18 December 2013

That's what I'm dancing about!

At last! I am seeing around me what I've been believing over the last few years: movement is medicine.

In retrospect, I can see that over the past decade I've made over many of my habits.

I stumbled across a dance class when my daughter was in her gymnastics classes and remembered having attended a couple of classes when she had first started teaching at my local rec center. The class was even better than I had remembered, and the music blew me away -- some days I knew 90 percent of the music we danced to and other days I knew hardly any of it, but the rhythms were good and the class always made me feel happy and loose by the end.

I tried to ride my mountain bike to work at least a couple of times a week. I'm a wimp in the winter, though. (Turns out this is probably a good thing. My sweetie crashed his bike on a patch of black ice on his way back to work at the beginning of the year and had surgery on his hand as a result. He's getting better now--phew!) One of the things I was excited about when I went back to work was my five-mile commute. I bought a hybrid bike and started riding back and forth, or when it was windy or stormy I'd put my bike on the bus home, and ride the last mile or so home. Then one day I rode my mountain bike and had so much fun riding but had this notion it was slower. So I timed myself on both bikes, and it turned out it took me exactly the same amount of time to get home on my mountain bike as it did on my hybrid -- but it felt ten times as fun to ride the mountain bike, so I hung the hybrid up on the garage wall.

Despite my few days a week at dance classes and my occasional rides to work, I was still having a lot of knee pain and decided to have my second meniscus surgery last year. I'd had one tear cleaned up about a decade earlier and now the other knee was yelling for mercy. I tried physical therapy but the exercises I was doing just weren't helping enough. One night I fell asleep weeping with pain and decided it was time to call the orthopedic surgeon. The rehab following my surgery made me feel like a fresh new human, stronger and more stable.

After I had done my knee rehab I was finally strong enough to go to the fitness training classes held at work (during the work day, amazingly), taught by personal trainer Judd NeSmith of Ser!ous Fitness. "I'm an exercise scientist," he would say humorously when he answered questions or explained a concept, such as why you work complementary muscle groups during exercise sessions. But seriously, in Judd's classes I learned so much about strength and stability, heart-rate training, and working complementary muscle groups with squats and band-walks. The fun and varied whole-body workouts incorporated freeweights, TRX straps (straps affixed high on the wall to support your weight as you use them for a variety of exercises), medicine balls, elastic bands, and foam rollers. I learned about raising your heart rate quickly and working toward intervals of high cardio output. I left the workouts sweaty and strong, the hour having flown past in a blur of exercises and playful banter between Judd and my endorphin-soaked coworkers.

On NPR's Science Friday radio show last week, Ira Flatow interviewed Jordan Metzl, M.D., who argued that exercise is at least as effective as many medicines but doesn't have the side effects of so many medications, and should be prescribed -- and dosed -- to support health. Dr. Metzl said exercise supports body health and brain health by reducing cholesterol, reducing depression, reversing hypertension, and reducing inflammation. And no side effects (except for the occasional injury).

Recent research supports the notion that exercise is at least as effective as medication in many instances. A recent story by Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times poses the next logical question, which is why doctors don't prescribe exercise as much as they prescribe pills. Is it because doctors think it's easier for people to take a pill than change a habit?

Here are a few ways I changed my exercise habits:
  • I put all my dance classes and workouts on my calendars. This meant I got reminders for each one. It also meant I had the times blocked out, for others who can see my schedule. Sometimes if a meeting was scheduled during a workout class, I had to miss the class, but all those reminders help me prioritize the exercise as a nearly daily activity, and also nudge me to pack the workout clothes I'll need in the morning.
  • When I was just going to the gym to work out, I thought of it not only as fitness time, but also time to catch up on music or podcasts I wanted to listen to. I love grooving through my workout with my headphones on. (I did have to spend about $30 on earbuds that fit my ears better -- the standard earbuds that came with my mobile music player did not stay put through workouts.)
  • On days when I thought about skipping class, I tried to think about how I would feel after the workout. Often this was enough to get me there, and 99 percent of the time I was glad I'd gone after about 15 minutes of any given class or workout. 
  • I started using an online fitness tracker app on my smartphone. This motivated me in a surprising way: On days when I work out, I see how many calories I've used and feel free to eat a little more of what I like that day. 
Have you changed any of your habits? How did you do it? Did the changes stick? Tell me in the comments.

