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!

What if it's the collective consciousness, not the collective unconscious?

What I'm on about this week:

The Big Three's plea for cash, when what they should have done is started innovating like crazy in 1973, when we got our first inklings of problems like these. I can't believe their nerve; I've lost my compassion. I mean, those guys couldn't have shared a jet to come talk? Or proposed they conference call? Come on, where are their strategists? Where are their heads? Stuffed deep into their own pockets, searching for lint in the recesses. I swear. It just makes me want to buy a hybrid Subaru even more than I did before. Now it's spite. (Sounds like the tagline for a silly movie: "Mike Masca and the Revenge of the Blue-Masked Meanies. First it was a crusade. Now it's spite.")

The meltdown. This is the first major financial crisis in my adult life (I'm not counting my cousin-in-law's experience of being in Korea during the Asian meltdown, nor remembering President Carter's environmental speeches and resetting our thermostats two degrees lower to 66 because ours had already been at 68, back when I was 10). The financial crisis feels very much like being in the Loma Prieta quake of 1989 and being only 17 miles from the epicenter: it doesn't feel like it's over yet, even when the ground seems to have stopped rumbling and roaring. I'm still ducking under my desk and waiting for the dust to clear. It feels like it's going to be awhile.

New media: Two things caught my attention this week in this realm. First and worst, the Rocky Mountain News is up for sale. I am sad to see this. I think having a two-newspaper town is a good thing, and I like the way Westword is the little yappy dog that nips at their heels. But I also guess those guys and gals have been shopping their resumes around for a while now, knowing full well if they hang on they may go down with the ship. It's terrible to watch these ships go down, too. It is like watching another great ocean liner sink, having already seen the movie Titanic yet feeling helpless to stop it despite having all that information about what went so wrong. Do we have to recast newsgathering and dissemination as something completely different? Must we turn to grassroots support as we do for vital services like community radio? How many people who listen to community radio actually donate? Can that number be increased if the loss of that resource is threatened? Second: in a news story this week about a local man who is a key member of Obama's transition team, a graphic was embedded in the story that was a little amusing, but also rather shocking to me. (Here's the close-up, if you can't make out this key member of the team.) I was just shocked that they would completely surround an advertising graphic in a news story. Were you surprised when you saw that, too?

I keep thinking about the Spot.us independent reporting-for-pay model; what seems to me to be missing is a way to gauge a reporter's credibility. A newspaper or other institution can open that door for an individual, but it's harder for the individual to push that door open themselves. So how do you create a new, yet credible, institution that is devoted to gathering and disseminating news? Busy minds are working on this problem as we speak, but I think it's like a lot of things (e.g., the healthcare system, the gut-brain connection, and the new killer news app) in that there's plenty of room for solutions from all corners, all comers.

Change we can believe in!

Why blog? Why write?

Why think?

It's such a joy to turn myself loose whenever something catches my eye, however large or small the idea. I'm always happy about knowing something about something new, ya know.

The kids in my daughter's classroom have been a joy to get to know this year. My kid tests me like always and everyone else is trusting and testing me right on schedule. I swear the brown kids have collectively breathed some kind of sigh about me and decided I am on their side. I think it's because I really like each one of them.

It's a source of endless fascination to all of the kids that they are different from one another, in shape, size, color, hair, you name it. There are mixed-race families of all kinds, Indians married to whites, whites adopting Indians, black and white, gay and straight folks, young parents and older ones. Despite feeling their differences acutely, the kids resemble one another in almost every way, more than they can fathom at their young age. But they are growing up with a brown man as our country's president!

Anyway, on the 5th, the kids were abuzz with election news. "Tyson" came up to us on the playground before the first bell. He and I had been in a little jousting match lately; he'd been making a point of telling me he didn't want me to answer his questions when I came in to volunteer.

"That was quite an exciting election, wasn't it?" I said, as Tyson practically sputtered his words. "This election was all about change!" Tyson declared. "Change we can believe in!" He said the school vote had come to 380 for Obama and 150 for McCain. I haven't heard otherwise since.

