for once, I’m going to recommend, with complete and whole-hearted enthusiasm, Chapters 1-4.
Why only Chapters 1-4? Um, because that’s as far as I’ve read. These chapters take you through “Stage 1” of the five-stage program. I know nothing about the other stages yet. But I am telling you, the preparatory stage and Stage 1 are that good. Judith Beck could have packaged them up as a book all on their own and sold them. Indeed, I am beginning to think that it might be a good idea for people who decide to get the book and follow the program to pretend that Stages 2-5 don’t even exist, at least until they’ve read and implemented Stage 1 — which is all about putting habits and skills into place, and doesn’t include any advice at all about what or how much to eat.
I’m going to summarize the book in a minute, but first I want to tell you why am I so excited about it.
Reason number 1. Because I see myself there. So many of the things I did to abolish gluttony from my life — it’s almost as if Dr. Beck has written a set of instructions for how I did it. Not what to eat—but how to think, and especially, how to get over the fear of hunger.
Here is an excerpt that is an example of near-perfect alignment with my experience and thoughts:
It’s important for dieters to know that hunger is normal and most people without weight problems get hungry, often a little while before meals… Most diet programs encourage you to avoid hunger. Some tell you to eat when you feel hungry and to stop eating when you feel full. The problem with that is you are likely to confuse hunger and non-hunger, at least sometimes…. Some diet programs encourage you to fill up on such “free foods” as raw vegetables to avoid hunger. The problem with that advice is that you never learn to tolerate the very normal sensation of hunger…
Phillip doubted his ability to tolerate hunger, and he engaged in certain unhelpful behaviors to avoid it. He was always thinking about how, when, and where he could get food, in case he got hungry before his next meal. He consistently overate at meals to ensure that he wouldn’t feel hungry later on. He kept extra food in various places—his car and office desk—just in case he got hungry. He was continually giving himself the message that it was bad to be hungry, that he couldn’t tolerate hunger. This incorrect thinking is exactly what I want to free you from!
(See my post from the “Gains” series, “What’s wrong with me,” and compare.)
How does Dr. Beck suggest that would-be dieters learn to tolerate real hunger without feeling panicky? She recommends they perform a series of “experiments” in which they get hungry on purpose, and write down what happens — keep a record of their level of discomfort over the hours that pass without food. Her instruction is to keep doing this experiment until the would-be dieter is able to “go from breakfast to dinner without eating and without feeling panicky,” and until the would-be dieter is completely convinced that “hunger is not a big deal—it’s only mildly uncomfortable… it comes and goes.”
This is very close to what I did, feeling my way through the experience with no guide. It seems to me that Dr. Beck’s version is better designed than mine, which isn’t surprising because while chemical engineering is an excellent all-around background for all sorts of problem solving, it is just possible that a cognitive behavior therapist might have some insights into the field that I don’t.
Dr. Beck advocates almost the same set of behavioral changes that I went through, albeit with some differences in how she implements them. Daily motivational thinking: check. The daily weigh-in as a piece of useful information: check. Eating slowly and paying attention to food: check. Setting small goals and consciously noticing successes several times a day: check. Learning to tolerate hunger: check. It’s all there. Those of you who want to do “what I did?” This is is definitely a way to do it. I love the way she is advising readers to really take the time to learn about what works and what doesn’t. It is definitely a lifetime approach, rather than a quick fix. And that’s exactly what I tried to do, and succeeded: I changed my life.
Reason number 2. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can do the first part — pregnant, nursing, medical problems, none of it is a barrier to beginning the program. (Some of the “experiments” might have to be skipped or modified.) The preparatory stage and Stage 1 of the program don’t involve an eating plan or calorie restriction, though Dr. Beck encourages readers to make good food choices if they want while following even if it doesn’t make sense to “diet” right now. It is all designed to work on your attitudes, fears, and habits.
(Dr. Beck does suggest that people who suffer from an eating disorder, depression, anxiety, or other psychological problem seek treatment from a mental-health professional before beginning the program. It sort of underscores how different this plan is: most plans advise you to check with a doctor for physical ailments that might preclude you from starting. This program is about your mind and behavior.)