It's exciting to me to think more people are learning how to move for their health. Movement seems to bring with it so many benefits beyond stronger muscles. I am looking for ways to support folks in moving more. Stay tuned for new developments!








11 December 2013

Blurred Lines


It was the grief in the voice of the crying – no, wailing – young rhinoceros coming over my car speakers that put me over the edge. NPR reporter Frank Langfitt warned that the next segment contained graphic and disturbing sounds and 30 seconds later I had burst into loud sobs at the shocked and bereft sounds of a young animal who had just lost his or her mother to a terrible death. A poacher had killed her for her horn.
As I sat in my car weeping through the story about African rhino poachers, the questions came: “How can I eat chickens and cows if I feel this way about a rhinoceros? If my cats are so precious and intelligent” – each one has his or her own cat-ality, I like to say “how can I justify taking pigs' lives for the sake of my tasty bacon for breakfast?” I knew then I had to stop eating animals.
I had once tried being vegan for a month or so, about 15 years ago. My senses seemed sharper. Flavors were brighter, less murky – I didn't need to add so much spice or jazz everything up the way I normally do. I didn't crave salt and sugar so much. But it was often less than satisfying given the quality of the nondairy cheese and milk replacements I tried then. Veganism felt like a huge set of deprivations, and I quickly reverted to my meat-eating ways.
Even the word vegan suggests that all you get is vegetables – it smacks of asceticism, of martyrdom. Friends draw little “cuckoo” circles in the air up by their temples, asking you, “Isn't vegan about halfway to breatharian?”
Somehow a “plant-based diet” sounds far sweeter and more satisfying. In a recent interview on America's Test Kitchen Radio, veteran chef and cookbook author Mollie Katzen (Moosewood Cookbook, Heart of the Plate) said people often mistake her for being anti-meat. But she does eat a little meat occasionally if it seems like just the right thing, she explained. It's just that Katzen prefers vegetables: by the time she's put all the vegetables she wants on her plate, there's no room for anything else.
When a friend's Facebook discussion flitted onto the book The Engine 2 Diet, I requested it from the library and learned about a fire station in Austin, Texas that went completely vegan, and whose firefighters now rely on barely any seed oils and no animal products in their diets. My questions keep coming: “If a bunch of Texan firefighters can do it, why can't I?”
Before I heard the crying baby rhino, I had already been teetering on the fence, leaning toward giving up meat. One challenge is that my growing child has a surprisingly robust appetite for meat. She craves it. Since I announced to our family that I wouldn't eat meat or prepare it, my daughter and husband sometimes order meat when we go out for the occasional meal, but they don't always.
I've found I haven't been able to quit all meat cold-turkey, though. I became a pescetarian, giving myself permission to eat more protein since I was working out regularly and not trying to lose weight (ok, I admit I wouldn't mind losing just a few pounds). But I have not made peace with this new line I've drawn, this arbitrary one between creatures that live above the water and creatures who live beneath it, and I have continued to question my own wisdom.
Another line in these shifting sands is dairy and eggs. I am an ovo-lacto pescetarian, to get specific. Yet I am less and less comfortable buying the animal products that are available in my local markets. Yes, we buy organic chicken eggs, but this fact doesn't tell me much about the lives of the chickens who pump out all those eggs, day after day. For a while, I was buying eggs from a fellow at work who has chickens. But the supply was erratic, as various weather patterns and other mysteries influenced their egg production. This too has given me pause about buying eggs from large-scale operations.
But I find eggs and dairy harder to quit than anything. I can walk away from alcohol, or order a tonic and lime if I think people will give me a hard time about not having a drink with them. But please don't take away the milk or cream in my morning coffee, or my poached egg for breakfast! My mother says my grandfather – her daddysaved her life when she was a young girl. Her mother, who was anorexic (or who possibly had intestinal problems she never spoke of aloud) barely ate anything. My mother was failing to thrive. They had been moving around Europe and Mexico. Her father insisted on moving the family to Amsterdam and he saw that she got abundant butter, milk, cream, and cheese. She returned to health and has never forgot her daddy's advocacy, or the role dairy played in her recovery.
“I'm ok with being at the top of the food chain,” I used to say. But I no longer believe this. I am nowhere near the top of the chain, and everything I've learned tells me I'm not all that compared with animals. I may have abilities to conceptualize things animals can't (like past and future – “Here, now” is what my cats seem to say every time I see them), but that doesn't make me better, just differently abled.
Autistic author and speaker and inventor Temple Grandin asserts that as an autistic person, she thinks much the way animals think: in pictures of things and not in words – words are abstractions animals don't understand. We say the same thing to our daughter when we explain to her that the cats understand her tone of voice, but not the words she speaks. Grandin's work has had a huge influence on how people think about animals, and she has used her knowledge to make cows' journeys to the slaughterhouse less frightening. If you follow her logic, either animals fall somewhere on the so-called “autism spectrum,” which for human animals includes Asperger's Syndrome. Or it follows that, like people, some animals have autism, which could mean that others don't, or maybe some animals have lesser degrees of it than others.
