How to live quietly in a noisy world

I didn’t want to leave the blog so unfinished. The “okay, I’m good now, see you later page”. I thought that perhaps the first and last thing you see should have a little bit more weight. So, here is a short list of commands I have written for myself. Only myself. When I say ‘you’ I mean ‘me’. Not being prescriptive here, ok?

1. Don’t shout, and don’t cause drama or commotion. And only say it if it is important.
2. Assume that everyone is trying their best, even if they don’t always succeed.
3. Look everyone straight in the eye. Do it with warmth. Don’t wear sunglasses. Two humans looking at each other is a powerful interaction. Don’t mess with that. Wear a hat if the sun is too much.
4. Don’t ever assume that the minutiae and miniature dramas of your life are of any interest at all to other people. Keep them to yourself unless you’re directly asked about them.
5. Walk whenever and wherever you can. Especially if the distance is less than a mile. There is really no excuse for not walking that kind of distance. Unless you are riding your bike, of course.
6. When you walk look ahead or look up. Don’t look down, don’t look at a phone. Don’t shield yourself with music. Be there, and be fully aware of all that is going on. Look for beauty and look for things you haven’t seen before.
7. When you talk to someone make sure your phone is switched off and in your pocket or at home. When you talk to someone, your only job is to listen, and to talk to that person.
8. Don’t brag. Especially not with status updates, tweets or Instagram pictures. We’ve all created fake storefronts for our lives, and yet somehow believe that other people’s fake lives are real. Let’s not perpetuate this.
9. Find ways of limiting the time on the internet. When you are on it, spend time digging deep into one subject rather than flitting from one random topic to another.
10. Only ever go to events that mean something to you and that make you happy. Life is too short to show up merely to be seen, to impress, to fulfill an obligation.
11. Don’t chase the latest film, book, band, TV program because it’s new, or just to be able to say “I saw that”. Watch, read and listen to what seems unusually promising.
12. Every single day remember that the 21st Century was bought with the blood of the 20th Century. That our freedom rests on the graves of tens of millions of mostly young people who died without ever having a choice about it.
13. Whenever something seems difficult, causing you to worry, remember that most things don’t matter. And will pass very soon, never to be remembered again.
14. Don’t borrow money unless it is really, really important.
15. Of your spare time, give a percentage over to helping others. Even if it’s just an hour a week.
16. Before buying a pet, ask yourself whether there isn’t a way of giving the love and the money to a human instead.
17. Speak your mind — with kindness and humility, not anger or spite.
18. Don’t ever assume that your good health or good fortune is the product of your good habits, your virtue or your hard work, when in fact you were just lucky.
19. For that reason, don’t prescribe those habits or behaviors to anybody else. You might well be wrong.
20. Don’t strive for success. Success is a potential byproduct of doing something you are good at and/or that you enjoy. If you have found something that makes you happy when you do it you have already succeeded.
21. Don’t worry about leaving a legacy. 99.9999% of us will be forgotten in just a couple of generations.
22. Don’t spend too much time trying to please other people. Chances are they won’t notice. Or if they do, they’ll forget about it very soon.
23. Pick up a crying baby. Life will batter us all soon enough.
24. Sing every day, even if you don’t think you can sing.
25. Don’t work for anyone or anything that makes the world a lot worse, even if it costs you money.
26. Only buy the things that make your life better in some substantive way.
27. Pay yourself in time. Work less if you can afford it, rather than making more money.
28. Don’t vacation in other people’s misery.
29. Don’t worry about what other people think about you. Chances are, they don’t at all. Or if they do they will soon forget you.
30. Know who has gone before you. Know who your ancestors were, and what they were like. You are a product of and a response to all that has come before.
31. Do at least one thing every week that isn’t part of your regular routine, physical or mental habits. Read, talk to, walk, experience something, someone, somewhere outside your bubble.
32. Air is alive. It carries information and emotion. It tells you where you are, who you are with, what is going on around you. Only use air conditioning as a last resort.

Unquantified, for right now

It didn’t feel right to just let this site sit unattended for so many months.

For right now, it has served its purpose.

I kicked my tracking habit, mostly. I still use my FitBit on days when I work, to make sure I walk around six miles a day. That’s really to make sure I get enough sunlight and balance out all that sitting at a desk. While I could just estimate the distances, using the FitBit means I don’t have to count blocks.

I no longer do any of the other tracking and my life hasn’t fallen apart in any way, shape or form. I’ve traveled more this year, done more, gone to more concerts, read more, explored more, lived more.

The other impetus for The Unquantified Self was my annoyance with the idea that somehow devices would save our health, and bring about some gigantic sea change where we all change our habits, diagnose our problems and fix them ourselves. This idea has mostly lost traction. And more, all the overhyped tech is in retreat. Nike’s Fuel Band is quitting. The Apple Watch is no longer sold on its abilities to self-track. There’s increasing awareness that most people don’t stick with tracking and those who do are the worried well, not the sick. And those who track have realized that their data isn’t particularly useful in pinpointing the causes of any problems. The whole ‘movement’ has lost steam – going out with a whimper rather than a bang.

So for right now, I don’t feel like I have a ton to add.

But if I do notice anything particularly annoying, I’ll call it out.

Nowhere to go but everywhere

The not-so-secret belief behind the Unquantified Self is that once we disentangle ourselves from the impulse to contain and control our lives by measuring everything, all the time, we could refocus that energy on living more adventurously.

Which of course is always easier said than done.

I have the crazy good fortune to work freelance, and to make enough money even if I just work seven or eight months a year. I know I need to be more daring with that non-working time. I used to take on every little job, and dissipated much of that time with half-days and quarter-days worked. I also used to worry a lot, and spent that time obsessing over where the next job would come from instead of just letting go. But after three years of living this unmoored life I’ve gotten more confident.

Which is why I set off to go backpacking in the Republic of Georgia in June, by myself, without husband or child. I’ve loved Georgia from afar for 26 years. I also haven’t traveled anywhere by myself for 22 years, apart from a few smaller North American forays. There was of course some tentativeness to this trip, a trip I have been planning in my head for so many years. Could Georgia live up to my exalted expectations?

The short answer is yes. I won’t go into long detail. This is not a travel blog. A week of small and large revelations, beauty, friendliness, compulsive walking with a cause (over 20 miles a day\). I finally got to use the crummy amounts of Georgian I had still stuck in my head after all those years. I will be back, soon. This was just the beginning.

Later that summer, Scotland and England. Family vacation to a country I once lived in. I went back to Oxford and got my master’s degree [long story]. Stayed in my London apartment [long story].

Summer has been brilliant. And I haven’t tracked much. Only my sleep. And distance. Those I cannot help.

I know that this unmoored life can’t and won’t continue forever. I’ll go back to work. I’ll get fearful. I’ll worry. Some things will fall apart.

But for right now I am immensely grateful for a brilliant, flawless Spring and Summer, beautiful, footloose, serendipitous.

Gurus vs rock stars

One of the unquestioned assumptions behind the various health and fitness philosophies that are being peddled everywhere is the idea that we all want to live to a ripe old age. And even more than that, we want this to be “quality aging”, i.e. with only the smallest amount of physical and mental decline, bright as buttons, still running half-marathons in our eighties.

Whether or not this is a worthy goal is a question I’ll leave for another day, but the obsessive focus on life extension gave me an idea. Why not get a little competitive with this? Let’s pair a team of health gurus with a team of people who’ve had perhaps a slightly less healthy life but a whole lot more fun, like rock stars. Obviously we’d have to wait a few more decades to see how this entirely unscientific experiment plays out.