Reason number 3. The program strongly appeals to my engineering brain. It is clear, and it is organized step by step, with “tasks” to complete before moving on to the next stage. Some of the tasks are collected into groups, and she says you can be working on several tasks at once, but (as they are numbered and presented in a specific order) you can surely master them one at a time — which strikes me as the wisest course. Baby steps.
Reason number 4. If you follow this program and do exactly what she says to do—and I can find no reason to recommend deviating from her plan through Stage 1—it will take a good long while. I’m guessing that if I had followed her program beginning from before I started to lose weight, it would have taken me three or four months at minimum to master all the skills. Someone with a more serious and out-of-control eating problem would likely take longer.
I am saying that I think it is a good thing that this program progresses very slowly. I do not think it will do anyone any good to rush it. Gluttony problems, like mine,* have to be abolished for life — there is plenty of time to slow down and do it right. Overweight, the visible manifestation of the gluttony problem, will follow in time.
Reason number 5. It is a cognitive-behavioral approach, but it is entirely compatible with leaning on the Lord for help. This is not, of course, a “Christian Weight Loss” book. Dr. Beck doesn’t get into discussions of gluttony as a kind of sin; but neither does she absolve the reader of personal responsibility. The program cannot work without some degree of personalization: The would-be dieter has to come up with his own motivating statements and reminders of values, of reasons to change behavior. It was obvious to me as I read through the preparatory tasks and the Stage 1 steps where the would-be Christian dieter can (and should) consider how the skills and tasks fit into living out his or her vocation in Christ. I can write more about that in another post if it seems necessary.
* * *
OK, now, here is an executive summary of the approach. I’m going to crack open Stages 2-5 just long enough to give you an overview of the whole program.
Overall structure of the plan is as follows. In each of these stages a very specific, quantifiable behavior-based goal is defined, and the “student” must reach that milestone before moving on to the next stage. In Stages 1-4, these end goals appear near the end of the chapter under a heading “Before You Move On.”
I would suggest not reading ahead past the stage you’re on.
A bit more detail about the preparatory stage and stage 1:
The preparatory stage has 10 tasks. I would suggest doing them IN ORDER and one at a time. Dr. Beck specifically enjoins the reader against assuming that these things can be figured out “as you go along.” They include gathering materials, setting a small goal, make time, get a “diet buddy” (I wish she’d used a less light-hearted term for a supportive person to be accountable to, because this strikes me as seriously important). Basically, you’re assembling all the things, people, and circumstances that are within your control and that you will need to build the skills in stage 1.
Stage 1 has 9 success skills to master before beginning the diet plan. A daily check-off sheet is included, and you are not supposed to move to Stage 2 until the check-off sheet is completed perfectly for seven consecutive days. I would suggest beginning with each new skill and mastering it before moving on to the next one. A few of the skills will take a minimum of several days to master, and I can easily see many people taking several weeks mastering just one skill. As an example, I know it took me a couple of months to learn to identify hunger accurately, when I was trying to figure it out on my own. I could probably have done it a bit faster on Dr. Beck’s plan, if I was devoting my full “dieting” attention to that skill rather than several skills at once.
That is as far as my review goes for now. I’d like to add one thing — if you have been following my series of posts, and you decide to give the Beck program a try, would you please drop a comment in the box to let me know? I’m interested enough in the program that I’m thinking of going through the steps myself, adapted a bit to help me with maintenance rather than weight loss.
*[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.
I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.
I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
Two quotes from my previous post:
1. "If getting enough exercise to meet your own adult body's needs never becomes a high priority, you will rarely if ever do it."
2. "With getting more exercise, one must take MORE for oneself.
This is a barrier for a lot of us."
It's a barrier because it can seem that to place your own physical health at a high priority is an indulgence, rather than a sacrifice. And therefore it seems like something Christian charity urges us to give up, rather than something to take on. I'd like to argue that for most of us, it is not an indulgence, it is a sacrifice.