In his most recent collection of essays, Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed: The Fascinating Science of Animal Intelligence, Emotions, Friendship, and Conservation, anthropologist Marc Bekoff says some humans feel they are superior to non-human animals and this can indicate that they feel superior or justified in treating other humans as lesser beings. In people, cruelty to animals has come to be an indicator to law-enforcement professionals and psychologists of a likelihood for cruelty to other humans. But, Bekoff continues, like people, it turns out animals have a sense of justice. This immediately rang true to me, having grown up with a violent father. I knew something wasn't right when my father treated my mother as if she was less deserving of the respect and freedoms he insisted on, and when he kicked our dog, who chewed holes in his socks. It felt like a matter of time before it was my turn to be treated badly, too.
In his new book, Bekoff describes a couple of studies that illustrate the notion that animals also have a sense of fairness. In experiments with Capuchin monkeys, known for being a social and cooperative species, "individuals who are shortchanged during a bartering transaction by being offered a less-preferred treat refuse to cooperate with researchers." And an Austrian researcher found that "dogs won't work for food if they see other dogs getting more than they do for performing the same task."
While I've been walking my path toward vegetarianism and possibly veganism, my daughter has been learning to ride horses. We have seen a variety of attitudes toward animals at the stables where she's learned. Her first lessons were at a Mustang rescue center. The staff were working with wild and sometimes traumatized horses but gentling them over time so they could work with children, some with special needs. One day when my daughter was in the middle of her first series of lessons, I was helping brush an Appaloosa named called “Shoni Pony,” short for Shoshoni. I felt Shoni flinch when I rubbed the curry comb across one of her flanks and said something about it.
“Oh, you noticed!” The trainer sounded surprised, and explained, “That's where Shoni got bitten by Prince. Prince is new and he's a lot bigger than she is, and they were alone in the corral yesterday for a while before someone noticed she was hurt.”
I thought I was in with Shoni after that, but then another day I was curry-combing and she nipped my arm. That time the trainer was really surprised: “She hardly ever does that! Huh, I wonder what's going on with her.” But I knew I had been up in my head, thinking about other things, and felt Shoni had noticed and given me a nip to bring me back to the here and now.
Another time, I was planning on going on a ride with my daughter and husband as a birthday treat, but when I saw the horses, I balked. My sore knee gave me a good excuse but it was really the horses' rheumy eyes and noses that stopped me – and the way they weren't curious about me like horses usually are when I walk over and try glancing at them and then walking away, a little behavior I picked up in a book by the real-life "horse whisperer" Monty Roberts. After the ride, my daughter protested to me, “Those people are mean to their horses. My horse kept stopping to graze, and the guide told me to kick my horse, hard. I didn't want to, but they kept saying 'The horse doesn't feel anything.'” She wasn't buying that either.
A few years ago, as a member of a selection committee for a film festival, I watched “The Path of the Horse,” an autobiographical documentary by a woman who had been a horse trainer for 20 years and had suddenly come to feel she was doing it all wrong. She quit her training business and sought out people who had different approaches to see if there was an alternative to the “I'll-show-them-who's-the-boss” training demeanor and her habit of bullying the horses into submission, yanking their bridles and jamming the metal bits in their mouths, their eyes rolled back in what looks like desperation at their brutal treatment.
What she found was beautiful, and so much easier. Alexander Nevzorov had done away with bits and bridles and, with only a loose piece of cord around their necks for the most gentle of suggestions, worked with his horses to earn their trust. As with many of the most exquisite interspecies interactions I have ever seen, you can watch these amazing dance routines and behaviors with them on YouTube. The filmmaker found other people who were finding the same communion with animals and building on it in kinder, gentler, and more productive ways.
Last summer, my daughter went to a summer camp at a stable that seemed fine at first, but then the young campers were given crops and encouraged to use them to lash their horses forcefully to tell the horses what to do and not to do. At the Mustang rescue stable, she had learned that horses have sensitive skin and you can only curry them in certain places and not others; now she was once again being asked to inflict pain on them.
It has taken me years to acknowledge the violence I grew up with and to see how I allowed some of it or perpetuated it into my adulthood, even when my father was no longer around. To protect myself and my daughter, I had to walk away from a relationship with my father because I couldn't trust him – not only did he lack any understanding of what he had inflicted on me and my mother and siblings but he also continued to tell stories and jokes that revealed the gaps in his empathy with other human and non-human animals, as Marc Bekoff calls us. As bit by bit I have weeded out these acts of violence in my life, I've felt more and more strongly that I and my fellow human and non-human creatures, and even the planet we all share, deserve better. Somewhere, whether down deep or up here at the surface, we all know we deserve kindness and justice.
And I really, truly hope no studies ever show that plants suffer when we use them as food.

