We live in an age of fragmentation.

Our knowledge of health and the body has been broken down into shards, units and bits, each one cut off from the other, each one independent and isolated from its natural, unifying origins. We live in a world of free-floating facts, images and ideas, completely fluid and accessible, but completely divorced from history and habitat.

This is what makes our modern study of health so perplexing. There’s just so much to learn now: biochemistry, biomechanics, human history, psychology and all the rest. Health, formerly an accessible art of living, has become a minefield of complexity, cognitive overload and stress. What we need right now is a sense of integration, a way to wrap up all of our knowledge about health and training into a single form that we can rely on to create our lives.

As it turns out, there is a powerful way to do this, one that’s right in front of us, one that builds on what we already know about how the body adapts to the world. To put it simply, it’s all about training. Genetics play a role of course, but for practical purposes, training is what really creates the trajectories of our experience in the world. Everything that we do with our bodies and in our lives is the result of challenge, experience and repetition. In other words, it’s all muscle.

Let’s begin with the familiar. Most of us have trained our bodies to one degree or another and we know what happens when we challenge a muscle with weights or endurance training; it gets stronger. The gravitational and kinetic challenge stimulates a “super-compensation.” In other words, growth. This is a wonderful thing, of course and many of us have enjoyed the payoff. But what’s really fascinating about this process of challenge and growth is that it takes place, not just in muscle tissue, but throughout every tissue in the body. In other words, all tissue behaves like muscle; stress it repeatedly over time and it will adapt to meet the challenge. This is how animal bodies work.

We know, for example that bone is a living tissue and that it too adapts with precision to meet the demands of how it is used. Load up the long bones of your legs with robust physical challenges and your bone density will increase, exactly in the places where its most needed. In effect then, “bone is muscle.”

And it doesn’t stop there. Every system in the body has the ability to adapt and will do so when challenged. We see it everywhere: Endurance training increases our ability to absorb and deliver oxygen, sensory training stimulates changes to acuity of sensory organs, balance training stimulates proprioception; our ability to feel our body’s position and momentum.

Adaptation is obvious in muscle and bone, but the truly spectacular changes take place in the nervous system. We now know the process in great detail. Far from being a static system, the nervous system is constantly remodeling itself in response to experience. The fancy name for this process is “use-dependent plasticity.” When we repeatedly fire a neural circuit, that circuit becomes faster and more sensitive. Cells that fire together begin to literally wire together. The challenge, in other words, stimulates actual tissues changes: membranes, genes and protein synthesis are all transformed in the process. With this in mind, it now makes sense to say that “neural circuits are muscles,” and “the nervous system is a muscle.”

This is plenty interesting in its own right, but what really fascinates is the realization that our muscular nervous system is driving everything that we care about in health and living. Not only does it drive our physical movement, it also drives our emotions, our cognition, our behavior and in turn, our relationships with other people and the world.

And this leads us to an expanded idea. That is, if the entire body is “muscular” then our emotion, behavior and cognition must also be “muscular.” Body, mind and spirit are massively interconnected. And because our bodies are “muscular,” everything that we do in the world is the result of training, everything that we do is consequential. In other words, everything that we do with our bodies and our lives matters.

Given the tight interconnections between mind, body, spirit and behavior, it makes sense to extend the metaphor still further. In this respect, just about everything we with our bodies, our minds and our lives can be described as “muscular.” And so, it now makes sense to say that fear is a muscle, anger is a muscle. Cynicism, isolation, defensiveness and blame are muscles. Self-control and discipline are muscles. Patience and kindness are muscles. Trust is a muscle. Compassion, gratitude and forgiveness are muscles. Engagement, flow, attention and mindfulness are muscles. Honesty, resilience and good humor are muscles. Joy, exuberance and love are muscles. Relaxation in the face of crushing stress is a muscle.

Even more fascinating, we can also say that health itself is a muscle. That is, we become healthier by actually exercising our health. We become healthier by practicing our exuberance in the world, by actively engaging with our bodies, our people, our work and our habitats. This will come as a surprise to many, of course. Modern medical culture encourages passivity; health and disease are simply things that happen to us. If we’re lucky, we remain healthy in life, but if not, the doctors will patch us up. But when we view health as a muscle, it becomes something done by us, an active practice and a doing.

In the world of work, there’s a lot of conversation these days about productivity and the power of engagement. Business experts and management consultants are writing and speaking at great length about commitment, purpose and performance. And of course, there’s a lot of people wringing their hands about the opposite state of being, a condition called presenteeism. People, it seems, are showing up for work, but are not really engaged in what they are doing. (The word presenteeism is a play on the word absenteeism. It refers to a state in which workers are on the job, but “not really there.”)

At the moment, presenteeism is mostly an obscure topic in the world of management and human resources, but it’s really the tip of a very distressing culture-wide iceberg. That is, presenteeism is more than something that happens on the job; it’s something that happens all across the modern world. Even when we go home after work, many of us are simply “going through the motions.” A person may be physically present, but the spirit is absent. The organism is empty; it is following the rules, complying with requirements and doing what it must, but it has no real passion for the process. Its commitment is minimal, its exposure limited. In essence, presenteeism is a withholding of potential, creativity and intelligence. It’s the opposite of exuberance.

It’s impossible to measure presenteeism, of course. But in taking an informal look around the modern world, one gets the creepy feeling that presenteeism is a full-blown psycho-spiritual epidemic. Lots of people are in habitual retreat from life, withholding their creativity, intelligence and potential, both inside and outside the workplace.

How else are we to describe it when millions of people fail to show up for the health of their own bodies? Isn’t “sedentary living” simply another name for what is, at its core, presenteeism?

the etiology of presenteeism

So where does this presenteeism come from? Have people always drawn back from engagement with life, content to live a shadow existence of minimal participation? Or is this a new condition, one more distressing feature of life in the modern world?

Naturally, some will suggest that presenteeism is simply a matter of character, a personality defect. People who don’t engage are just lazy slackers who don’t want to show up for life. They’d rather sit on the sidelines, watching TV until the grim reaper comes to take them away. They don’t engage because they don’t have any grit, backbone, curiosity or imagination.

This accusation surely contains a grain of truth; we’ve all met slackers and most of us have done our share of aimless drifting and hiding from life. But still, this can’t possibly be the whole story. Character is obviously an important factor in how we show up, but other forces play a role too. And if we’re going to get to the bottom of presenteeism, we’re going to have to look at the big picture of human history, environment and culture.

Consider the Paleo, that vast period of human prehistory. Can we imagine presenteeism in our hunting and gathering ancestors? Hardly. After all, every day on the grassland was a survival challenge; life itself was a near-death experience. Awareness was paramount and inattention was swiftly and brutally punished. Psycho-physical engagement was the very thing that kept us alive.

So clearly, something must have happened on the way to modernity. Sometime in the last 10,000 years, we lost our intensity and our willingness to engage. The most obvious explanation is simply that we have become pampered by agriculture, industry and convenience. Modernity is, in some respects, a free ride. We killed off most of the predators and most of us have an ample supply of food and a safe place to sleep. For the first time, we can slack off without threat of immediate death. We can be lazy. We can be apathetic. When it comes to presenteeism, we do it because we can get away with it.

learned helplessness

But presenteeism is more than just a character defect and it’s more than just lounging in the soft womb of modern civilization. There’s something else here, something that is wearing down our spirits and our exuberance. That thing is chronic stress and its close relative, “learned helplessness.”