But the nature of the sacrifice is different depending on why you might see it as a self-indulgence. I want to knock down the easy ones first. All you have to do is figure out which of these "self-indulgences" matches the one in your own head.
Imaginary self-indulgence 1. Keeping it all together (or appearing to) without asking for help from other people is your high priority. You should be able to do everything yourself! If you have to ask for help to get your workout—help from an expert, help from your spouse, help from a friend to watch your kids—that would be admitting you can't take care of yourself (let alone your family) without help, and you can't bear to admit that.
Sacrifice: Bite the bullet and ask for the help you need. If it feels yucky to ask, then it's probably all the more important that you do it. If you pride yourself on self-reliance, the cure is humility.
Imaginary self-indulgence 2. The priority you won't displace is all the commitments you've made. Your schedule is tight: volunteer work, the kids' piano lessons and science classes, maybe your job or your blogging. If it turns out that the time you take for exercising conflicts with one of these things, you know you'll have to cancel the workout. People are depending on you.
Sacrifice: More humility, and some thankfulness for all the wonderful opportunities you have —including your good health and the opportunity to take care of it. There will be other volunteers. The world will go on if you drop out of some of this stuff. Your kids' future will not be compromised if they have to miss a lesson or go for a time without extra enrichment classes. (Think of the many kids whose parents can't afford those things. Are their parents bad parents?) Most of the time, someone else will step in to fill the need. And people will understand if you have to cut back on your schedule and your family's schedule to take care of your health.
(And if they don't, they can go take a flying you know what.)
Imaginary self-indulgence 3. This one counts double. The truth is, you don't really want to exercise. It's hard, it's not as much fun as the other things you want to do, or you're afraid to start for any number of reasons—will people laugh at you, will you give up and be disappointed in yourself, will you fail? But you have convinced yourself that you don't want to do it because it would take you away from your family. It's a convenient excuse with plausible deniability! This way, (a) you don't have to change, and (b) you get to feel like a selfless person. Maybe even a bit of self-pity.
Sacrifice: Here the necessary sacrifice is to stop this insidious, comfortable lie. You aren't as selfless as you think. You're using your family or your other commitments as an excuse to keep from doing something difficult. There's at least two or three things wrong with this attitude, including possibly sloth for real. Repent and turn back to the truth. Even if the truth hurts.
Oh, and I've got a really great idea for your penance. Drop and give me twenty!
* * *
But what if none of those describe you? What if… you really are a generous person who really struggles with taking resources for yourself — for real? What if you can think of lots of really good reasons why it might really be a self-indulgence to place your exercise at the highest priority? What if you can't tell your needs from your self-centered wants? Scrupulosity's a bitch, isn't it? I'm going to try to unpack that kind of discernment in the next post.
Imagine you are single. You are, in this scenario, a not-terribly-fit person who gets some exercise — once in a while—and enjoys it somewhat.
Now imagine you get married, to a very fit, very active person who exercises vigorously most days and enjoys several strenuous sports.
Your new spouse says: "It's my dream that someday we'll spend lots of time enjoying an active life together."
You say: "Great! I love togetherness too. That's why I want us to do all our exercising together. You'll have to quit doing all the stuff that makes me too nervous to even think about — no more extreme sports, for sure. And of course when we go out running, you'll have to go slow enough that I can keep up. And if I get tired, we'll go home right away. Deal?"
* * *
Maybe, if exceptionally generous and exceptionally patient and exceptionally persuasive, the active spouse could agree to such a thing, reasoning that once the two of them are out on the trail or on bikes or whatever, a little push here, a little encouragement there, and eventually the more sedentary spouse will be able to catch up some — go a little faster, last a little longer, and maybe some day the dream will be realized and they'll both be living an active life, side by side.
More likely, agreeing to such an arrangement would be … the end of that person's very active, physically fit lifestyle. It would be settling for something less. Less than what's wanted; and maybe even less than what's really needed to stay healthy and strong.
It would be foolish to assume otherwise.
* * *
But it's not far from the arrangement that many parents, especially women, tacitly agree to when the children come along.
Unless we are exceptionally creative or lucky, we are almost always forced to choose between family togetherness and exercise that meets our own needs.