05 December 2013

TED talk of the day

I was watching TED talks this morning to help me think about my passions and pursuits. I was going to write about the New York City traffic talk because I was so excited to have found someone who had spent her whole career figuring out what is just starting to take shape in my head, which is that traffic and design can help people make cities more livable, easily. But the talk that hit me where I live is a talk by Eleuthera Lisch on Becoming immune to violence.

That one made me cry, and made me worry, too. I live in a very violence-free environment: the kind of violence I am most likely to be present in the vicinity of is a fight between drunken college students outside a restaurant or more likely a bar (but I so rarely find myself out late late at night anymore), or a car crash. (Not one caused by me, to clarify.) I don't take my daughter to CU football games because neither of us particularly wants to surround ourselves with loud drunk people. If we want to watch a game, there's always TV, which we can control. We don't go where people are likely to be out of control, but every now and then someone gets too drunk and gets belligerent (I wonder: will this guy remember what a dick he was being or will he just think he was having a good time?).

I worry because my daughter is entering a phase in her life where she is more likely to be in places at times when she is more vulnerable to violence, and I hope she stays cautious as she has throughout her childhood. That is, I hope caution is one of her traits, and not just a reflex. And I worry my mom is vulnerable because she is alone so much of the time and she is getting so frail.

What did I do that made me unsafe as a kid? Besides living in a household where violence toward others was commonplace? Trailed after the wrong people for the sake of novelty, for the thrill. Went places with people who weren't sober. Sometimes I chose to; it wasn't always my parents. On the other hand, I had become habituated to it. My daughter would be boggled at the things that were going on around me then, if she were to compare my world with her environment today.