First described by pioneering psychologist Martin Seligman, learned helplessness is a state of resignation and apathy that comes from extended exposure to inescapable stress. In laboratory tests, Seligman discovered that chronically-stressed animals showed far less resilience and persistence in solving new challenges. In other words, they tended to generalize their chronically-stressed experience to other non-stressful situations. They learned, in other words, to be helpless.

The implication is chilling. I believe that what we are now seeing in the modern world is an epidemic of learned helplessness, showing up as presenteeism. We are the animals in the cage, stressed repeatedly without chance of escape. We fight the stress for years on end until finally, we capitulate. Our spirits give in and we begin to generalize our experience to any other circumstance that we might encounter. Even when we do get our freedom, we play it safe, refusing to risk, refusing engage, refusing to get involved.

And so we come to one of the most striking paradoxes of modernity: On one hand, the modern agricultural system coddles us with unprecedented wealth, safety and certainty. On the other, it grinds us down with a perpetual stream of demands, a never-ending series of stressors. Some of us are fortunate; we are born into families of wealth or power and we can fight off the stressors along the way. Others get sucked into the stresspool, working multiple jobs or no job, all in the face of a never ending assault of bills, demands and requirements. Eventually, the stressors teach a toxic lesson: withdraw, disengage, retreat. Do the minimum, get by, and go home.

Learned helplessness is often described as a psychological condition, but it could just as easily be described as a disease in its own right. When an organism is dispirited and disempowered, by whatever process, it is no longer whole and fully functional. Standard biomedical tests may not reveal any particular pathology, but nevertheless, something is clearly wrong. And clearly, learned helplessness sets us up for real disease states; it is a precursor to physical illness. In this way, chronic stress and learned helplessness may in fact be the biggest threats to health in the modern world.

learned exuberance

So what are the antidotes to learned helplessness and presenteeism? For his part, Seligman has advocated an approach called “learned optimism.” He puts a lot of emphasis on “explanatory style” and teaches people to use more optimistic language in their daily narratives. Clearly, this can be a powerful approach. The stories that we tell about our experiences are incredibly influential in shaping our outlook, our stress resistance and our behavior. Change your story and you may very well change your relationship with life.

Another approach is to create an alternate experience of engagement. That is, find an arena in which control, success and mastery are possible. Find a place when you can struggle, strive, learn and flourish. Develop an area of life in which personal action is meaningful; a place where your behavior makes a difference.

The idea here is that skill, success and mastery in any domain can immunize us against stress. When we do something well and experience the rewards of learning and mastery, we become more powerful and begin to generalize from that experience: “I struggled against challenges before and I learned new skills. Next time I’m challenged, I’ll probably overcome those as well.”

Generally speaking, engagement and mastery in any realm should offer some measure of immunity against chronic stress and learned helplessness. If you take a deep dive into music, art, chess, gardening or woodworking, your experience should buffer you against the rigid demands of the modern working world. Your workplace may be a tyrannical, spirit-crushing corridor of despair, but you’ve still got your art, your music or your sport. Your chosen discipline will sustain you with a sense of meaning.

But of all the possible domains of mastery, the physical arts offer the most promise. There’s nothing so powerful as moving one’s own body. Nothing gives us such an intimate sense of personal and psychological control as vigorous physical striving. This is why physical practices are so essential for children. As schools become more like adult workplaces, with rigid corridors of rules and incentives, they also become factories for learned helplessness and presenteeism. The chronic, inescapable stress of the modern school saps the spirits of many children, leaving them with no choice but to withdraw and hang on for dear life.

What children need is some sort of physical discipline that offers an opportunity to exercise personal skill, judgment and mastery. Sports, dance and martial art all serve as a physical antidotes to the spiritual wasteland of the modern classroom. Give children a chance to move their bodies and learn a sense of psycho-physical control. Let them engage the world through a physical experience, striving and play. Then, when they encounter an environment of challenging stress, they’ll have a positive, successful memory to fall back on.

For adults and for kids alike, the specifics of physical engagement are largely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether your chosen discipline is power lifting or beach volleyball, rockclimbing or dance. The most crucial elements are passion, engagement and identity. Does this activity feel like me? Does it give meaning to my life? Does it continue to draw me in month after month and year after year? Does it sustain me? Does it teach me that “my actions make a difference”? If so, this is your arena for learned optimism and exuberance.

When you find this practice, embrace it with your whole body and spirit. This discipline is vital to your health, your spirit and your success in other realms. It is vital, not just to you as an individual, but to our future as a people. Learned exuberance is more than just personal happiness, it’s a path to a sustainable and sensible future for all of us.

Warning: The following essay may or may not be satire. You be the judge.  

I love my local supermarket! There’s all those bright, bold posters on the walls, all spiced up with attractive photographs of mouth-watering fruits, vegetables and meats. There’s lots to choose from and the hours are great. The staff is friendly and the check-out is quick and easy. But most of all, I love the way that the food in my supermarket is conveniently arranged by disease category.

Surely you must have noticed it yourself by now: there’s one aisle for heart disease, one for diabetes, one for osteoporosis, one for celiac disease and auto-immune disorders, one for depression and one for neurological disease. Conveniently, this cuts way down on the decision-making process. No longer do I have to read labels to find out precisely what illness I’ll be getting with my food-product purchase; I’ll just go to the appropriate aisle, make my selection and be on my way. Saves a lot of time and stress.

no safe way

It’s high time that we admit the stark and uncomfortable truth: the vast majority of the products in our supermarkets are poisoned in one way or another, either chemically, genetically or morally. Sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s subtle, but it’s there all the same. If you subtract the corn and grain-based products, the hormone and antibiotic-laced meats, the high-fructose snacks and drinks, the pesticide-laced vegetables trucked in from Mexico and the gassed-up tomatoes from Florida, what are we left with? Is there anything in the supermarket that’s safe to eat? Anything at all?

By my count, there are only about 3 or 4 non-poisonous foods available for purchase in my supermarket. On a good day, there are organic vegetables, humanely-raised and grass-fed meat and eggs, wild salmon and similar seafoods. And that’s it; a handful of items out of several thousand. So maybe it’s time for our retail food marketeers to do us all a favor and call a spade a spade: “Welcome to your friendly neighborhood poison and disease center.” It may not pull in the customers, but it is truth in advertising.

paleo

The problem of a poisoned food supply is compounded by our Paleolithic history and inclinations. Just think about your life experience in a wild natural environment: You haven’t eaten for a day or two and you’re ravenous. Your tribe is working a river bank to the west of camp, hoping for any kind of game, or at least some fruit, roots or nuts. Suddenly you encounter a small animal, which you quickly kill with a barrage of rocks. Or maybe you scare off a pack of lions and scavenge a kill. Your expert fire-starter guy is off on the other side of the grassland this day, so what are you to do? Are you going to be picky and hold out for something that’s broiled to a perfect medium rare? Of course not.

Your prime directive is to stay alive and you’re going to eat whatever you need to eat to make it so. This willingness, multiplied by thousands of generations of human evolution, brings us to the 21st century and a world of poisons masquerading as “food.” Are you going to be picky? Of course not. Especially because those “foods” are intentionally engineered to be hyper-sweet, hyper-flavorful versions of their natural counterparts. And so, it’s no wonder that we’ve become non-discriminating gluttons of modern food-poisons. Bring our Paleo ancestors to the local supermarket and they’d behave precisely the same way we do.