Sure, we can envision a life in which we stay with our children, or our children come along with us, and everybody gets lots of physical activity all day long. For a while it seems to work. We put the baby in the sling and walk to the grocery store and back, or we take the jogging stroller and go for a spin around the lake. We go to the playground and climb on the monkey bars with the little guy.
Then the second child comes along. The first child likes to walk, but… not very fast, and stops to look at every bug along the way. The walk to the grocery store, once a swift jaunt with a bouncing baby on the back, becomes a maelstrom of speeding cars and crosswalks and dodging bicyclists, and all our attention has shifted; we can't feel our heels pounding the pavement, we have to pay attention to how close the kiddoes are getting to the curb up ahead. Three kids now? The jogging stroller isn't big enough, and the oldest can't make it all the way around the lake without whining. When you climb on the monkey bars you can only see one kid at a time. You could maybe walk around the playground, but you heard last week that somebody called the cops on a mom who went to get her cell phone out of her car and left the kids unattended for five minutes.
Someday they'll be old enough for you all to get a really good workout, together. Someday you'll be able to share it all with your kids. You go for long slow hikes together, admiring wildflowers and looking for butterflies, and you know it's good, you're teaching them to go longer and move faster, and also to love being outdoors… but you wish you could really be moving.
* * *
This is a reality check. Kids need their mothers; mothers are adults who need a certain amount of vigorous exercise, or else a great deal of moderate exercise. In most of our neighborhoods, most of our schedules, these things are in conflict. Doing stuff with the kids isn't enough. It'll take the time: to walk on the treadmill for thirty minutes uninterrupted, to head off to the gym and leave the kids in the child care, to serve cold cuts for dinner to save time for a workout later, to get through an entire yoga session with the mental freedom to concentrate on the sensations in muscles and joints and not on did I hear the baby just wake up?
If Mom decides to make it a priority to give herself the exercise she needs, there's less "Mom" to go around.
* * *
This is different from fixing the overeating problem. In overeating, one ought to take less for oneself. One sacrifices, leaves more for everyone else. It is so easy to see that this is right and good.
With getting more exercise, one must take MORE for oneself.
This is a barrier for a lot of us.
* * *
Some of us are the kind who always take care of everybody else before ourselves. It's truly difficult to speak up and to say "I am going to do this because it meets my needs."
Others are the kind who have difficulty asking for help from others. It's hard to ask a friend to watch the kids, or maybe even to ask a spouse. It would be a kind of admission that you can't do everything all by yourself.
And some of us (ME) never have trouble doing things for ourselves, but "I need to be there for the kids" pops up as a convenient mental excuse NOT to do something that sounds difficult.
(Let's put it this way. About a third of the way into every swimming workout, a little mental voice pops up that says "You should cut your workout short today. The kids are stuck in the child care and there are so many things you should be doing at home…" This voice never pops up when I am out having my Saturday morning coffee and newspaper. It only pops up when my muscles start to get tired.)
* * *
I'm not saying that every mom should find some way to ditch the kids three times a week so you can concentrate on getting more exercise.
You've got to decide whether you can take yourself away from your family for that time. Whether you should. It's your family. You know your situation. I don't.
But I'd like to argue two things: first, more of us ought to take that time for ourselves than actually do.
Second, that whether you do it or not, you ought to be aware of the choice you're making. If getting enough exercise to meet your own adult body's needs never becomes a high priority, you will rarely if ever do it.
Accept it, and make your choice.
So, I'm just curious about something.
All the obsessive posts I made about weight loss this year are, by far, THE most popular posts I've ever written. I get links from other places to them. I like to think I'm more broadly interesting than this, but oh well… I guess I am starting to understand why there are so darn many weight loss books out there. People apparently like to read weight loss stuff.
What I'm wondering is… how are you readers doing? I have heard that weight loss is kind of contagious in families and peer groups. I wonder if any of mine rubbed off on you (this goes only for those readers who could stand to lose a few pounds and who aren't pregnant). Some of my closest friends IRL have also dropped more than a few pounds in the last year, and I suspect it's at least a little bit connected to the fact that I TALKED ABOUT NOTHING ELSE FOR MONTHS.