But in the meantime, let’s do some retrospective pairing:

Health and fitness gurus

Jack LaLanne (exercise and diet guru) died at 96

Roy Walford (Caloric Restriction guru) died at 79

Barry Groves (low carb guru) died at 77

Robert Atkins (low carb guru) died at 72

George Ohsawa (macrobiotic guru) died at 72

Jerome Irving Rodale (organics and Prevention guru) died at 72

Adelle Davis (supplement and health food guru) diet at 70

Nathan Pritikin (low fat guru) died at 69

James Fixx (fitness guru) died at 52

Rock stars

“Fats” Domino (not really a rock star, but you know what I mean) – 86, still living

Chuck Berry – 87, still living

Little Richard – 81, still living

Willie Nelson, 80, still living

Leonard Cohen, 79 – still living

Bill Wyman, 77 – still living

Jerry Lee Lewis, 77 – still living

Keith Richards – 70, still living

Mick Jagger – 70, still living

Patti Smith – 68, still living

Iggy Pop – 66, still living

Lou Reed  – died at 71

Would you take lifestyle advice from this man?

Or this man?

I know it’s not a fair comparison. But still, let’s ask ourselves the question: should we eat only coconut oil for breakfast every day and spend precious minutes obsessing over whether that bit of canola oil on our toasted seaweed will throw off our omega 3 balance, or should we stay up late, get a little drunk, sing out of tune, say things we shouldn’t say, wear pants that are too tight and lipstick that’s a little too bright?

David Johansen/Buster Pointdexter, ex New York Dolls, still chipper at 64

The ultimate tracking tool

I was talking to my friend Scott the other day. He is what you could call a gadget athlete, very into the idea of tracking, and a master of the latest device, but not actually doing much exercise beyond walking to and from the train. But his latest purchase left me genuinely awestruck.

There, right next to his Nike FuelBand, was the Tikker – a tracker whose sole purpose is to count down to your death. It counts down the years, months, days, hours and seconds that you have left.

Its point is to be a constant reminder that time isn’t fungible, but a good that’s becoming scarcer every day. It reminded me a bit of Darren Almond’s clock installation – the quietly urgent tick tock that can be heard behind all the din.

It is of course mostly a gimmick. Actuarial tables can’t predict when you die nor will a watch. And I am hoping you are already doing some seizing of the day. And really, isn’t almost everything a waste of time, evanescent, gone without a trace? Isn’t that the bitter-sweetness of the human condition?

But it is a brilliant rebuff to so many trackers already out there (and having checked into CES, we ain’t seen nothing yet). It says, to me, that whatever you happen to track, it’s all futile in the end, we’re all just counting down to when our number is up.

 

Kicking tracking, no picnic

Time for a bit of a personal update. I set out to so confidently last September to get rid of all the numbers, spreadsheets and devices. I mean, how hard could it be to just … be normal?

Not so easy, it turns out. For a while, everything went well. I walked because I wanted to walk and didn’t worry about hitting x steps or y miles. I ate what I merely guessed were reasonable amounts of food. I no longer did complicated regression analysis on my numbers. I stopped reading most health and fitness blogs and feeds and forums – they mostly all just say the same things anyway. I also mostly didn’t step on the scale, just using my clothes to gauge my weight.

This did free up a considerable amount of time and mental real estate. I read more history books (norse, Mesoamerica) and went to see more concerts (early music, experimental/noise) and just generally got more curious about life again.

I started using a teeny little service that asks me once a day to write a short list of all that was good on that day, creating a log of my small and large adventures. It takes less than a minute and there’s no quantification or further analysis.

So far so good, at least until January. I was working a really big freelance gig, for a very large company, helping to create a new program that’s hugely important for them. Crazy hours, lots of redeye flights, living out an admittedly pretty awesome cafeteria (uni, anyone?). Projecting confidence and nonchalance. Transmitting energy and optimism.

No, I didn’t gain weight. But I just had to start tracking and counting steps again. I know it’s crazy and makes no sense. Just that feeling that my life could go out of control made me reach for the comfort of my numbers.

And now the project is over and done, and I’m still tracking. Because after every big project comes a bout of existential angst – will I ever get another gig? Will I be able to feed my family? Why are we here? What should I do with my life?

I love my freelance life, but it is a rollercoaster, and this stupid, pathetic tracking habit seems to be the price I’m paying.

In my defense I will say that I’m spending much less time on it and don’t obsess over the numbers as much. Plus, I’m still doing more adventuring and aimless wandering. And I’ve booked myself for a trip to Georgia, by myself, in June. Which means I’ve dusted off my Georgian phrase books and grammar and been plotting routes. Maybe that’s the next time I’ll un-track? Wish me luck.

Artist: Roman Opalka

On wanting

There’s a question I’ve been wrestling with for the last few months and I can’t for the heck of me figure out the answer. I could use some help, or at least some strong opinions.

I’ve stopped wanting things.

I don’t know whether that’s a good thing – some kind of enlightenment, or a bad thing – a state of mild depression.

I used to want things so badly. Wanting’s been the fuel that powered my engine. It’s done amazing things for me.

When I was a miserable, scared teenager in some god-forsaken village who dropped out of high school I ached for a very different life. I ached to lo live in London or New York City, to have friends, to have a cool apartment – I wanted it so badly. When I was lonely and poor, I wanted to not be lonely and poor anymore.  I wanted to find another human being to whom I could open up to. I wanted to be able to talk to people without feeling deeply scared or ashamed. I wanted to go to a great university. I wanted to study art and have my work in galleries. I wanted to quit working for other people and be in charge of my own life. Work whenever I want for whoever I want. Take time off, and do things I love.

Want, want, want.

Much of it seemed impossible at the time, but I wanted it all so freakin’ badly, I made it happen, every single last bit of it.

And now, I’ve stopped wanting things. And I’m not sure if I like it.

I got a great life. A lovely husband, and a strange marvel of a kid. I try and make the world around me a little better – I volunteer for a couple of causes, and also help out in other informal ways. I’m ridiculously grateful for the big things and the little things. Music, art, nature, walking, talking, food.

And yet.

That existential ache for something you don’t have is such good kryptonite. It makes you jump out of bed in the morning. It gives you energy. It forces you to do things you’re scared of. It gives direction. It makes emotions more extreme.

I miss it.

I don’t know what happened.

Is not wanting anything anymore good (some kind of nirvana)? Or is it bad (some kind of anhedonia)?

How should a human be?

I’ve managed to arrange my life so that I work really hard for a couple of months and then take a month off. Having just finished a big assignment I didn’t have much of a plan of how to spend my time off. It’s not the best time of the year to be free and at loose ends. It’s still winter in New York, apart from a few crocuses here or there, and walking’s a bit bleak. Instead I’ve had a sudden and urgent need to feast on classical concerts, history books and museums. They’re an infusion of beauty but also inspire me to think and explore.

I’ve always been fascinated by how other cultures and other ages are dealing with the questions we’re all dealing with every day. How to be a good person. How to be healthy. What physical and mental ideal to aspire to.

I used to subscribe to dozens of health and fitness blogs and websites to a point where it became a deranged echo chamber. I’ve pretty much stopped all that stuff cold turkey last September because I was losing sight of the bigger picture.

One the continuous themes off which so many of these blogs feed is the idea that The Media/Marketers/The Diet and Fitness Industry/FitSpo Memes/Society/The Man is creating an unrealistic health and beauty and diet ideal to which we are forced to conform. This is such a prevailing theme that marketing itself has begun to recycle it. And it’s a theme I grew a bit tired of. As a one-time observation it seems fine, as a prism for looking at life it seems just not very useful or substantive.

Having wandered the halls of the Met Museum and the Brooklyn Museum and poring over various books, I’m once again reminded that this supposed media-fed frenzy isn’t such a new thing. Check out these Fitspiration images:

Mosaics from the Villa Roman del Casale, 4th Century AD

Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1530

 

These images represent some pretty entrenched beauty norms. And not only did they have fairly normative ideas on beauty, Greeks and Romans, for example, spent a lot of time thinking about the right way to eat. The dominant debate was whether to eat simply, with an eye on health, or whether to abandon oneself to the delicious creations of the culinary arts. This was part of the larger tension between austerity and decadence.