So therein lies our dilemma. We’re programmed to eat whenever and whatever we can, but our food supply is toxic. Paleolithic impulse plus a poisoned food supply adds up to an epidemic of chronic disease. Eat a diet of cheap grains, high-fructose corn syrup, trans-fats and tainted meat and you may as well make your reservation for the hospital right now. They’ll be glad to have you, of course. Just make sure to sell your home before you check in; you’re going to need every penny to pay for your treatment.

optimal shopping strategies?

So what are we to do when faced with the poisonous cornucopia on display in the local supermarket? How do we shop and eat when almost every single “food” item is chemically or morally tainted?

One nutritional pundit has come up against this conundrum and sums up her research with this bizarre recommendation: “Rotate your poisons.” In other words, we can’t possibly eat healthy, but we can mitigate the damage by shifting the load from one internal system to another: one day you abuse your gut, the next day your heart, the next day your nervous system. This defeatist attitude is depressing: We can’t hope to eat healthy and nutritious foods, but at least we can slow down the rate at which we’re being killed by our local “food” store.

Naturally, some consumers attempt to navigate their way around toxic supermarkets by “moderating” their consumptions of poisonous food products. They claim that they only eat the poisonous stuff “occasionally.” But this is a steep and slippery slope, one that leads to a deep abyss. Get yourself started on a diet of food products, even in moderation, and you’re going to find yourself on the way to nutritional oblivion. Hyper-sweet processed food stimulates the appetite and sets up a wicked positive-feedback loop: the more of it you eat, the more you’ll want to eat. In this sense, there is no “safe dosage.”

Of course, the standard advice in nutritional circles is to “shop the perimeter.” The idea here is that the poisonous food-products are located deep in the center aisles of the supermarket, while the real food is stocked around the outside. This advice is good in principle, but it’s not necessarily valid. My survey tells me that there’s plenty of poisonous “foods,” toxic meats, and other unrecognizable “food-like substances” on the outside track. Obviously, supermarket designers read the same books that we read and track our behavior with in-store cameras. These “attention scientists” are constantly innovating new ways to distract us away from low-profit food and towards high-profit food-poisons. Thus, we can no longer rely on perimeter shopping to save our health.

Finally, many people now suggest that we should stop going to the supermarket altogether and live instead on wild game and real foods from local farmer’s markets. It’s a great idea, if you can pull it off. But the unfortunate fact is that many of us simply don’t have access to wild fish, game, organic vegetables or farmer’s markets. Many neighborhoods don’t even have poisoned supermarkets and are forced to rely on convenience stores for their toxic calories. So, what’s a body to do? We’ve got to eat. Something.

tactics

It seems to me that the only sensible recourse is to get focused, strategic and ruthless. Food shopping can no longer be treated like a casual leisure activity. Instead, we’ve got to treat it like what it is, an excursion into dangerous territory. Shopping should be a premeditated, highly focused surgical strike.

For motivation, borrow a page or two from the Navy Seals, the SWAT academy or a classical Ninja school: Practice, plan and execute with precision. When you roll into the parking lot, adopt your best combat-readiness. Study your route in detail, focus your energies and prepare to engage. Leave your cell phone in the car; you won’t want to be distracted. For maximum focus, go alone. Memorize your list, grab your wallet and go.

When you enter the front door, avoid the grocery carts; you won’t be buying much anyway. Instead, grab a hand basket and proceed directly to the organics. Select the brightest colors you can and stay focused. Don’t look at the TV displays or the advertisements. Don’t engage with the person handing out free samples. Next, head to the meat department and grab the most expensive stuff you can find: the wild salmon and the grass-fed meats. If seasonally necessary, make a laser-focused dash to the frozen food or canned food aisle, but only as a last resort.

Whatever you do, don’t select any non-food items. No toilet paper, no cosmetics, no flowers, no greeting cards. These are all slippery-slope items that will distract you from your primary mission; if you need these things, get them elsewhere. Select only what’s on your food list, then head directly to the check-out. When in line, don’t look at any of the trashy publications or special offers. Just do the transaction, put your food in your bag and head directly for the door.

When you get home, check your shopping bag for any non-food offers or promotions and dispose of them immediately. Wash your food and set it up for cooking as desired. Then you can relax, secure in the knowledge that you penetrated the danger zone and emerged with your physiology intact.

You’ll live to eat another day.

Note: This essay was originally published on PTontheNet

I know, I know. You’ve heard it all before. You’ve heard a thousand health and fitness formulas from every expert, pundit, publication, and website on earth. And they all sound pretty much the same.

But this one is different. I promise.

the formula

If you really want to get fit and healthy, take the following course of action:

Start by choosing the right grandparents. This is a crucial choice, so be sure to do your homework. Genes are powerful players in your health and fitness profile and you’ll want to have the best possible code in every cell in your body. Make certain that your parents are similarly well-endowed and that they’re well nourished prior to your conception. If they’re malnourished, they may pass on a tendency for metabolic abnormalities such as obesity and diabetes.

Next, make sure that your moment of conception coincides with the optimal season so that Mom will be well-nourished with fresh fruits and vegetables in your last trimester and your first few months of life. If you blow the timing on this, you’ll be suffering through the winter on a low-quality diet of preserved food or food products. This will have a drastic downstream effect on your development, health and performance.

During the course of pregnancy, make sure that your Mom is well-nurtured and stress free. If she’s under stress, you’ll be stewing in a prenatal cortisol bath, which will lead to epigenetic changes in your DNA and increase your stress reactivity throughout your adult life. Adverse gene expression may actually be permanent, which will put you at greater risk for lifestyle diseases and compromised performance down the road.

When you’re finally born, make sure that the event takes place in a nurturing, natural environment, not a hospital. Make sure that you are liberally touched and stroked early in life; this tactile experience will have a calming and restorative effect on your tissue.

As an infant, make sure that you’re encouraged to play in mud puddles, go barefoot and rub your body up against natural surfaces. This will seed your skin and body with beneficial bacteria and give your immune system something to practice on. This microbial priming will have beneficial effects that will last for decades.

During your childhood, make sure that your parents expose you to natural light and circadian cycles. Avoid artificial light, especially TV and computer screens. Exposure to natural light will synchronize and entrain your physiological rhythms for most efficient function.

Be sure that your parents give you a safe, supporting and protective environment in your childhood. You’ll want a stable home with lots of protection from the dangers of the wider world. This protection will allow your brain and your stress response to develop normally; a fully functional prefrontal cortex will inhibit impulsivity, leading to better health behaviors later in life.

Whatever you do, be sure to be born into the right social class, which is to say, the upper level of society. Research has shown conclusively that individuals of higher rank enjoy better health. (See Michael Marmot’s The Status Syndrome.) Similarly, make sure that your parents are affluent. A solid financial surplus will not only decrease stress in your family, it will also open up vast opportunities for physical movement and engagement.

Likewise, make sure that you’re born into a body-friendly neighborhood, one with lots of bike paths, walking trails and farmer’s markets. If you’re on the wrong side of town, you’ll be stuck with poor opportunities for healthy living.

And of course, make sure that you’ve got solid health and fitness role models around you: in your family, your school and your community. Your parents, teachers, coaches and relatives should all display vitality, curiosity, creativity and optimism.

When you finally begin your career, make sure that your employer understands the importance of regular movement, organic food and sensible stress management practices. Be sure that he or she gives you plenty of time off to devote to exercise and personal enrichment.