Once all the kids had filed inside the classroom, and as soon as coats and bags had been stowed, the Spanish-speaking girls got down to rapt and rapid conversation. "La-li-la-la John McCain," I heard, not able to keep up with the urgently murmured words. One of McCain's supporters, "Meghan," before even hanging up her coat, made a beeline for the teacher. Meghan poured out a stream of frustration and sadness that lamented the vote having gone the wrong way for her and everyone in her family. The teacher nodded and empathized with her frustration but without totally agreeing with her charge's politics and not disclosing her own. She and I understood each other. But the children did not know whom the teacher had supported in the election. (That's why I found one of the ads for one of the Colorado ballot issues so offensive -- it almost made me vote against it.)

This historic election makes me happy for myself, with my threads of African and Native American descent along with the "Scotch-Irish" und lots of German. Who knows if anyone else in my ancestry was disavowed along the way (Jews, perhaps?). My ancestors did not uniformly seem to be the kind who advanced because of their tolerance for other cultures, other ways of life. Now all that mixing we have been doing all along can come out of the cultural closet. It may continue to reverberate and reveal to us something about how unnecessary that boundary truly is in our world. But it makes me positively overjoyed for my daughter and her peers, these truly wonder-filled sprouts of joy and energy bursting out into the world. From across the street when I was in the little school, that big public school made of bricks and concrete and pavement seemed so white and sterile. Now that we are families of that big public school, it feels warm and welcoming; it has a supportive structure for the many things everyone needs and wants to provide for this new crop of learners and workers.

Speaking of workers, I still can't believe how early they start inculcating the kids with information, though. Such is the pressure of the testing they do in the third grade that if the Leave No Child Behind folks had their way, the kids would all be able to work at McDonald's by the time they were eight. For us that timetable isn't quite right. But I'm continually amazed at the blistering speed with which they get new concepts. The testing drives that intense exposure to math and language.

I wonder if there would be a way to build into such a large entity -- the U.S. public school system -- some new adaptive approaches using specific developmental markers that indicate readiness for learning. Of course, all that has to be supported by nutrition that supports mental health and learning. Because you can't learn if you're not healthy; if you're chronically unhealthy, you're likely to be poor, and if you're not now, you may be soon if you're not very careful. And you have to have the money to provide a long enough school day that they have playtime, too.

How does a community support total health? Isn't it kind of like what parents are always urged to do in the magazines: provide enough nutrition to get through the time. Remove sources of stress (that's huge). Have available fruits and healthy snacks available in every way, not just the highly processed, simple-carbohydrate, oversalted and -sugared stuff that leaves you gasping for a Coke to jack your sugar levels back up to their precarious heights again an hour later. You rezone your neighborhoods to allow every neighborhood a bodega stocked with affordable, fresh veggies and fruits, breads, dairy, eggs, and other essentials. Oatmeal and granola alongside some of the more familiar options. It's a start.

So those are my priorities, again: public health, food, learning. It's all one thing. How do we the people take those things back from the corporations that are holding them hostage?

How to wear pants: with both of the legs on

My mother said and did a funny thing when she came to visit me most recently. She passed on tips from How to Wear Clothes or whatever the the cable show is called. She suggested little things and brushed off some cobwebs. It was all very helpful, but she caught herself after suggesting which direction we point our silverware in the dishwasher (tines down, to avoid handling them when you put them away). She said, "I should stop. I wouldn't like it if you came over and told me how to do everything." We had a laugh and that was the end of it, no hard feelings.

But the bit about the advice about pants kept nitching at my consciousness. My mom was suggesting, as do the women on the cable TV show, that it's better to wear pants that go all the way to the floor, or come down to your knee (or just below, depending on your knees), but not in between, especially if they aren't close-fitting. I kept circling back around it, not knowing why this advice didn't necessarily sit right. I didn't think it was the usual defensiveness caused by getting advice from one's mother, or anyone really. But this morning when I was putting on some favorite, just-above-the-ankle pants, in white twill with thin blue vertical stripes, I realized what had been bugging me.

I used to dress to emphasize certain features and redirect attention away from others. I had the figure Frances McDormand has in Burn After Reading, but I was only 30. Then I lost 10 percent of my body weight and now I feel more comfortable. I keep track of my eating, getting more and more attentive to the what I eat, and I have the middle-class luxury of being able to attend to my health when I need to, when I'm out of whack.