“Refined cuisine could be moralized as a sign of either civilized progress or decadent decline. The early Imperial historian Tacitus contrasted the indulgent luxuries of the Roman table in his day with the simplicity of the Germanic diet of fresh wild meat, foraged fruit, and cheese, unadulterated by imported seasonings and elaborate sauces.”

“Produce—cereals, legumes, vegetables, and fruit—[were] considered a more civilized form of food than meat.”

“Some philosophers and Christians resisted the demands of the body and the pleasures of food, and adopted fasting as an ideal. As an urban lifestyle came to be associated with decadence, the Church formally discouraged gluttony, and hunting and pastoralism were seen as simple but virtuous ways of life.”

Plus ça change. Insert discussions around veganism, farm-to-table artisanal food, intermittent fasting, and so on.

It seems to me that narrow beauty norms, and moralizing and agonizing over what foods to eat are perhaps not as old as mankind but they’re considerably older than our mass media, social media, blogs, Photoshop or fashion mags. The idea of a golden age when people didn’t worry about their appearance or didn’t obsess over their food might be more fantasy than reality. These things have likely always been socially, morally or religiously charged.

But the ancients have also bequeathed us a set of coping tools. We can get angry about cultural norms, prescriptive diets and and “lifestyles”, climb into the trenches and lob grenades in that never-ending battle.

Or we could spend our energy elsewhere. Stoic thinking is a brilliant way of not worrying so much about what other people think, and not obsess over what are ultimately trivial.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
– Marcus Aurelius

In other words, get better at not caring.

“Display those virtues which are wholly in your own power—integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity. Do you not see how many virtues you can already display without any excuse of lack of talent or aptitude?”

And focus your energy on the virtues you would like to cultivate.

 

 

 

Extreme navel gazing

Just as I was one of the first people to have my genetic information parsed (I joined 23andme in 2007), I simply had to jump on the microbiome bandwagon. Gut microbiome to be specific; call it navel gazing at a slightly deeper level.

And even more than with genetic information the science has yet to catch up with the general excitement. Everyone knows that the gut microbiome is super mega interesting and important. But nobody really knows much about what the specific bacteria do and how they interact with each other, impact your health and well being, and so on.

So they become these perfect Rorschach blots. Everyone sees what they want to see, especially people with a cause, mission or hope.

Anyway, at the end of 2012 I signed up for uBiome‘s Indiegogo campaign, and 16 months later finally got the results. Needless to say, it all took much longer than promised, but it’s early days, and everyone’s learning.

So, what’s the state of my gut microbiome?

Here’s a smattering of the results:

I’ve got a lower than average proportion of  Bacteroidales, bacteria who don’t digest fat well. In other words, it means I get more calories out of the fat I eat than the average North American. Which might well be true, since I seem to need fewer calories than other people. Perhaps my microbiome has adapted to me being borderline underweight all my life.

I’ve got way more Lachnospiraceae than most people. These guys help to digest fiber. I eat a ton of vegetables, so they would be useful.

I’ve got way lower than average levels of Faecalibacteria, who are common gut microbes that break down resistant starches such as legumes and unprocessed whole grains. Even more extreme, I’ve got zero Butyrivibrio in my microbiome. Butyrivibrio digest wheat bran, and play a major role in breaking down simple and complex sugars. Because I rarely eat grains and really no legumes at all, that isn’t perhaps surprising.

Confoundingly, I have lower than average levels of Lactobacillales and Lactobacillaceae, which are the bacteria in ferments, including dairy. I eat from several different strains of yogurt and kefir every week so these should in theory be high. However, there is some debate of whether these guys actually survive in the gut once you eat them, and I’ll be following to see where the science ends up.

Anyways, like I said, the science isn’t there yet. And I’ve got a feeling the answer will be complex, which will annoy all the extremists. That most bacteria types are neither “goodies” or “baddies” in the absolute. We’ll find out that humans are able to thrive with a broad spectrum of diets, and that the biome fluctuates and adapts to all kinds of seasons, foods and geographies. And they’ll find that ultimately all diets that contain a wide range and a large amount of vegetables will be beneficial for your microbiome.

Jeff Leach of The American Gut has recently embarked on a series of self-experiments in which he’ll plot the shift of his microbiome under a wide range of dietary/environmental conditions. While this sounds a little stunty, it might just generate a few interesting hypotheses. And The Human Food Project‘s research into the biome of the Hadza people seems like a worthwhile project.

Finally, I’d argue that the time for having your microbiome analyzed has not yet come. You will not learn enough for the results to be useful, and in any case they’ll support whatever your beliefs are. Like a horoscope, you’ll single out your own truths.

(C) Micah Lidberg

 

 

From the swamp to the ocean

I spent Thanksgiving with the in-laws and associated family who live deep in the hinterlands of Florida, just a mile from the hard edge between suburbia and wilderness. Staying there makes me sad, I’ll make no bones about it. Nobody moves very much at all, and all the food comes from bags and boxes, and the there are veritable dunes of sweet junk accumulated in various places around the house, which the kids consume at all hours of the day. Not just on Thanksgiving. All the time. Much of day-to-day conversation is taken up by what’s on sale where. Perhaps understandable because they are so barely hanging on economically, having painted themselves into small corner via revolving credit, car leases and no retirement savings. So much fear, barely kept at bay with Xanax and Wellbutrin, and a reluctance to accept it or address it. I try not to judge. Self control comes easy to me, generosity is a bit harder. I try to see my in-laws as heroic but tragic figures within a larger game they haven’t quite figured out how to control. I wish I could figure out how to connect. They think I’m odd and a bit nuts. I probably am, in my own way.

But that’s why I get so restless there. After just a day I’m yearning for escape. In my self-tracking days I used to just wander for miles and miles through the de-peopled “communities”, along the strip malls, trying to make up my daily distances, six miles, seven miles or even eight miles, trying to control what can’t be controlled.

Now that I only walk for pleasure I decided for something more ambitious and perhaps symbolic; to walk from the swamp to the ocean, which happens to be 14 miles. The purpose of the walk was not only to shake off the mental confinement of being trapped between kitchen and couch, but to look at the Sunshine State from a pedestrian perspective rather than from a minivan or SUV, and perhaps impress upon those nieces that the world doesn’t end at the bottom of their cup-de-sac, that there is a way out.

Here are some of the pictures from that epic walk, which took me just over three hours:

     I 

I know the images are pointedly melancholic and not at all how most people experience South Florida, but that’s how it feels to me. I only saw a handful of pedestrians on my walk. Like, a few people standing on the sidewalk with boards announcing bargains. Some unexpected shared humanity there.

Needless to say everyone thought I was crazy, even crazier to take the bus back, but on that bus, humming with conversations, I felt I was somewhere, a real place.

Survivorship bias: when we focus only on success

Great post on survivorship bias from the always spot-on Ethical Nag

The church of Crossfit

Yes, dear reader, I do Crossfit.

I know, I know. I don’t do Crossfit because I bought the gospel. I think the whole thing is a bit dubious. The faux-patriotic thing. The not-focusing-on-one thing approach to training. That annoying obsession with stupidly named workouts. And so on.

I never heard of it until a couple of years ago, but when I had done the paleo thing for a few months I realized there is a Crossfit gym (sorry, I won’t call it ‘box’) two blocks from my apartment.

I used to half-heartedly lift weights in my thirties, in a regular gym and at home, but I didn’t really have a clue and I didn’t get very far.

I thought getting more serious about exercise, beyond walking, running and cycling might be a good idea. So I joined.

I sucked pretty bad at the beginning and then I got slightly better. And now, almost two years later, I haven’t really improved much. My personal records have mostly stood unchanged for a year or so. Given that I’ve done Crossfit three or four times a week, all out, for 21 months that looks like epic failure. Failure on my part? Failure on my coaches’ part? Failure on Crossfit’s part?