Next, make absolutely certain that your extended social network is practicing good health behavior. Your friend’s friend’s friends should be affluent and active, eating right and exercising often. This will have a potent ripple effect on your body, your life and your health.  (See Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives – How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler.)

Finally, make sure that you’re born at the right time in history, into a culture of creativity and optimism. The ethos and values of your culture will have a profound influence what you think, how you behave and ultimately, how your body performs.

the trajectory of health and fitness

Perhaps you think this formula is satire, and maybe it is. My recommendations sound absurd because they all involve circumstances that are utterly beyond personal control. No one gets to choose their parents, the conditions of their prenatal environment, their friends friend’s friends, or their culture. And yet, all of these influences have profound downstream effects on the health and functioning of our bodies. New research in public health, epigenetics and interpersonal neurobiology prove without question that health and fitness are shaped in large measure by “extra-personal” forces and circumstances.

Consequently, I believe that it’s time to re-think what health and fitness is all about. Too many of us believe that training is all about personal will, personal choice and personal effort. Just do the right exercises and eat the right food and you’ll get the desired results. Fit people are fit because they do the right workouts in the right gym and take the right supplements and train with the right trainers. Unhealthy people are unhealthy because they’re lazy or just don’t have the right information. In fact, these common assumptions are simply wrong.

Our profession is now being undermined by a highly disruptive findings in the world of neurobiology: that is, health and fitness is often the product of unchangeable circumstance. In large measure, fit people are simply lucky. Unhealthy people are, in many cases, simply unlucky. Yes, there is plenty of room for volition, choice, will, and determination, but in large measure, the conditions of our bodies are shaped by forces far larger than ourselves.

This is why our myopic focus on biomechanics (exercise) and biochemistry (nutrition) so often fails. We deploy our professional expertise and the latest information, but our epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and depression continue to deepen. Obviously, if our current methods were truly effective, people would be getting healthier in droves. They are not.

The inconvenient truth is that the health and fitness trajectories of our bodies are established far earlier than previously believed, even going back to the time before we were born. As trainers, we have very little control over what we can do with these trajectories. In most cases, it takes enormous amounts of time, energy and resources to bend the long-term arc of human health. Yes, there are transformational and inspirational turn-around stories, but in most cases, there is simply not much that we can do. Even a strict program of diet and exercise will not reverse epigenetic effects that have been decades, even generations in the making.

If we really want people to become healthier and fitter, we need to broaden our attention beyond biomechanics and biochemistry, beyond diet and exercise, and especially beyond appearance and athletic performance. It’s time to start talking about the really difficult stuff: social justice, equality, culture, social neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology. When it comes to the larger social and environmental forces that shape the body, we can no longer get away with saying “that’s not my job.”

In fact, it is our job.

I continue to attempt to speak my truth about what it means to be Paleo.  I’ve written several posts on my own blog, and thank Frank Forencich for offering to let me share a summary of those ideas here.

So what is the ideal “paleo” diet?  Or the ideal “paleo” movement practice?

What is the “ideal” human diet, generally speaking?

What are the optimal levels of carbs, protein, and fats?  What about vitamins and minerals?  What time of day is best to consume different nutrients?  Before physical movement, during, or after?  What is best?!

A Specific Type of “Ideal”

I begin the journey here because this is the place of modern Western culture.  Our inquiries are embedded in a scientific (knowledge) framework that seeks to reduce things to their individual “parts.”  It seeks to isolate these in order to determine ways to extract the “best” performance or qualities from them.  This perspective is focused on efficiency and effectiveness from an atomistic perspective.  That is our “ideal.”

An alternative perspective is one our paleolithic ancestors may have had.  This perspective regards all things as critical in understanding our place and the place of our tribe in our environments.  It seeks signs in the weather and wilderness around us, in the rhythms of our own bodies and of the natural world, and in the lessons handed down to us by tradition.  Things may be isolated, but only in order to refer them back to the larger context, to provide greater understanding.  That is their “ideal.”

Both methods of inquiry offer insight, but modern Western culture prefers the former.  And, in preferring the former, it must downplay the latter…to its own detriment, I believe.  For any “paleo” human, diet is embedded in habitat, as well as in culture, a fact that Western atomism has difficulty accepting, embracing, expressing, or embodying itself.

(The philosophy of reductionist “idealism” also tends to destroy the validity of individual experience…but that’s the topic of another post!)

The “Ideal” Human Diet

Many paleo and other diet advocates assert the dangers of wheat consumption for human animals.  People get sick eating wheat, they say.  Wheat causes inflammation and auto-immune disorders.  They say this about other things – dairy and legumes, for instance.

Within this particular “scientific” framework that considers the average of the mean-averages of a population sample (not of the entire population mind you), generalities are the “ideal” of the day.  So the above information is said to be true for all human animals.

But is it true?

Most scientific studies that I’ve seen actually say that it is not true.  And many more moderate “paleo” nutrition advocates say that it is almost certainly only an exception to the rule of human-wheat interaction if the wheat is of a wild (i.e., non petro-chemical farmed, non-genetically modified) variety.  And even more so when those varieties have been soaked or sprouted prior to consumption.

Many modern paleo advocates promote diets of specific macro- and even micro-nutrient amounts, which are to come from very specific foods (cookbooks and dietary lists abound).

The foods themselves run the gamut – from meat from land animals, birds, fish, to tubers, vegetables, eggs, berries, and nuts.  The foods on these lists are often from any and every habitat one could imagine.  And then there are the supplements…

While there’s something to be said for offering choice, none of the authors I’ve read have mentioned bio-regional specificity as an important quality in considering food choice.  What does “bio-regional specificity” mean?  Hang with me a bit longer, and I’ll explain.

Ancestor Worship

The deification of the paleolithic period of human evolution has a long history, both generally and specifically.  Human beings in every culture tend to worship the past “Golden Age” of their people.  This is a useful practice, providing reverence for tradition and a story-line explaining the current state of things.  The Golden Age gives human beings something to strive for.  Whether or not such stories (called “mythologies”) are “objectively true” is unimportant.  These stories guide behavior, and give meaning to human existence and action.  On the specific side, it seems that some group of people every hundred years or so advocates for the ways of Ye Olde Noble Savage, and a return to our “primitive” roots.

But this deification can come at a cost.  At times, it results in disgust for the modern age.  Modern people are “worthless and weak” compared to their ancestors.  They aren’t fit or smart enough.  They’ve devolved, and will continue to do so unless something is done about it!

It’s not always untrue!  But it is interesting that many people within the modern Paleo community only see the negative side of the formation of civilizations, including agriculture and technology.  It’s interesting, because it’s only half of the picture.

The consumption of large quantities of carbohydrate, especially in the form of cultivated grains, directly coincides with the explosion of human technological innovation that also started around 10,000-30,000 years ago.  Coincidence?  I think not!  The brain has been said to be the single-largest consumer of glucose in the non-exercising body.  At rest, the brain can demand up to 10% of the body’s blood-glucose.  Glucose is the fuel for thought.  Its ideal source is carbohydrate.

The “Ideal” Carbohydrate

Are all carbohydrates created equal?  It seems ridiculous to say so, though many reductionist “authorities” assert to the ends of the earth that the body treats all carbohydrate compounds the same.  All are transformed into “glucose.”

Without going into the science, let’s examine this sort of statement from another perspective.  Are all products made from coca leaves the same?  Some South American peoples use coca leaves to produce different effects.  The use is usually embedded in a cultural tradition – to visit the Spirit World, as medicine,  to endure long travels for ritual events, or even the occasional “recreational” use.