Today, I choose to stay fairly safe but keep alert. Several years back, we were berry-picking with friends in northern California when I suddenly feared for my daughter's life: a set of hunting hawks seemed to be spiraling toward my daughter's shiny dark head. We hid in the car for more than five minutes before the hawks lost interest and flew away. This incident frightened us and told us that anything can happen, anytime. But knowing that helps, in some funny way, not to keep us hypervigilant, but to keep us open-hearted and light on our feet. If we need to fight or flee, we can,  -- but we might also need to take a breath and try compassion first.

The talk culminates with the Alive and Free movement, with four rules for living:
1. Respect comes from within.
2. Change begins with the individual.
3. A true friend will never lead you to danger.
4. There is nothing more valuable than a life.


How will this affect your choices?

20 August 2013

Learning from cognitive dissonance

Wait, what? you ask. Cognitive what?

Cognitive dissonance is that phenomenon in which, simply, what's in your head is not matching up with what is going on around you.

I'd say cognitive dissonance has had a presence throughout my life. It has made my life feel out of control and frightening. As a kid, I couldn't trust my thoughts and feelings because the people around me were counting on me to get all the good stuff and skate away past the bad, like Rollergirl in the old Dire Straits song. But really, it was tough to be me in a lot of ways. When they say kids are forced by circumstances to grow up fast, they're talking about kids like me who saw and did a lot of things kids shouldn't have to see and do at tender ages.

Only now becoming clear to me -- so surprising at my advanced age! -- is how much I have contributed to the amount of cognitive dissonance in my life as an adult. Time after time, I have chosen situations that challenged me and confused me at the same time, and I have taken it upon myself to bridge that gap.

To quiet that dissonance, I have had to learn to do some difficult things.

I had to stop riding in cars with anyone I thought might not have my best interests in mind.

I had to call myself a woman instead of a girl. (My blogger name is vanillagrrl for a reason. Grrrr. Tangent: I was so upset when I heard an NPR Science Friday segment last week about women studying STEM -- science, technology, engineering, and math -- and one of the callers talked about her experience in school, adding that she dropped out and had a baby. Then she called herself a girl, as in, "Lots of times I am the only girl in the room." If you've had a baby, surely you have earned the right to call yourself a woman.)

I had to stop doing things that hurt my own feelings, when I stopped and felt my own feelings. I had to stop laughing reflexively about the joke about women being bad drivers. I had to stop getting into an automobile I didn't really want to ride in because it was easier than making some kind of scene about it. Now I am incredulous that my own father told that "joke" with me standing there, not only a woman, but also his daughter! The moment I noticed that I have a father who tells jokes disparaging my half of the population in my presence was a moment I knew I couldn't have a relationship with him because he didn't see me as an equal, as a whole human being.

Now I'd make the scene and refuse the ride, or say something about women being good drivers (thank you, Danica Patrick).

I like to think that I also wouldn't put myself in any of those positions in the first place, but I am not convinced it would be so simple. For I still have things I have to stop doing, because the cognitive dissonance still costs me something very dear every time I experience it. It takes a lot of energy to think one way and act another.

That means I can't say, "I stopped doing those things," because it's an ongoing assignment. I have to keep stopping. When my daughter says, "I don't like riding the bus" and the bus ride is only three minutes long, plus the time they have to interact with the bus driver while the bus is loading, I can hear her cognitive dissonance loud and clear and help her do the right but uncomfortable thing. I can help her stand up for her feelings and figure out how to act on them. But truly, it's not always easy to know when to stand up for my own feelings.

Most recently I stopped eating meat -- well, I'm making an exception for fish, but I am not sure that is defensible given the reasons I stopped eating meat. And still there's more to do. More noise that necessitates adjusting the frequencies to something harmonious instead of the static that consumes my attention and, like kryptonite to Superman, robs me of my strength.

I hope you will wish me strength for this next phase of weeding out the dissonance and finding the sweet harmonies in my world.