Weirdly, I actually look pretty muscular now; more muscular than some of the much stronger women at the gym. Maybe because I’m relatively skinny, so it shows more. But my (now discarded) scale said my body fat percentage didn’t really change.

I used to get really depressed after workouts (I refuse to call them WODs), wandering home ready to burst into tears, when I’d attempted some heavier weight and failed miserably. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I was angry with myself for not getting better. I’m sure my coaches were a bit frustrated too – they’d given me a lot of extra attention, and if it wasn’t working, it either meant I wasn’t trying hard enough or their coaching wasn’t good enough.

I used to search for “crossfit failure to gain strength” or “crossfit women plateau” on some of the bigger Crossfit message boards and never find much, which made me feel worse. Was I really the only person out there for whom Crossfit wasn’t working?

Now, it could well be that this is really a case of technique, and chances are that if I adopted a more rigorous program focused on strength like Starting Strength I might actually improve. Get over those half-assed, random combinations at my gym. And yet, most everyone else there seemed to always get better, just not me.

But then again, I’ve always been really lousy at almost every sport from a very early age, even though I spent my childhood outside, running, cycling, digging, rollerskating, scootering, building and whatnot. Which made me think there had to be a genetic component. And it does turn out that some people are exercise non-responders.

As the New York Times reported “Hidden away in the results of almost any study of exercise programs is the fact that some people do not respond at all, while others respond at an unusually high rate.”

Which makes me think that I might be one of those people for whom exercise does not lead to many measurable changes.

But why do I seem to be the only one so afflicted among the many people at my gym?

Well, the penny dropped about half a year ago: survivorship bias. The people for whom Crossfit does not lead to measurable improvements tend to drop out and choose some other kind of exercise. New people start all the time, but only a few become regulars. In other words, I am the only idiot who doesn’t get measurable improvements and keeps going regardless.

That changed my thinking completely. I still go, I still don’t make any “progress”, my coaches still give me the ‘sad’ face whenever I fail at my attempts to get to new personal records. But I absolutely, totally do not care. I am not interested in any serious strength programs – I get obsessive about stuff, and the last thing I need is yet another thing to get obsessive about. Crossfit is a decent workout, it’s fun, the people are nice, the gym is two minutes away. I give it my best, and then wander home and do something else. It’s not part of my identity. I don’t do the weird lingo. It’s just exercise.

That’s enough.

Kill your darlings

Not the movie.

An invitation to never stop questioning all the beliefs you hold dearly. Chances are, at least half of them will turn out to be wrong. If your identity becomes too wrapped up with them, you’ll either end up demoralized or deeply wrong. I come from a long line of people who built their lives on grand explanations of everything, and then spent years sorting through the wreckage.

Life is messy and whatever truths there are don’t take the form of bumper stickers, memes or Pinterest platitudes.

This post is really a tribute to one of the bloggers I’ve been following for 11 years. Most people will take a few wrong turns in that long of a time, and if you slavishly follow them they’ll take you down with them. Krista‘s been a critical thinker, a skeptic, a learner, a hater of dogma, a rejector of certainty and just a general badass.

Here is an edited list of some of her thoughts on turning 40. The full list is here.

• Being addicted to “a solution” is just as fucked up as being addicted to a substance. This is characterized by rigid all-or-nothing thinking (“If I eat one cookie, I’ve failed”); shame and guilt (“I hope nobody finds out I’m a bad ___ and a fraud”); cult-like devotion and fanaticism; self-righteousness and intolerance (“Diet X is good, and if you don’t believe that, you’re an idiot”); along with reductionism and over-simplification (“Everyone should do Workout Y”; “Food Z is the answer”). If you find yourself obsessively seeking, information-gathering, surfing blogs and websites, arguing your point of view on the interwebs, analyzing or ruminating over your “issues”, and generally in continual “self-helping mode”… your problem-solving behavior is part of the problem.

• “Training” and “working out” are good. “Movement” and “living actively” are better. If you focus too much on a single sport, or on a structured “plan”, then it’s easy to get overtrained and bitter, out of balance, and/or bent out of shape when stuff doesn’t go your way. Waah, I missed a scheduled PR on a bench press!! Waah, my foot hurts and now I can’t go on your scheduled run! Waah, doing the same exercise the same way for 6 months has given me tendonitis! Who gives a shit!? Fuck the plan and the percentages. You have a million other things you can do if your mantra is “live actively”. Plus then you don’t sit on your ass feeling smug for 23 hours of the day because, well, you “worked out” today. Magical things happen at a biochemical and spiritual level when you move your body. Mix it up, get out there into the big ol’ world, and just fucking move as much as possible.

• Talking about your workouts, your body fat, your weight, and/or your food intake is very, very boring. Put the fucking iPhone away and have an actual unmediated experience with a meal. Nobody gives a shit if you’ve gained 3 lbs, what your Fran time is, whether you knocked a few minutes off your 5K, or whether you’re currently off grains. Mention it only if it’s crucial — like, if you have a peanut you’ll die, or explaining to your physiotherapist how you busted up your knee — and shut the fuck up about it otherwise. I apologize to all my friends for 2007-2010, during which I was deep in crazy exercise-compulsive/food-obsessive town and considered my diet/body fat/general neuroses an acceptable conversation topic for about 3 years straight. (See “good listening skills”, above.)

• The only way to “get over” your body issues is to live as if you are already over them… which means not ruminating over them, or posting apologetic approval-seeking selfies with the caption “I know it’s not perfect, but I’m OK with that.” Go have fierce and fantastic sex with the lights on. Go have an adventure. Go sit and listen to your wondrous immune or circulatory system humming and marvel at its orchestrated splendour. Go do anything other than navel gazing. Please. You are already perfectly fine and a testament to Nature’s brilliance.

• Also, the world does not need more articles by bourgeois educated white women whining about they’ve “come to terms with” their thighs. Jesus Christ people, there are bigger fucking problems in the world. Pull your head out of your privileged arse, toss your skinny jeans, and go help someone who actually has problems. Part of your social privilege blinders is thinking that everyone needs your public display of self-loathing narcissism. (And yeah, I can take this just as much as I dish it out. As Part of The Problem and the One Percent, I vow to never produce such an article. Every time I even think of writing that article, I will go and volunteer at a soup kitchen.)

• Get over yourself. Nobody cares about your dreams. Except maybe 1 to 3 people. Love those people hard and try to see yourself through their eyes, instead of the tunnel vision of a harsh, impervious mass culture that has nothing to do with reality. As my esteemed colleague Craig Weller once told me, “The minute I start worrying about whether my eggs are cooked just right, I’ll put myself back on a plane to Somalia.”

Think before you track – the uncertain future of the Quantified Self

I used to be a self-described adherent of the Quantified Self movement. Like many movements it does not have a strict definition nor formal membership requirements, so everybody brings their own definitions, goals and needs to it. It’s pretty obvious, given the name of my blog, that I’m moving into a different direction, but that’s not to say that I think Quantified Self is fundamentally misconceived. I do however think there are costs and risks to certain Quantified Self approaches that are not immediately apparent, and as more people start tracking behaviors, buy trackers, and buy into the general hype the more those risks will become apparent.

Like I said, there isn’t one definition of Quantified Self. Instead, there a different strands to the movement, serving different purposes, and pull the movement into different directions.

Quantified Self as short-term experiments

These are tracking projects to help answer specific questions, usually over the course of a few weeks. For example, “will this supplement make me more alert?”, “does coffee cause my headaches?”, “will sleeping in a colder room help me sleep longer?”. Ideally, these experiments are simple, testing one variable at a time, with a duration that’s long enough to let you see patterns, but no longer than they need to be. This kind of self-quantification can yield actionable results but does not commit the experimenter to a lifetime of tracking drudgery. This is an enlightening, low-risk activity, as far as I can see.