As the coca leaf is harvested and refined to extract one of its elements – cocaine – things are lost.  Among them, chemical buffers that keep the drug from having excessive negative effects on the chewer.

But a more important missing element might be the cultural element.  The meaning of chewing coca is lost as the plant is ground to dust and “purified.”  The element cocaine is isolated, and the individual is isolated – removed from cultural context or meaning in their behavior.

The more refined the cocaine becomes (to make “the best” or “ideal” cocaine), the more removed from its biological and cultural context, the more dangerous it is to the human being.

The wheat produced from a field sprayed with chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides, that is genetically-modified, farmed with machines that emit petroleum-exhaust, processed with heat and a litany of chemical softeners, additives and “purifiers,” packaged in plastics that slowly leech into their contents, shipped long distances in containers not always heat-controlled (and so lending to the leeching and spoiling process), that then sit on shelves for indefinite lengths of time before being consumed…

…well, let’s just say that “wheat” is, by the definition above, different from a wild wheat, cultivated from a non-chemically manipulated field by hand, minimally processed, and consumed shortly after harvesting.

The Quest for Immortality

It all boils down to…something…doesn’t it?  Feeling good is one thing, but searching for the “perfect” diet with an obsessive-compulsive fervor?  That usually leads me to believe that we’re after something else.  I’ve seen it before in the history of humanity – the search for greatness, the quest for immortality.  That quest itself may be the only thing immortal about human life.  It has led Chinese emperors to eat mercury, the spiritual adept to climb mountains and forge through dangerous jungles…

And it doesn’t exist.  (for another take, read this article).

Immortality is a nice thought, and common among most human cultures.  In each it has a slightly different path.  I tend to like the path to immortality described by some indigenous cultures – the ancestral path.

Some cultures saw the individual “immortal soul” as a product of the culture itself.  How long would you last in the after-life?  Only as long as you were remembered by your tribe.  Or, only as long as someone prayed for you on a certain date.  Or, perhaps, forever, if a certain landmark was named after you, or a god in the pantheon, or a story fashioned around one of your deeds (or misdeeds) as a lesson for future generations in the tribe.

Bio-Regional Specificity – The Closest Things

My personal “project” in life is an exploration of “the closest things” – of my own physiology, community, and habitat.  It’s what fascinates me more than anything else.  It is the foundation for my own concept of what is “ideal.”  And it’s from this perspective that I offer a different view of Paleo.

Having a list of foods that are “appropriate” to eat might help someone new to the concept learn what’s okay.  But I feel it’s simpler to offer some general principles.  Here they are:

1. “Ideal” foods are bio-regionally specific.
That is, they are foods that come from your immediate geographical area. Any “paleo” or other culture before long-distance trade lived by this rule.  Of course, such foods are also in season, by definition.

2. Make food intake activity-level specific.
The “paleo” eater is not counting calories, but is eating whatever natural foods are available locally to satiate themselves. The amount they eat will depend on how hungry they are – not on a “recommended daily intake,” or to satiate unmet physical or emotional needs.

3. Foods are as unprocessed as possible.
That means unprocessed from the point of view of planting, growing (and pest-control), harvesting, shipment, storage, and preparation for eating.  Foods are cooked, but not boiled to death.

This outlook embeds the human animal within its local environment.  It reduces the need for and side-effects of petrochemical use.  It entrains the human animal to the natural rhythms of the land in which it lives.  To me, it is a very paleolithic perspective on diet.

The Culture Club

No, this isn’t an ode to Boy George’s (horrible) band from the 1980′s.  It’s my “dietary supplement” to the above principles.  Culture is regionally-specific.  It revolves around and grows within a geographical climate.  The culture of the American Pacific Northwest (where I now live) is vastly different from the culture of the Mid-Atlantic (where I grew up), and a lot of that has to do with the shape of the land itself.  And, of course, culture is tied to dietary practices.  Ask anyone who grew up in an Italian-American family what a “normal” dinner is, then ask someone from an Asian-American family.  Culture rules.

The diets of indigenous peoples throughout history reflect the three principles I’ve laid out above.  The Masai tribes herd cattle and live on a diet of blood, milk, meat, and tubers.  The Inuit live eating seal, whale, bear, and other meats, and seaweeds and other available vegetables.  Bedouin nomads eat camel and other meats, drink milk, and eat available vegetables and tubers.  Islanders from French Polynesia eat seafood, vegetables, and plenty of delicious fruits available in their habitat.  None of them live on “paleo bars,” or three dozen eggs per week.  Unless those happen to naturally occur within their habitat, that is.  In many of those places, cultural (and religious, as a function of culture) mores and laws are shaped over time to help to keep the human population of the tribe from overstepping its bounds, keeping it in synch with the natural rhythm of its habitat.

Those dietary practices are embedded within their culture.  As are ours.

The Western dietary practice for many years has been about counting calories, RDA’s, RDI’s, percentages, supplements, and prescriptions.  This way of thinking about diet reflects our culture’s perception of its place in the world.  We are Homo Reductionus.  Homo Hypochondriacus.  We are “Man the Obsessive Compulsive.”  We count, we divide, we reduce.

Various modern-Paleo communities have their own cultural behaviors.  But these are almost always situated within our larger cultural framework – the Western Culture Club – and within primate behavior, generally.  The Western Culture Club is the club of the Outlier – where individuals are built-to-follow-and-obey.  Don’t think you were somehow exempt from this conditioning.  We have to be aware of this in order to do anything other than merely reflect and refract that larger culture.

Our modern habitat does offer many things.  We need to be careful about why we’re choosing them.

How To

A lot of people have responded to my posts and conversations by saying “Yes Josh, that’s nice, but unrealistic for most people in our modern world.  And at least it’s introducing people to a new way of eating that is healthier than what they have now.”

I’ll concede that.  But I’m not a huge fan of “at leasts.”  I think we can and should do better.

The very approach of boiling down “paleo” or indigenous dietary habits into “general rules” in itself is not indigenous-thinking.

It fails at creating a locally sustainable diet.  It fails at holding individuals accountable for their actions within a sustainable local community.  It fails at creating community.

And diet is not all that is common among “pre-civilized” cultures, nor is it the only factor influencing their health.  Community, lifestyle, connection with environment, these things matter. It isn’t the “general rule” that makes indigenous peoples healthy, it is their very specific and individual adaptation within their unique habitats.

Putting “paleo” on top of a medicalized and reductionist generalized dietary practice doesn’t change anything about Western behavior.  It IS Western behavior. The cycle of mass-production and destruction, the “oil economy,” the unresolved stress and strain of modern living, the pollution of environments through corporate, governmental, and individual negligence – all of these things lead up to the modern state of the human animal.  Without a local approach, you sustain all of the things that create dysfunction, regardless of how healthy your diet.

Altering the course of modern civilization toward regional-specificity is more important than diet in terms of health. I know many people who have developed cancers who eat healthier diets and live healthier lifestyles than any others I’ve met.  The problem for them was an accumulated level of toxins in the general environment, caused by industrial farming practices, corporate, government, and individual negligence and abuse of resources, and a general reliance on petrochemical manufacturing practices in terms of pharmaceuticals, “durable goods,” etc.

So my challenge to you is to find a way to make it work. Which might involve shifting priorities a bit.

For one thing, excuses are out.