So, have you lost weight or made some healthy changes in the past year? This blog had anything to do with it? Speak up! And if you hate the weight loss posts, or if all my writing about food made you fatter, now's your chance to complain suggest constructive criticism.
This "Daily Photo" post at dooce, about having to trick Leta into wearing the dresses that aren't pink, reminded me of MJ's latest fashion nightmare.
… after her husband's sudden death last week, after the funeral.
(Yes, I said in the last post that my next post would be about something else. I meant the next post in the series.)
My small victory for yesterday was necessary, because I've gained about a pound for real and am trying to take it back off.
Yesterday Hannah and I watched Becket with the 8/9 year old boys in lieu of reading our medieval history from Story of the World. (Only a small amount of skipping ahead, during a couple of "wenching" scenes, was necessary. The boys liked the movie surprisingly well, with some pauses for us to discuss what was going on.) Because we were watching a movie, Hannah made copious amounts of generously buttered popcorn. Real popcorn! Not microwave. Cooked in coconut oil on top of the stove, which you should know is the second-best way to pop popcorn, the best being on top of a campfire.
I am not sure how much buttered popcorn I ate. More than I should've. At least two bowls, I think, between 10:30 and lunchtime.
That's not the victory. The victory is that I consciously compensated for it. Knowing that I'd had a couple servings of buttered whole grains I didn't plan to eat, I (a) didn't eat the crackers I'd planned to go with my lunch of tinned sardines, vegetable soup, and snap peas, and (b) didn't eat the pasta I'd planned to go with my dinner of chili and salad and (c) knew I didn't need a bedtime snack so didn't have one.
Cool!
Happily I can report that my fellow popcorn lover, Hannah, used a different strategy which, had I had some forethought, I might have done: She told herself she would save her popcorn for lunch. Which she did, setting some aside so the children would be sure not to eat it. At lunchtime she made room on her plate for a generous serving of that beautifully buttered popcorn. Good for her! An even more elegant
(and much less gluttonous!) solution than mine.
I said before that it is difficult to draw a direct analogy between fighting gluttony* (eating less) and moving around more and getting exercise. One thing they do have in common: If you’re serious about them, you’ll plan, and you’ll make deliberate choices to follow the plan.
I know that one conventional wisdom is to “find opportunities for movement that fit into your life.” Play vigorously with your kids, take the stairs, walk to the corner store instead of drive, things like that. The idea is supposed to be that working out is difficult in part because it’s unnatural, that our ancestors got physical activity as an integral part of their daily lives and that’s better for the psyche and the body. I’m going to argue that, unless you are exceptionally lucky with respect to the arrangement of y0ur schedule and your environment, it’s not enough. Physical movement is an area where it pays to behave unnaturally. Like a gerbil on a wheel! Yes, very much like that.
“I’m just going to eat moderately” or “I’m just going to move more in my daily activities” — these are linked, and here’s why: If weight is at all stable, we are already moving and eating “moderately.” In fact, we’re exquisitely good at it: we “moderate” our intake to match our physical effort, and our physical effort to match our intake. If we burn more energy, we are likely eating more energy. If we eat less energy, we are likely burning less energy. Or perhaps when we pride ourselves on having a moderate lunch one day, the salad and the half sandwich and no mayo, we’re making up for it later without really noticing by nibbling crusts during dinner cleanup. Perhaps when we are pleased with ourselves for parking at the end of all the lots and walking to the stores, we are sleeping an extra few minutes longer in the morning.
We are pretty good at “moderation.” What we aren’t so good at is knocking ourselves off balance in the direction we want to go.
So. How do you knock yourself off balance? You do something artificial, foreign, and shocking to the system. If we’re talking about eating, you make sure you eat less energy by measuring and controlling intake. And if we’re talking about movement, you introduce deliberate, controlled movement. You “have a workout.” You induce exercise.