Quantified Self for goal-directed healthy habit reinforcement

Typical examples of this approach are setting a weight and/or health goal and using tracking to keep yourself honest. Followers will, for example, track their intake (calories) and their output (exercise, steps), and will usually set smaller daily goals in pursuit of the bigger goal. Other measures that often get tracked alongside include body fat, macros, blood sugar and so on. This kind of tracking has been around for a very long time, and popular diet programs like Weight Watchers are built on it. While this tends to work well for many people the challenge is to keep going when you’ve reached your goal. You can treat it as short-term intervention and cease tracking when you achieve whatever you wanted to achieve. The fact is that the vast majority of people find it hard to stay at goal. For example, well over 90% of people who have lost weight on a diet gradually backslide and end up where they started or heavier.  The alternative is to keep tracking to keep yourself at goal, potentially for the rest of your life. The cost of perpetual tracking is  high – in terms of time consumed (tracking calories in particular is a pain), non-intuitive relationship with food, obsessive exercising after overeating and so on. It can be a life-long commitment. Few people are fully aware what they’re taking on when they embark on a project like this.

Quantified Self as long-range observation in search of correlation

These kinds of one-person “studies” are often gadget-driven, and basically involve generating a multitude of data sets over a relatively long period of time with the idea of discovering interesting patterns and unexpected correlations. The promise is that if you track ten different variables from sleep, to mood, to exercise, to food, to emails, to keystroke quantity, finance, to weight, to day parts, to energy levels, to you-name-it, that the data will give up interesting, surprising insights about you, that will allow you to tweak your behavior, fix problems and optimize your life. In terms of commitment these kinds of projects ask a lot – a lot of time and dedication. While gadgets can log some of the data for you, there is still a lot of data that you have to put in yourself, such as mood, sleep quality, food intake and so on. A certain amount of obsessiveness certainly helps.

There are many people now how have embarked on these kinds of open-ended projects. The continuing proliferation of gadgets will only fuel this particular kind of quest. And yet, of all the different ways of quantifying the self, these are by far the most problematic. In the vast majority of cases they yield only trivial insights: that sleep quality impacts mental acuity, that exercise can boost mood. In other words, they generate the kinds of insights you could have pretty much figured out by observing yourself for a couple of days without the use of any kind of complex gadgetry.

The quest for insight ‘gold’ continues and there are now more apps and services that promise that they’ll sift your data output and find that elusive non-trivial insight, yet the results so far have been less than impressive.

That’s because there’s a fundamental flaw in the thinking. One of the basic principles behind scientific inquiry is that it needs to always be driven by hypothesis. Science is propelled forward by testable theories, around which experiments get designed, which will either confirm a theory or refute it. Science does not happen by watching streams of data unspool, with the hope that an interesting finding will emerge by itself.

And yet it is the two less interesting and less productive streams within Quantified Self that seem to be on the ascendance. This is no doubt driven by gadget manufacturers and tracking app creators who have the most to gain by a population of obsessive, only vaguely purposeful self-trackers. Quantified Self would be well advised to be careful about its new best friends. They might inject excitement and noise in the short term, but dilute the experimental spirit of the movement in the long term.

What really counts?

I am, for reasons too obscure and irrelevant to explain right now, an expert in kitty litter. Having spent a lot of time having to think about it made me appreciate its profound role in people’s lives. Humans have adopted cats in order to fulfill a profound need, to love and to take care of others. This love and care is manifested in many ways, including cat food. All this love and care and affection conveyed by cat food finally ends up and gets absorbed by kitty litter. A $7bn industry that gets absorbed by a $2bn industry. While love, and care and affection are profound, what gets left in the litterbox isn’t. Humans create a lot of data “exhaust”, but not at all of it is interesting and meaningful, and analyzing the aftereffects does not tell you much about the complex human causes.

What I would to love to leave you with is the following:

Think hard before you track.

Obsessive tracking cost me a lot of time, made me obsessive, less adventurous and more harsh on myself, undermined my intuitive relationship with eating, walking and exercise. The “insights” it yielded were trivial and few in number.

If you are going to track, focus on testing interesting hypotheses using simple experiments lasting a relatively short time.

If you must track calories and steps do it for a short time, until you’ve got a good basic idea, and then switch to using your intuition. It’s one of your most precious tools. Don’t mess it up.

As for the Quantified Self movement, it’s been oversold as the cure to all of society’s ills. It is anything but. It doesn’t have much to say about the messes and moral complexities of human emotions and interactions of our everyday lives. Tracking is hard and time-consuming, and the majority of people don’t have the time or discipline to do it. And just because you give someone a tracker doesn’t mean they’ll change their behaviors in the long term. Because that’s hard. Most people will end up tracking for only months, perhaps a few years, which is as it should be.

If you can’t live without self-tracking and quantifying yourself ask yourself where in your life you fear losing control, and face those fears.

Why be healthy?

Up until recently if you’d asked me why I was spending so much time, so much physical and mental energy on exercise and nutrition, I would have said “It’s a long-term experiment. It’s based on the theory that if you live a healthy lifestyle, you’ll live to a ripe old age. I want to live a long life, and I want it to be a good life up until the very end.”

Sound reasonable?

It’s certainly an alluring theory that’s much trotted out, but it bears examining. The tacit underlying assumption is that we’re all responsible for our own health and sickness. Which means that if we do get sick, and don’t live to a ripe old age, or if our old age is marred by sickness or disability and not “good” it is perhaps our fault. That’s healthism.

Which is a rather insidious notion, because it can turn us into corrosively righteous snobs who silently blame the victim. “They should have taken better care of themselves” is what we think secretly to ourselves when we hear someone has been diagnosed with a serious illness. Is that really fair?

If I take a look at my family I see

… my father who is almost 80 and is overweight and on crutches because he’s got a terrible back after a life of hard physical work and a couple of botched surgeries. Which means he can no longer walk very much.

… my mother who is 70, in a nursing home and overweight, because she can no longer walk at all after a traumatic brain injury after slipping on ice, after a lifetime of healthy eating and lots of exercise.

… my aunt who can barely walk and is recovering from surgery after a non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis.

… my grandfather who died young from cancer after long years work-related exposure to DDT

… my grandmother who lived to be 90 but suffered from dementia for the last 15 years of her life.

I see a family of people who for one reason or another didn’t achieve that “healthy old age” “good aging” ideal for a number of reasons that have nothing to with healthy lifestyles.

And there is a perfectly good possibility that I won’t either, for reasons entirely out of my control. The idea that somehow I can “earn” my way to a good old age is wishful thinking. Yes, if I abuse my health in some kind of dramatic fashion, my chances get slimmer. But the idea of achieving “hyper health” – of somehow earning my way up the ladder by obsessively optimizing exercise and nutrition is probably foolish.

The other side of the coin is that I am not obsessively attached to life. I am not one of those people (yet?) who feel they must absolutely live a very long life. I am not possessed by a consuming vocation that has me raging against death. For me, death is part of life, not a violation or a brutal enemy (once again, that could change – who knows?).

What I need more than anything is to make more of the life I have right now – to have a “good life” now. To live more voraciously, more consciously, more adventurously, more daringly. I’m often too complacent, too numb, too timid.

I reserve the right to occasionally drink more than one drink, to bum a cigarette of someone and to have a dark and deep conversation. I reserve the right to stay up til 3am once in while so I can dance my ass off, even if I feel crappy the next day after doing any or all of these things. I reserve the right to spend a whole afternoon in bed and read a book instead of doing exercise. I reserve the right to eat jerk chicken or bhel puri from a street vendor now and then, even if they’re not hormone free and have been cooked in vegetable oil. I reserve the right to go on road trips where I spend a good part of the day just sitting in a car looking out of the window. None of this is healthy, but to live a life without these things isn’t worth it to me.

I don’t need more years, just more life.

Jessica Mitford, queen of the badasses, who died at 78 but lived an amazing life

The untracked life, worth living?