The modern worker bee can easily implement my principles by 1. shopping at local farmers markets, or joining their local CSA, 2. eating in accordance with their actual level of hunger, rather than in accordance with “caloric recommendations” or to appease some repressed physical or emotional need, 3. eating unprocessed foods (see #1) in as minimally-processed (i.e., not fried, etc.) a form as possible, and 4. doing all of this within your local community, in a loving environment.

If these options aren’t available to you, if you simply cannot play within your environment and cultural conditioning to attempt to achieve the four principles, if there is no community to which you can reach, which you can join in your efforts, I have one word of advice for you.

Get the hell out of wherever you are, because you’re in deep trouble, and you’re making it worse for the rest of us.

If you can play, if you are looking for that community, you might find your tribe in Exuberant Animal.  Check out the upcoming jams, and attend one.

Join me on my quest for the closest things at my own blog – joshleeger.com

Just back from the Ancestral Health Symposium at UCLA and my mind is buzzing with exuberance and ideas. In brief, the short story is simple: This was an outrageously inspirational event, not just for me personally, but for anyone interested in themes of health, human origins and primal living. This event will ripple all across the world; the effects will be felt for years and decades to come. This is going to have a huge downstream impact.

Because of simultaneous, concurrent presentations, it was impossible to see more than half the speakers. Not only did this present some excruciating choices, it also left everyone with only a partial view of the whole event. Consequently, everyone will now be living with a different impression of what the event was all about.

Nevertheless, the energy was incredible. People were friendly and supportive all the way around. I witnessed a whole lot of sincere teaching, sharing and genuine listening. There was expertise and curiosity in abundance and I was inspired.

In general, the preponderance of the presentations were on Paleo diet concepts. Naturally, there were differences of opinion on details, but the consensus view was that the low-fat, high-carb diets of the late 20th century were a dreadful mistake. A string of presenters made it abundantly clear: refined sugars, flour and food products contribute enormously to our modern health woes. Vegetarian diets also took a hit: most agreed that vegetarian diets simply don’t provide adequate support for good health. The scientific data and clinical reports were impressive. I will never look at a loaf of bread the same way again.

Curiously though, the strength of the conference was also its weakness. That is, a first-time observer of this Paleo scene would surely have walked away with the impression that Paleo is almost entirely about food, diet and nutrition. There was no question: diet was the central focus of this event. In fact, the conference might have well been called “The Paleo Diet Symposium.”

This is where I take issue. Powerful as the dietary evidence was, it still came across as an isolated, mono-disciplinary specialty. Several presenters drilled the biochemistry down so deep that I thought they would come out the other side of the earth. And in this sense, it wasn’t really consistent with a Paleo world view. If we know one thing about native, pre-modern cultures, it is that their orientations were inclusive and holistic. Food was obviously important to our ancestors, but they would find our focus/obsession with food to be completely out of balance.

The full range of Paleo experience was simply not represented at the conference.  As far as I could tell, there was little interest in the human connection with land, tribe or the animal world. (Refreshing exceptions included Mark Sisson speaking about play and Erwan Le Corre talking about natural movement.)

Obviously, Paleo diet studies are vital. Public health is in serious decline and a large measure of this is the result of grain and carbohydrate over-consumption. Clearly, we need to be speaking up and making this case to the public at large. But by focusing exclusively on nutrition, we make a fundamental error and keep our minds stuck in a modernized, Western orientation. We attribute a systemic problem to a single cause. Our field begins to look and feel narrow, mono-disciplinary and reductionistic; this is a classic rookie mistake.

So I would pose a couple of questions: Don’t we want more from the Paleo than diet? Isn’t there more to be learned from the last 2 million years than a formula for eating? If all we take from the Paleo is a recipe book or a chemical prescription, we’re missing a much larger and potentially more valuable lesson. In fact, if all we do is mine the Paleo for nutritional, health and weight loss advice, we become guilty of yet one more form of unconscious cultural imperialism. In this case, we don’t invade other countries and tyrannize their people. Instead, we raid the past, take what we want and leave the rest behind. This is more of the same behavior that got us into our modern predicament in the first place.

I believe that it’s time that we listened to the full range of what the Paleo has to offer. Yes, let’s talk about food, but let’s not get carried away with substances and their effect on the body. Let’s keep it whole. Like good Paleo hunters and gatherers, let’s keep our attention moving across all dimensions of our habitat and experience. Let’s talk about our relationship to habitat, to the land and to the creatures around us.

Ultimately, health is about more than getting the right substances down our throats. It’s about developing a better sense of rapport- with our bodies, with the land and with one another.

Perhaps we’ll see a broader panorama at the Second Annual Ancestral Health Symposium.

In any case, I can hardly wait.

Note: This essay was first published on the PTontheNet community blog August 3, 2011

 
Dulce bellum inexpertis (War is delightful to the inexperienced).
Erasmus, the 16th-century scholar

Every profession has its trends. Fads come and go, attention shifts and culture changes. In the world of personal training, the trend of our day is militarization, especially in the form of boot camps and MMA.

I believe that this trend is inappropriate and counter-productive. I believe that it’s time to drop the combat orientation and create more appropriate and relevant forms of physical experience.

Before you dismiss my proposal as that of a weak and skinny whiner, let me just say that I’ve done the martial art circuit. I trained really hard for a couple of decades and earned a couple of black belts. Back when I was training, I could really dish out some physical punishment to myself and others. And now, on reflection, I see that a good deal of that training was wasted. Wasted on domination and posturing. Wasted on a futile quest for security. Wasted on maximizing the self at the expense of integration. What I finally realized was that there are far more beneficial and interesting ways to train the body.

Fitness pundits like to talk about the great conditioning benefits of MMA combat training, but MMA isn’t about conditioning at all. Any biologist would see the obvious. That is, MMA is primate dominance behavior, pure and simple. Contestants train, not to become better people or to make the world a better place, but to establish their place in the hierarchy of other primates, to dominate men and get access to the females. For a primatologist, it’s completely transparent. In this sense, MMA fighters are no different than chimpanzees tearing limbs off of trees in the forest, trying to impress the tribe. And we, as trainers, are simply offering our expertise so that these fighters can get better at tearing limbs off of trees. Why not call it what it is?

Ultimately, it’s all hormonal, a cultural case of testosterone poisoning. As our nation and our world slide deeper into economic insecurity, and with multiple wars in progress, people feel an ever greater need to assert their position. Men lead the way in this behavior, doing whatever they can to exercise power, often with the body. In contrast, secure people do not go looking for ways to dominate one another. They look for rapport. They look for solutions.

Along with MMA, the other trend in fitness militarization is, of course, the boot camp. Boot camps have proliferated in recent years, based on the assumption that the only way to really get in shape is to have an unpleasant physical experience, motivated by a loud authority figure. It’s hard to believe, but the history, imagery and context of boot camps are lost on both trainers and participants. In fact, boot camps are preparation for killing people in war. They are about obedience, conformity, unit cohesion and the ability to withstand intense physical hardship. Boot camps are not about health, longevity, sustainability or integration.

MMA and boot camp trainings are narrow specializations devoted to the body and very little else. Yes, there are benefits in the form of speed, strength, mental focus and the like, but what about human relationships? What about the earth, land and habitat? And what about the tragic state of the world that we now inhabit? Our biosphere and our social systems are on the verge of collapse. Wouldn’t it make more sense to develop physical arts that promote human relationships and integration with the natural world?