These days, when I choose a pair of pants, I am thinking of the entire ensemble, of how I feel when I wear them. And today I noticed that I'm not dressing to hide anything. So I don't feel the need to wear only two kinds of pants: ones that end at the knee, or full-length ones that fall to a point always covering the tops of my shoes, to lessen the breaking up of the line of my leg. It's more about being able to walk or ride my bike in them. So today I have my loose capris with my little peg ankles going into my black mary janes, but the white of the pants picks up the white of my shirt, which is sprinkled with bright flowers and makes me happy every time I look down and see it. Maybe I look nice, or maybe I look dorky. I don't know. But I feel great.

Now I'm off to the Regional Transportation District hearing downtown. I'll report back soon....

The largest Elizabeth in the room

I keep examining why this story is important to me and what is driving me. Part of it is this conspiracy-theory feeling that the fatcats (because this all feels like such a throwback to gilded-age policy and practices, doesn't it?) don't want us to see the eight-zillion-pound Enron -- I mean elephant in the room. And I am seeing it, and I can't help seeing its parts and effects everywhere: the heaps of poop, the detritus left after the trees have been chomped as if they were celery stalks, the dirt and dust from the bathing rituals, and their massive presence in the room, their audible and subsonic sounds and signals, their memories, their histories, their needs.


Today I spoke with someone involved with a government agency long ago. She asked me about my project and I explained there were three inspirations, the film Taken as Directed, the film Syriana (in how it looked at a problem from so many different angles), and the prevalence of side effects of medications on everyone around me. My interviewee agreed heartily with my perception that more people than ever are taking prescription drugs, noting that the populace only started taking them in 1964. If you think of that blip of time on a geological scale, it's a subspeck, but if you analyzed the effects on human health over this tiny timeframe, what would you see on an evolutionary scale? Would there be a balloon in mutations, I wonder? What sorts of divergences from established equilibria would be notable? Cross that with the effects of global warming and increased exposure to complex environmental chemicals in our daily lives, and then what?

So I find myself wanting to not only blow the whistle on big industry and a government that lets big industry call the shots but I also want to blow the whistle on all who believe the hype: the ones who ask for that medication we saw in the ads, the ones who hold stock in biopharm companies. The prescribers who take the tiny tokens and don't even notice that they have obligated themselves to return the favor. The nurses, pharmacists, and care workers who know better who persist in doing things like taking antibiotics as preventive measures, flushing expired prescription medications down the drain, and using antibacterial soap (which inhibits the natural inoculation against asthma in youngsters and upsets the pH balance of the water downstream for all the plants and animals that depend upon it). The prescription drug users who don't understand the potential effects of the pills and the myths they swallow.

I see how I could easily take just one part of this story, and for example, frame it in terms of an environmental debate about the concentration and persistence of these chemicals in our bodies and our water supplies.

But there are other sides, too. Human nature must be carefully considered in evaluating the results of all these drug studies. We all know belief is a fundamental component of health and healing, but we don't often consider how this works in combination with other principles that drive us. I'm thinking of commitment, for example: once you have chosen a means of trying to solve a problem, be it by taking a government-approved medication or by participating in a clinical trial, that solution becomes your favorite in the race for a cure. You commit to it, you talk it up, and you naturally pin your hopes on it. When you combine your commitment with your desire for something to believe in, this form of rooting for the chosen solution is bound to affect the outcome. Even if you take the placebo, you are under observation, being cared for, and you get the placebo effect, of doing something as opposed to nothing at all. Your participation surely has an amplification effect that could be as influential as the chemical composition of the pill or injection that you have chosen as your deliverer.

Doing something is always going to have an effect, and I want to explore what that can mean to people, how people aren't necessarily limited to the options suggested on the commercial breaks during the Late Show. How doing something can mean taking an Advil instead of a Vicodin or listening to music or learning to ski or painting a picture or meditating or making a garden bed.

For some people, I understand that making a garden bed is not even possible, much less enough to keep them from walking in front of a bus. But I also see a recent and dramatic about-face on the efficacy of SSRIs in the general population and that little fact alone is enough to scare the bejeesus out of me: I think we still know so little about our brains and bodies and about the effects of these strong medicines on our brains and bodies that we should be very careful with our brains. They are the only ones we get.