Maybe you could, possibly, if you could just figure out how, get enough exercise just by making small changes in your daily life. Have you done it yet? Why not? Haven’t figured out how to fit it all in? Why wait for the stars to align so that you get enough physical movement “naturally?” Until you figure out how to make that work, get some artificial movement. Make it a priority to put in a couple of hours a week concentrating on moving your body. Your body needs it, whether you’re getting the groceries home at the same time or not.
Or to put it another way: Sure, it’d be best if we all got all the trace nutrients we need from fresh foods, vegetables and fruits grown in mineral-rich undepleted soil. But that’s no excuse not to take supplements if we need them. Induced exercise is the supplement to our movement-depleted lifestyles.
My next post: What’s stopping you, Mom?
*[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.
I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.
I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
(Part 1)
By now I’ve written a great deal about my forty-odd-pound weight loss and my struggle to conquer gluttony*—what I called my diet of “not eating so damn much.” I have written only a very little, so far, about the role that induced exercise (defined in part 1) played in my improved health. With this series I hope to explore it a little bit.
I spent a few days thinking and came to my first conclusion: The analogy “gluttony is to overeating as sloth is to not enough exercise” — does not work. I tried to draw on what I’ve learned about the relationship between gluttony and overeating, and apply those lessons to sloth and lack of exercise, and very few obvious parallels can be drawn. So let’s contrast them instead.
1. Overeating/gluttony are usually problems of excess, and nonexercise/sloth are problems of negligence. Overeating and nonexercise are both patterns of bad decisions. But overeating is a pattern easily described as choosing too much of something that’s necessary, and nonexercise is a pattern easily described as choosing to do too little. You don’t have to describe it that way; you could say that gluttons choose to eat when they ought to choose to fast, and slothful people choose to remain still when they ought to choose to move. But the minute you try to write about them with any clarity, the awkwardness of the sentences make it obvious that gluttony and sloth are natural antiparallels rather than parallels. (Why else would I have to coin a weird word like “nonexercise?” Do you prefer my second choice, “sedentation?”)
2. They can’t be broken down into similar categories. Unless you are a very holistic person, physical activity or nonexercise can often be divided up into stuff you do for fun, stuff you have to do anyway for your daily work, and stuff you choose on purpose because it’s good for your body (“induced exercise” or deliberate resting). Food and fasting may not split up evenly along those lines, certainly not in the same way.
3. The vice isn’t related to the behavior in the same way. Eating more food than you need is a decent measure of gluttony. Eating less food, almost by definition, makes you that much less gluttonous. But slothfulness isn’t automatically fixed by adding exercise. Sloth has to do with not doing your duties, spiritual and otherwise, because of their laboriousness. If you get some exercise, but you still go home and flop in front of the TV instead of helping with the dishes or horsing around with your children, you’re just as slothful as you were before. Sloth and nonexercise are only directly related insofar as it is your duty to get yourself into better physical condition.
4. One change may be more drastic than the other. Ending overeating requires “only” paying deliberate attention to something you have to do regularly anyway, and have been doing since the day you were born. Ending nonexercise may require you to introduce whole new activities into your life. A corollary: It is possible and fairly straightforward to eat less food without affecting the people around you much at all; it is hard or even impossible to add exercise “quietly” unless you live alone.
5. Fighting gluttony fits much more comfortably into the everyday Catholic religious context. We have a religious tradition of ordinary people’s fasting to gain spiritual benefits and strengthen us against vices. We don’t have a religious tradition of ordinary people’s physically exerting themselves for that purpose. Now, mind you, we do have a religious tradition of physical penance, hair shirts and other sorts of self-punishment, but that’s not exactly what you call widespread today, and anyway a hair shirt is not exactly what you’d call aerobic. Anyway, my point is that we have a lot more direct experiences to call on, and more well-known spiritual benefits to gain, associated with eating less and with fasting. We don’t have so many associated with physical exercise.
None of this is to say that it is impossible to connect gluttony/overeating with sloth/nonexercise. You can make it fit, I think, but you have to push reeeeeeal hard. I think it’s better to abandon the gluttony template and start fresh when it comes to thinking about sloth and physical movement for health.
*[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.
I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.
I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
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