It would be one thing if combat conditioning and boot camps were the only ways to develop physical excellence, but that’s not the case at all. There are thousands of ways to make our bodies stronger and healthier. The number of physical art forms is almost endless. And that’s the beauty of it. With so many ways to train our bodies for strength, vitality and exuberance, why not create something beautiful, progressive and productive?

If the proliferation of MMA and boot camps tell us anything, it’s that our professional imagination is failing us, just at the time we need it most. MMA and boot camps are crude and to be completely honest, ugly. The imagery and metaphors they provide are counter-productive to both individuals and our culture at large. If we were a little more creative, we would invent new forms that are appropriate to the conditions that we live in.

Some will argue that by offering MMA and boot camps, we are simply giving people what they want. We, like good businesspeople anywhere, are simply responding to market forces. If people want combative, militarized physical training, that’s what we’ll give them. We are nothing more or less than good service providers.

But this view is passive, reactive and ultimately, irresponsible. It is followership, not leadership. As trainers, our job to get out in front of our culture and show the way to something better. This would be a demonstration of real strength.

Our profession has some of the brightest, most intelligent, most creative people in the world.

Boot camps and MMA are a step backwards.

We can do better.

So this is what we’ve come to…
In a culture dedicated to boxes, what else is there to do?

Note the language: “ideal” “imaginative”

(This clipping is from the most recent edition of Club Business International, the trade publication for big-box gyms)

I am not making this up….

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

Leo Tolstoy

When people ask how long it will take to “get in shape,” my brain usually goes into  spasm, my right eye starts to twitch and my gag reflex jumps into action. That’s bad enough, but things get even worse when a fitness pundit offers up an easy answer. At this point, my entire nervous system starts coming apart at the seams. Obviously, to me at least, the question betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the matter at hand. And the answer, when it comes in the form of a specific number of minutes, days, weeks or months, sounds like a formula cooked up by a marketing consultant, not a teacher or a coach.

This thing we call “getting in shape” is a process. It is not a commodity that we can buy or a destination that we can arrive at. Our bodies are fundamentally dynamic and they’re living in a dynamic world. We are plastic beings, always under construction, deconstruction and transformation. To suggest that a human or animal body could ever reach a static, utopian goal state (“in shape”) is misguided, possibly even delusional. Heraclitus would agree: We can’t step into the same river twice. Not only is the river changing, so is our body-mind-spirit. The movement never stops.

Given our dynamic predicament, what we need is a philosophy of training and living that is fundamentally open-ended, continuous and sustainable, something that lives and breathes. Fortunately, we are beginning to see some moves in this direction. There’s a lot of talk nowadays about something called “long-term athletic development.” Coaches and trainers have come to the conclusion that short-term, single-season training is not enough to transform young athletes into high performers and they’re looking to extend the time line from months to decades. Many common estimates now hold that it takes some 10,000 hours or 10 years of concentrated effort to achieve mastery in athletics, or any other art for that matter.

Long-term athletic development is a great idea and well worth our attention, but it gets even more fascinating when we expand the notion and use the body as a touchstone for training and mastery in other realms of creativity. If we begin with “long-term athletic development,” we can just as easily imagine any of the following variations:

“Long-term artistic development”

“Long-term creative development”

“Long-term musical development”

“Long-term professional development”

“Long-term personal development”

After all, isn’t it all the same thing? When you get right down to it, all of these pursuits share similar characteristics of experience, challenge, relationship and learning. No matter whether you’re immersing yourself in martial art, baseball, sculpture, painting, keyboards, guitar, management or writing, there’s bound to be a similar process at the core. In fact, we can simply drop the particulars and simply refer to the process as “long-term development” or LTD.

The ancients (any pre-Twitter generation) knew that LTD was essential; the whole LT orientation was built into the fabric of native and traditional cultures. No one took an online course or a weekend workshop on how to become a better hunter. (“Learn how to be a master hunter in 6 minutes! Call now!”) The process required sustained immersion, participation and focused attention, over the course of years. Later, the arts took a similar path with LT apprenticeships in scholarship, blacksmithing, martial art, dance, painting, sculpture, medicine and music. If you want to learn a thing, you’ve got to get into it and stay into it for a very long time. There was no instant education in the paleo or the Renaissance.

a dying art

Sadly, LTD is fast disappearing from the modern world. Indeed, our culture is profoundly toxic to LTD of any kind. The usual culprits are familiar: technology, media and marketing, the urgent and obsessive quest for instant gratification. We know all this, and yet we seem incapable of slowing the pace. We are locked in a tightening grip of vicious cycles that feed off one another, destroying our attention and our development. Computers drive the illusion that, whatever we want, there’s a way to have it instantly

Of course, it scarcely needs to be pointed out that the modern health and fitness industry is notoriously hostile to LTD. In a speed-crazed world of “6 minute abs” and “short cuts to a hot bod,” there’s almost no way to have a conversation about what really matters: sustainable participation over the course of decades. Can anyone imagine a magazine or website headline that reads “Thirty years to a life of vitality and performance!” Or “Ten thousand hours of authentic work for a hot bod!”) If we were really honest about what it takes to “get in shape,” our clients and customers would flee in droves, clicking their way to impossible promises of instant make-over and fitness stardom. False promises would rule the day.

the basics of ltd

For much of human history, LTD has been the norm, but in the modern world, many of  us have no sense of it whatsoever. Raised in a culture of dabbling, skimming and short-term test prep, the average person is familiar only with STD, if that. Consequently, it’s time to review the basic characteristics and qualities of LTD:

Without fail, LTD is built on a base of consistent participation over the course of years and decades. This sustained engagement is essential and cannot be compromised. LTD is not a “drop-in” process. It is not “a convenient program for busy people.” Rather, it’s a commitment that requires lots of time, day in and day out. Martial art teachers refer to this vital ingredient as “time on the mat.” There is no short cut or bypass.

LTD also requires a sense of personal and psychological identification with the process at hand; a merger and a commitment to a complete way of living. The student declares with confidence: “I am a dancer.” “I am a athlete.” “I am a physician.” This is who I am.

A famous study of successful musicians revealed the power of personal identification and commitment. Researchers interviewed young musicians and probed their early childhood experiences, looking for the determinants of success. Some factors were obvious: practice time correlated strongly with success, for example. But even more powerful was the student’s early answer to this question: “How long will you play your instrument?” Students who answered “For the rest of my life” consistently out-performed those who imagined a shorter commitment.

Naturally, LTD is fueled by a growth orientation. This mindset, championed by psychologist Carol Dweck, simply refers to the belief that skill, intelligence and aptitudes are not static qualities. Rather, they can be developed over time, especially in response to intentional effort and repetition. Numerous studies in various learning environments clearly demonstrate a placebo-like effect. In other words, if you believe that your skill and aptitude will grow in response to challenge and effort, they will.

LTD is a serious study, but it also includes a high level of playful exploration and lighthearted fun. High performers focus on the material and come at it from every angle that they can think of. They grind away at the problem with sets and reps, repeating the process over and over again until they get it right. But they’ll dance with it too, turning it over, around and upside down. Many settle into a rhythm that oscillates between freedom and discipline, between gravity and levity, between broad and narrow.

In any case, all LTD is built on the sustained and rhythmic application of mindful attention to the subtleties of the craft, the discipline and the process. It makes no difference whether it’s cooking or combat, fly fishing or finance, mastery always comes down to focusing attention consistently on the process, relationship and experience. In this way, LTD could also be described as “long-term attentional development.”