I jest, of course. I officially quit my manic tracking & over-exercising ways 25 days ago, and this is a little summary about the experience so far.

The first few days after ditching my Fitbit, retiring the scale  and stopping with the calorie counting were hard – antsy, guilty and rudderless days. Not having my Fitbit on me made me feel amputated. I kept feeling for it, then realizing its absence with a pang.

I know this will sound absolutely ridiculous to someone not so afflicted, but if you’ve been devotedly keeping tabs on every movement, every bite of food for two years you somehow feel that without those controls you’ll start eating crazy amounts, gain tons of weight, lose all self-control, turn into an inert blob or something even worse.

And obviously just because I wasn’t using mechanical devices that didn’t stop my head from keeping tabs. Tabs on distance walked, calories burned, food eaten. Just not quite to the same level of detail.

Things did get better after a week or two. I’m working out of an office at the moment which also helps. Less time to “over-walk”, less time to think about this crazily trivial, yet somehow mind-consuming nonsense.

And I did lapse here or there, I confess. Not with the Fitbit; that’s still stowed away, though I still miss it. I weighed myself a couple of times and I tracked calories a couple of days, when my paranoia about putting on weight got the better of me. I also couldn’t quite stay away from the health, exercise and nutrition blogs. They’re such catnip to me.

Please don’t judge me. This stuff sounds crazy. I swear I am a sane, intelligent person. I have a master’s degree, a responsible job and a family. Nobody knows about this.

The learning so far is, you can take the trackers off your body, you can delete the spreadsheets and hide the scale. But changing your habits of your mind so that it will no longer keep tabs is a painful, long-term and perhaps futile project.

I will say though that it is getting better, if slowly. I spend a lot less time thinking or reading about the whole subject. It’s footprint in my mind has gotten smaller. And I walk enough, but not as much of it is just to rack up mileage. So I’ve got more time for other things. Next questions: what grand, adventurous, productive thing to focus on now?

A grand unified theory of everything

My mother’s family has never been normal. And they’ve never been satisfied with ordinary explanations.

Extreme beliefs run rife there, in particular beliefs of the ToE variety – Theories of Everything. Grand ideological edifices that explain and prescribe How Humans Should Live. My grandfather and my grandmother, I am sorry to say, were life-long passionate believers in National Socialism, mixed with Nordic religion, and the collapse of the Third Reich, detention and a life on the margins did nothing to cure them of their fervor. If anything, it made them feels like possessors of special knowledge, which the masses were too dumb to understand.

One aunt took those selfsame beliefs and added a dose of Wiccan magic and started her own cult.

An uncle ran a youth organization training the next generation of right-wing activists.

Another uncle sought refuge merely in a particularly austere variant of Protestantism.

And yet another uncle became a committed communist and staunch defender of the Soviet Union, but after the grand collapse switched allegiances to buddhism and the new age.

Many of my cousins were or are members of right wing organizations. One is a fundamentalist Christian. One  of my sisters is a new age practitioner and teacher of highly unorthodox therapies and for a while became a breatharian until reverting to raw veganism. Another sister believes that chelation will take care of most diseases, and is busily prepping for Armageddon.

My mother’s journey has taken her from astrology, to Christianity, to the power of crystals and other new age practices.

I am of course not saying that these Theories of Everything are equivalent – they range from the outright evil to the benign. All I’m saying that my mother’s people are either genetically or through upbringing predisposed to search for Meaning with a capital M.

I’ve always prided myself on my dry pragmatism and my pursuit of scientific knowledge. After all, I didn’t just study philosophy, I also studied psychology, physiology and statistics.

And yet, I know I have that Meaning-seeking urge in me. I’m drawn to ideas and theories that propose grand solutions that promise to make everyone healthier, wiser, happier. There is something elegant and seductive about a good Grand Theory. It begins to answer the question of How to Live – the biggest, unanswerable question of them all.

And I have to keep reminding myself, that Theories of Everything have a terrible record, especially in the hands of politicians and dictators.

And then I remind myself that I am also my father’s daughter. A long line of hardworking, humble, honest people who tried to do the best they could for their families and the people around them. Most didn’t go to school beyond their 14th year and yet they all read widely, were curious about the world, traveled, but never thought they had all the answers.

Those are my people too.

 

A world before the fall

I’m writing this post on the last day of Summer, so this could just musings on the transience of the seasons. And yet, today’s post is a brief history of the 30+ year experiment in “healthy” eating that is my life.

Beneath the nutty quest that took me from every extreme food ‘religion’ to another was the idea that there is a pre-ordained way for people to be. That there is some kind of imaginary Eden in which people lived and ate a certain way that was perfect for all human minds and bodies. That if we could only rediscover or reconstruct this paradise before the fall, we could live in perfect harmony and health.

This idea first crossed my path when I was thirteen, probably from one of my mom’s healthy eating pamphlets.  I promptly decided to become vegetarian. Teenage rebellion and a rejection of my father’s hunting ways surely had a part to play as well. So for the next four years I followed a vegetarian diet, which was in those days highly unusual and rarely catered to. I didn’t know much about nutrition, so I just ate a lot of bread, cheese and spaghetti with tomato sauce. I was a pasty, un-athletic punk living a nocturnal life, but had the innate health of a lanky teenager, so I was basically OK.

When I was 17 I came across a book extolling the virtues of living on raw foods only, and this is when I got serious about the idea of discovering the “perfect” human diet and increasing up the nutritional content of what I was eating. Raw foods seemed to make sense – after all, that’s how animals eat; cooking seemed like a wrong turn that mankind had taken by mistake. I switched to a diet of huge salads, lots of fruit, raw milk and soaked and sprouted grains. This worked quite well until I moved to London in the depth of winter, surviving in a youth hostel with not a lot of money. I lived off fresh and dried fruit and yogurt until my teeth started collapsing in on themselves. I still have gaps in my molars from those brutal days.

I didn’t put two and two together then, blaming it on poor dental hygiene. I added more foods such as gigantic amounts of vegetables, olive oil and sprouted grains. I ate and ate and ate, and still felt hungry all the time, even though I was so bloated that I couldn’t sleep. I was freezing continuously, and pale and tired, but it was Thatcher’s England after all; I was poor, and worked long hours in fast food joints, so I didn’t think to blame my diet.

I spent a few months in Southern India, living off Indian Vegetarian food, got a stomach bug and came back with a BMI of 16. I  worked in cafeterias and had crazy binges late at night. I blamed myself for my lack of self-control, not realizing that my body was fighting for survival. I added back “bad” cooked foods, mostly bread because digesting huge amounts of vegetables was painful. For years after I basically lived off bread, boiled vegetables and a bit of fruit and yogurt. That I didn’t get sick is a miracle. I worked during the day, went to classes and studied at night and weekends, often falling asleep in my bed with my books. I had so little energy.

During college, without a kitchen I tried my hand at veganism, subsisting mostly on whole wheat bread, fruits and vegetables, with a bit of peanut butter thrown in. What saved me then was an insatiable, and totally explicable desire for smoked mackerel. I beat myself up over slipping from my almost-vegan ways. My body was craving fat, protein, omega 3s. Again, I was often tired, and also quite timid and very scared in general of my much more confident, well-educated and affluent fellow students. I spent much time in hiding, studying, walking, rather than fully engaging in student life in Oxford. This is still look back on as perhaps the greatest waste of my life. Food was only a part of it but it didn’t help. I don’t live life with regret, but if I could rewind any part of my life, this would be it.

Over the next few years I added a bit more variety, like beans, hummus and tuna. But I didn’t escape from this dietary limbo until my thirties, when I met my husband who is an excellent cook. It forced me to straighten out my bizarre and highly deficient diet. But right up until then I still thought I my diet was exemplary and supremely healthy, and pretty close to perfect.

Things got better since then, apart from a dalliance with low carb eating which left me weak, tired and emotionally flat.