A near and dear bipolar says, "I love Lithium because it's the second element in the Periodic Table of Elements!" But in some cases this can be as disingenuous as letting big pharma decide what's best, as pointed out in a terrific expose of the supplements industry we both read by Dan Hurley called Natural Causes, "all natural" does not necessarily equate to "all good."

It's complex stuff, our health, and I feel I am walking around scoping out all the angles to see the elephant from: making my little director's finger-frame from up close, from afar, in discrete parts, and as a whole. Is there anything new to be seen from here? I'm convinced there is, even if I haven't a clue what the heck it means yet.

Part of this verge-of-discovery feeling may be connected to my recent forays into gluten-free baking and eating, too. That adventure is fodder for another post or several, it's led me to feel that what I am eating is more nourishing. I am eating a greater variety of grains and everything is tasting good. I even found a dish that totally eased the transition to gluten-free flour for me, and the help of a decent cookbook recommended by a neighbor. Now I'm not feeling I am cheating my body of something when I have a piece of banana bread or blueberry cake. I feel I am giving myself health and well being and nutrition, and it makes a world of difference to me. I'm also noticing my need to be in motion and active more during the day lately, perhaps just because I'm interested in my physical health, perhaps because we're on the brink of spring, but in any event these days I am riding my bike more and working out and walking more. I feel I have found my own way to give myself the gift of better health, and I find am not as depressed or manic as I was a few months back when I was having a much harder time keeping things in perspective. So that's my story, and everyone's is different, and some people wouldn't be alive without big pharma's fruits. But I still think there are many more ways to look at this elephant that is public health.

At war with our own culture

Yet another angle of this story I've assigned myself is that we have always made so many choices about living in the modern world, so many compromises about our health. I will recycle all my paper and glass but I will keep buying plastic stuff too. I will take only the most biodegradable dish soap camping, but I'll blow five gallons of gasoline to get up to my campsite plus a few more to get back home after, and all that that entails.

I think about lifespan when I change the kitty litter, a task during which I try to breathe as little of the dust as possible. Yet it is inevitable with all the changing and the sweeping and the vacuuming that dust will fly, and I do breathe some of it, wondering all the while whether the exposure to these chemicals will shorten my life (gross-out alert: although I have far more immediate worries about whether cats are really engaged in a long-term project to train us so they can eat our brains). And at the same moment, my partner in time is exposed to another set of chemicals and compromises because he has a corporate job and bikes back and forth every day. I can say with great certainty that all those buildings in all those office parks and plunked down at the edges of the city centers expose their occupants to wildly varying conditions. I believe a great tragedy like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was to its century as toxic conditions in seemingly innocuous atmospheres are to this century. Really, this kind of poisoning is a violation of a right I feel we don't even realize we have: the right to a safe environment. Which to me is the ultimate statement of nonviolence, an idea I keep coming back to, because there is nothing else. "You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars! You have a right to be here!" (cue "Desiderata" as recited/sung by Les Crane -- and then the parody, "You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here...." along with which I still remember laughing until I cried back when I first heard it as a kid -- but I digress, again).

In urban environments especially I feel we live in this supersaturated agora in which we are not just asked to make a few choices about lifestyle but rather are bombarded with these compromise-inducing options at every turn. Daily we face food that is more convenient than nutritious. We see an obliviousness to special needs and allergenic substances that still has a long way to go (I know, I'm projecting on this one). Direct-to-consumer drug advertising is one huge example of this bombardment -- how many of us have had the experience of looking at that sad little animated character and envisioned the lightness of being experienced by the sunny actress at the ad's close (for yes, we're not total rubes, here: we know Hollywood just puts people in these scenes as placeholders), yet casting ourselves in that tiny moment of unreality TV remains an improvement on what we are experiencing for real. How can we not consider asking our doctor for the "little [color of your choice] pill" we see right there in that ad that suggests that our problems can be solved (but not without the warning beats of all those icky side effects and adverse reactions and compromises we stand to allow into our lives if we choose this particular route to "wellness")?

Conspiracy? Nah. Just follow the money.