LTD also includes (and develops) a sense of resilience, the ability to bounce back from setbacks, injury, illness and humiliation. Genuine creativity demands risk and risk exposes us to failure and folly. Every true creator has stumbled and crashed, but the sense of commitment and resilience brings them back into the process.

Finally, LTD is powered by optimism and by dreams. The young athlete, student or artist falls in love with an idea and wonders “How can I do that?” “I want that experience.” “I want to feel that in my body.” Ultimately, you’ve got to be in love with the process. If you’re not in love, you need to find another art.

a call for radical honesty

So that is LTD. We know what it takes to transform the body and it’s time to start teaching it to our clients, our customers, our friends and families. And it’s time to start telling the truth. No more “6 minute abs” or “6 minute anything” for that matter. Instead, we need to be crystal clear about what’s really required. That is, “getting in shape is going to take the rest of your life.” If we all start telling this truth, we can transform this industry and bring some meaning and dignity back into the process.

Last time I checked, I thought we were in the business of working with human bodies, movement and physical experience. So how then, did we ever get into the numbers business? Physical movement used to be about, well, moving your body. But today we’ve gone from quality to quantity, from experience to data, from romance to spreadsheets, from exuberance to accounting.

The whole miserable business began back in the 1970′s, when “target heart rate” was all the rage. You probably remember the formula: Maximum heart rate = 220 − age. Everyone was supposed to stop moving every so often and check their pulse, do the conversion and then start moving again. Mystified by this sudden interest in numbers, I started asking around: “Why do we need to do this?” The “experts” explained that “people really need to know when they’re in the target zone, otherwise they might work too hard or not hard enough.” This struck me as preposterous. Can’t the human body actually feel when it’s working hard? And in fact, don’t our bodies come fully-equipped with internal nervous system receptors (interoceptors) that sense things like heart rate, blood pressure and the like? And isn’t it the case that no other animal on the planet ever stops moving to manually check its heart rate? But of course, my protests went nowhere; I was using words, not numbers, to make my case. No one could understand what I was saying.
But that was just the beginning. Target heart rate was later abandoned in favor of something called “pulse product” (also known as “composite cardiovascular measurement”), which is calculated by combining pulse rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure. Hard to count in the middle of an aerobics class, but great for inputting into a data base.

About that same time, someone came up with METs: Metabolic Equivalent of Task, or simply “metabolic equivalent.” This is a measure of the intensity of aerobic exercise: the ratio of metabolic rate during a specific physical activity to a reference rate of metabolic rate at rest. Whatever.

And of course, the cardiophiliacs had to have their own numbers, so they came up with VO2 max: maximal oxygen uptake or aerobic capacity. This number is supposed to reflect the physical fitness of the individual, or at the very least, their position in the athletic pecking order. Big numbers get big respect.

Naturally, strength athletes had to get into the numbers game too, this time with the hallowed 1RM (One repetition maximum). For some reason, this formula is now considered vital for strength training. There are now some 24 different formulas for assessing one’s 1RM, but fortunately, if you want to find out how much you can lift, there’s no need to actually lift something, you can just go a website and fill in a form to get the answer.

All of this counting has led to an epidemic of charting, logging and tracking of miles, heart rate monitors, laps and reps. We’ve convinced the average exerciser that he or she needs to consult a computer and a biometric specialist before moving a limb or taking a step. The raw experience of sweat and heavy breathing has now been domesticated by the rows and columns of the spreadsheet. The purpose of the body, it now seems, is to produce data.

Even worse, the whole thing doesn’t stop with exercise; the nutritionists had to get in on the action too. So now we have ANDI, the “Aggregate Nutritional Density Index.” (Calculate nutrients against calories, etc.) At the low end, we find sweet and empty food products like soft drinks. At the high end, we find the really dense, revolting foods like kale. If you really want to be healthy, you’re supposed to calculate your meal’s ANDI rating before taking a bite, but fortunately, there’s probably an app for that.

As you might imagine, all this measuring is taking me out of my body and stressing me out. Where did this obsession with digits come from? And who can make a case that it’s even remotely necessary? Wasn’t there life before numbers? Didn’t millions of people stay healthy through most of human history, entirely without the benefit of METs, 1RM’s, VO2 maxes and ANDIs? And don’t non-human animals function just fine without the benefit of quantification?

I could rant about this for years, but today I’ve decided to throw in the towel and resign myself to the inevitable. Now that it’s “measure or die,” I suppose that I too must offer up some sort of metric, a magic  formula to calculate some dimension of human physicality so that I too can have a seat at the table of professional expertise. If I’m going to have an impressive set of letters after my name or a book contract, I’m going to have to knuckle under and start coming up with some metrics. To that end, I offer two proposals:

ape units

First is the APE unit, aka the Ancestral Physical Education unit. An APE unit is simply a full day of sustained, outdoor locomotion, physicality and exploration: a sunup to sundown effort of moving your body in the natural world.

For example, John Muir logged thousands of APE units during his lifetime, walking tens of thousands of miles across the North American landscape. Adventurers, backpackers and hikers log them too. Mountain climbers and rock climbers also get credit for APE units. And of course, our Paleolithic ancestors logged APE units almost daily. In contrast, the average modern American likely has only a handful of APE units to his or her credit, if that.

The APE unit is an ideal metric for the modern human health predicament. No actual research has been done to date, but we can suppose that there’s a correlation between one’s APE score and their physical happiness, health and longevity. It’s just an assumption, of course, completely hypothetical, with no evidence to support it. It’s a rash speculation and will remain so until someone actually logs the metrics and publishes his or her work in a respected, peer-reviewed journal.

Note: Subdivisions of the primal APE unit are not permitted under this model. In other words, you cannot take a walk in the park, kick your shoes off for a half an hour, and lay claim to “.001 APE units.” This would constitute a perversion of the system and is antithetical to our purposes. It’s a full APE unit, or nothing.

combined physicality rating

If APE units aren’t to your liking, how about CPR? This metric has nothing to do with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but it may very well prove pivotal in bringing nearly dead people back to life. The formula for CPR goes like this: Sensation + Effort = Total Physical Experience

This metric is more subtle and difficult to measure than the APE unit, but it is essential nonetheless. My assumption holds that physicality is the vital quality we’re looking for in the modern world; it’s physicality, not exercise, that’s the biggest deficiency in modern life. Sure, movement is vital, but exercise is not enough to keep the whole human organism healthy; there has to be an authentic sensory experience, a touching of the world, to get the body’s full attention and to make the experience complete.

For example, if you run on a smooth treadmill while wearing heavily-cushioned marshmallow shoes, you might get a good score for “effort,” but a low score for sensation – thus a mediocre CPR rating. But now suppose that you hike a big mountain or go for a barefoot run on natural terrain. Lots of bushwhacking, rocks and roots on the trail, a couple of stream crossings and lots of hot sun, cold wind and biting insects. This satisfies both requirements of the CPR: high sensation plus big effort adds up to impressive physicality for the day.

This is what our bodies need at this moment in history. Not METs, not “pulse products,” not 1RM max, not VO2max. We need physical striving and intimate tactile contact with the natural world. Without contact, we remain lost in space, disembodied creatures of low health and vitality.

count or get out

By combining CPR with APE units, we find an ideal solution that should keep everyone happy. By working together, we can create a composite metric that we can log into a spreadsheet and upload into a data base and then get down to some serious, laborious number-crunching. We can work some formulas and write an iPhone app that will help us keep the whole thing on tap for instant reference and comparisons.
Or, we could just go outside and move our bodies. It worked before and it can work again.