Then, in a final tussle with dietary dogma I started eating a paleo diet two years ago. Once again, a diet that promised to deliver mankind from original sin, by literally encouraging to eat as we would in some imaginary Eden.

I still do believe that the basic tenets behind paleo eating are sound if you mean unprocessed food, fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, dairy, starches. But to appropriate and brand this kind of eating – which encompasses a very broad range of foods and ways of preparing them – seems silly to me in retrospect.

I’m finally waking up the idea that the idea of chasing some kind of ideal is ridiculous, given the broad diversity of healthy and thriving populations across the globe. That civilization isn’t just some malignant intrusion on primal perfection and that pleasure has always been a fundamental need, and isn’t an enemy of living “right”.

Also, please don’t think I’m criticizing vegetarianism, veganism or raw food eating. I’m sure there’s ways of making them work, but I couldn’t. They just made me dogmatic, obsessive and forever guilty about not sticking to them 100%.

Oh, hindsight …

But our lives are our lives, with all their wrong turns, seeming dead-ends, discoveries, revelations, obsessions and reversals. I’ve learned a lot on this crazy journey, and thank god I came out just fine.

Source: creationmuseum.org

What are you afraid of?

I wandered through big cities by myself day and night, going to concerts and the movies when I was in my mid-teens.

When I was a teenager I quit high school one morning, got myself a factory job, and went home and told my parents.

I went on a television quiz show when I was 17 to make enough money to run away.

Instead of going to work, I took the train to another country, without telling my family beforehand

A country whose language I didn’t speak very well and where I knew no-one.

After working many menial jobs I applied to a famous university and got accepted after finishing high school in evening classes.

I moved to New York City where I knew no-one.

I studied art in my thirties even though I didn’t have a background in art.

I’ve photographed almost a hundred strangers whom I found on the internet.

I regularly present to large audiences, CEOs and senior business leaders.

I quit my job a few years ago and started a freelance career even though I am the main breadwinner in my family.

I’m no daredevil. But I have no fear of big decisions and big changes.

So why the hell am I so deadly afraid of putting on even just a couple of pounds?

Crazy, irrational, self-destructive, bizarre, ridiculous fear.

What are you afraid of?

The rent is too damn high

That’s actually the name of a political party here in New York; yet another reason that makes me love this city, though I must admit I’ve never actually voted for it.

Reason I’m writing this, is I’ve been musing on a concept brought to me my a lovely Facebook commenter, who stated

“I found myself “healtifying” myself into a frothy quandary, although it did not feel obsessive or harmful to me in the middle of it. I looked at me being diligent, caring for myself, protecting my health, just being inquisitive. I would not have told you I paid much mental rent on all this stuff, it seemed I paid more mental rent without it.”

That’s exactly how I felt about my many health-related behaviors until recently. I knew I was devoting a fair bit of time and brain space on tracking, on analyzing the data, on reading health blogs and newsletters, on exercise, and just generally thinking about all things health-related. I used to think of it as this slightly nutty hobby, perhaps a bit over the top but mostly a good thing, since anything to do with health is good, no?

And then I did the ultimate Quantified Self meta-analysis. I analyzed how much time I’d spend on an average day on all that stuff I just listed:

– Logging, tracking, downloading and analyzing step, sleep, weight, energy expenditure, calorie, money, mood and activity data:  20 minutes

– Following a gazillion health related blogs, sites, Twitter and Facebook feeds: 20 minutes

– Exercise including walking beyond what I would have normally walked: 90 minutes or more

– Just generally thinking/obsessing about my health, what I’m eating, what I weigh, tracking: 20 minutes

Even if some of this is taking place consecutively, we’re talking over two hours a day.

That’s the rent I’ve been paying on this crazy obsession.

Well, there is an opportunity cost to spending over two hours a day on thinking and doing health-related stuff – namely, all the other activities I could have done or thought about instead. Two hours a day is 1.5 months a year, assuming a 16 hour day. Now, I’m not saying all this time was wasted – doing exercise is generally a good thing, and occasionally thinking about your health is probably wise. But even a month spent learning a new skill, with my family, studying, reading or who knows what else would have yielded greater dividends.

This is an art installation by Darren Almond, an English artist and photographer, that I saw well over a decade ago, but it stayed with me.

It’s a giant clock the size of a shipping container. Every second a number flips down, just like with a much smaller alarm clock. While it looks rather mundane in pictures, it is as an installation quite haunting. The numbers turning over create the relentless noisy drum beat of time passing by, of a countdown to some unknown end, an urgency to hang on to time that’s evaporating in front of you.

You only live one life, so be careful who you are paying rent to.

The art of walking

“Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

I’ve been a walker all my life.

When I was little, I walked from necessity. I spent my childhood outdoors, and to get from home to anywhere you had to walk.

When I got a little older I woke up to the liberating power of walking.

I walked hundreds of miles on the streets of Berlin when it was still fenced in, still somewhat pockmarked from the war, wistful and forlorn. I walked the ruins, I walked the East, I walked the West. I saw it transform over the years, but every time I walk I still discover places I have never seen. I walked there from loneliness, I walked from curiosity, I walked from boredom.

I walked all over London, freshly arrived as a teenage runaway, I kept moving, to grasp the city, to understand England, to understand a culture that was entirely foreign to me and quite hostile. I walked many evenings and nights when I had nothing else to do, when I just wanted to be among people. I walked the East End, I walked the canals, the river, the old industrial areas, the docks, the cemeteries, the Metro-land suburbs.

And I fell in love with New York by walking endless hours until my feet were swollen and blistered, because I couldn’t possibly stop  – the streets were so exciting, so busy, the people so beautiful and odd. I walked the Bronx, the outer reaches of Queens, every neighborhood in Brooklyn from Maspeth to Gravesend, and every block in Manhattan.

Many of my literary heroes used walking for epiphanies, for transformation, for understanding.

Louis Aragon, who wrote so well about the chance discoveries, the peculiar magic and mystery of Paris, creating a larger framework for experiencing the world.

WG Sebald whose books are from the perspective of the solitary walker, the solitary traveler.

I thought nothing of walking 10, 15 miles at a time, and I would have walked longer if my feet wouldn’t give out.

But the point is, I walked because I wanted to.

When I first got a pedometer I was intrigued to learn how much I actually walk. But when I started to set goals everything changed. I began walking for mileage. Five miles every day, six miles every day, eight miles every day. I walked circles in the neighborhood, circles in the park, circles in the cemetery because I had to hit my goal. I’d pace up and down the apartment just hit a round number.

I no longer walked for pleasure, for curiosity, for loneliness. I walked just to walk.

“And once had, the data mind is hard to shake” writes Craig Mod in his essay Paris and the Data Mind, where he describes the abject disappointment of climbing the Eiffel Tower and then realizing that he forgot his Fitbit, making the trek not count.

“Part of me wanted to cab it back to the hotel. Cab it back and clip on the Fitbit and do the walk again. All of it. Mirrored and remapped. Climb the Eiffel steps once more. Ground it. Make it real in the ether.”

I’m trying to rediscover my old way of walking – open to what’s around me, ready to be transformed, open to detours and adventure, unconcerned with mileage.

The basic rules are:

To never walk just for exercise

To walk into the uncharted

To walk with my eyes wide open

To lose myself

“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away … to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” ― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The right to take up space

Just over a decade ago I got bored with my nice cosy life and my nice cosy job – this seems to happen every few years – and decided to do a Master’s Degree in photography. Studying photography is a license to explore places and talk to people you wouldn’t normally have the guts to approach. In my case it gave me the courage to explore the gay subculture of bears, who are, per Wikipedia, “large, hairy men who project an image of rugged masculinity.” An experience for which I, a straight skinny woman, am grateful for.

Why bears? I wasn’t able to articulate it at the time, but I knew something was broken with my obsessive quest to stay lean, angular, wiry and lanky. The idea that there were people out there who somehow had permission to be big/bulky/chunky/meaty/fleshy and  not only didn’t feel guilty about it but celebrated it felt utopian. Who didn’t want to be invisible. Who didn’t give a damn about what other people thought. Who felt they had the right to take up ample amounts of space.

The next couple of years I lived off the generosity of a wide variety of men all loosely affiliated with the bear tribe. I’d turn up at their doors with my camera and my lights and we’d collaborate on pictures – a leap of faith on both ends.

I loved the outlaw defiance of the bears I met, that they loved food, loved their bodies as a source of pleasure, not of guilt or shame.  Their willingness to be vulnerable opened me up to being more vulnerable. I wasn’t just a reporter documenting a scene, I was a human being looking at another human being and vice versa.

I learned that the nonchalant confidence with which they enjoyed their bodies was often hard-won. Mainstream gay culture was (and is) very prescriptive about beauty norms, and bears broke every rule, often landing them in a position of being double outcasts. Being a straight woman helped; I knew about norms.

I wish I could say that this project changed how I felt about my own body. It did give me more confidence to stand my ground and to look other people straight in the eye. It changed and expanded my definition of beauty. But actually change my own size? Take up real space? I don’t know what it will take to do that.

 

Adding more adventure to life

The reason I started writing this blog is that I felt I had painted myself into a corner – I was focusing so carefully on health, and healthy food, and exercise, and sleep, and tracking every step and every morsel, that I had inadvertently engineered out surprise, craziness and adventure. Life was wholesome, virtuous and entirely dull.

What does a life look like that’s lived so cautiously? Well, I actually have a friendship in my life that has taught me a lot about balancing restraint and abandon. 

I first met my friend – I’ll call her Mrs S – almost two years ago. Since going freelance I’ve been doing some volunteer work with a charity that looks after survivors of Nazi persecution. This charity pairs up elderly survivors who don’t have large social support networks with people like me. To hang out, to talk, to run errands, to really just spend time together on a regular basis. We hit it off right away and we’ve been fast friends ever since. 

Just for background, Mrs S’s life has been one of tremendous turmoil. She was one of many kids in a poor family. Her father died young. She often didn’t have enough to eat. As a teenager she was abducted to a Siberian labor camp. Her mother and sisters were murdered by the Nazis. She survived the labor camp, despite the incredible cold, the hunger and the rampant diseases. She then ended up in several different countries until she made it to New York. She worked into her late eighties, losing a husband and a son. She never had a day of vacation in her life. She’s never been to Manhattan to see the sights. Even though her window overlooks an amusement park she’s never been on a single ride.

When she lost her job three years ago, Mrs S found other ways of imposing structure on her life. Every minute of every day is scheduled: when to clean, when to do laundry, when to exercise, when to go the pharmacy, when to make a little lunch of fish and potatoes (she eats a diet paleo followers would recognize) when to sit on the terrace, when to watch TV and when to go to sleep. Her only treat is a visit to the beauty parlor once a month to get her hair and nails done. She also attends a monthly lunch and dance arranged by the charity.

Others would look at her life and find it incredibly constrained and boring. But I can fully see why she has decided to adhere to these very rigid structures – she’s lived through history’s most brutal convulsions, has experienced more dramatic changes any of us would ever experience. She has changed country five times, had to learn six languages, has lost everyone she has ever loved. She has figured out that if she keeps her head down and sticks to a plan life becomes manageable and endurable. That change is usually risky and dangerous. 

My life is safe and easy in comparison. Whatever change and risk I’ve faced pales into insignificance in comparison to hers. But we’re using similar strategies to manage our daily lives – irrational strategies that supposedly protect us from life spiraling out of control. And in a way, we’ve both ended up in a similar quandary. How do we add a little bit of unexpected, irrational joy?

We’ve been feeling our way forward. One small ritual we’ve added is that we’ll occasionally have coffee and pastries at a little Turkish coffee shop, and people-watch, and gossip, and feel a little bit glamorous. Sticky middle eastern pastries are a total no-no for me, and an expensive treat for her, but we’ll do it anyway.

The best discovery we’ve made is that we both love dancing. And on the weekends a DJ sets up on the boardwalk. So instead of just strolling along the ocean like we usually do, we’ll do serious, intense, expressive, badass dancing to whatever ear-splitting deep house the DJ is spinning, until we’re too exhausted to continue. And sometimes we’re the only people dancing. And we don’t care at all.

It’s not a big thing, but it’s beautiful.

The urge to track and its dark roots

I’m on day 5 of not tracking and I’m finding it really hard.  I feel both demotivated and agitated, unmoored and vaguely guilty. Of course I am tracking in my head – how many calories does this have? How many miles does that add up to? It’s the worst of both worlds. The mental preoccupation persists while the clean, reliable records have disappeared. I am very tempted to give in, but I have great perseverance and willpower in everything that I do, so this is no exception.

The bigger question, that I have asked myself – and that anyone who self-tracks should ask themselves – where does this need to track come from? Yes, there are of course objective reasons, healthy lifestyle, concrete goals, small steps. But frankly, that’s mostly hogwash in my instance. My lifestyle would be plenty healthy without tracking.

Here are some candidate reasons:

I’ve tried to remember the times in my life when I was most obsessed by the need to track, and there’s definitely a pattern to this. Early puberty. Just after I ran away. After I quit my regular job and went freelance. Well, basically any time my life took a risky, uncertain turn, where matters outside my control could have created havoc in my life. And in retrospect it’s easy to figure out: I track to give myself a sense of control, impose some kind of imaginary order on my life. Tracking gives me the sense that I’m piloting a plane and all the instruments and indicators are telling me it’s a smooth flight. That no matter what life throws at me, I can handle it, as long as the metrics stay within range. It’s a method of self-soothing, it’s a safety blanket.

It also means that I’ve tied my mental health to walking, calories and money, which is crazy and I know it. I’ve never been able to accept the idea of weighing more than 126 pounds or so. For me, it would mean being out of control, and projecting a sense of out-of-controlness to the outside world, like people would look at me think that I didn’t have my shit together. Thin-ness and being in control of my life are one and the same to me. I know that this must sound utterly ridiculous to 99.9% of the world. Especially since 126 lbs is still only a BMI of 19, barely not underweight. I once tried to put on a little bit of weight, based on a lot of reading of a couple of health blogs and worries about actually damaging my health by being so light. And I did it for a total of three days ’til I broke down, and in those three days I totally cancelled out the effects by walking like a maniac.

The other reason is sort of related but a bit more generational. My mother was a bit of a tracker too. She had her neat books in which she wrote down all her expenditures. She comes from a family that experienced a number of major collapses in their life. Lost their homes, status, belonging, countries, money and ideological frameworks in the great depression and the second world war, which must have left them with a strong urge to hang on and protect what little they had left, to fear change and to embrace control – a belief that if you count everything you have, it won’t get taken from you.

Finally, perhaps because I have few other rituals and relatively little structure in my life (freelancing, again), doing my regular tracking and analysis in the morning and evening gives me a bit of a grid and a framework for the day, almost like a little prayer.

So, in order to alleviate my anxiety and restlessness I need to find replacement activities, new rituals, other ways of satisfying the needs that tracking satisfied. Finding those activities and rituals will be a big part of why I am doing this blog. It should be an interesting journey.

Make what count? The arrogance of Nike’s Fuelband campaign

I’ve never had much time for Nike’s advertising – maybe because I’m not the in market for a new religion. Too many of the ads are earnest,  black and white, talk about sacrifice, blood, sweat and tears, about transforming yourself into a quasi super-natural being. We’re asked to worship at the altar of what are frankly often not very smart athletes who have benefitted from outsize genetic gifts, or worse, lab-made. I just want to say, lighten up, it’s only friggin’ sport. But that’s just me.

Anyway, Nike has been telling us since 2012 to Make It Count with their Fuelband. OK … now what is “It”.? Life is a Sport. Ah, I get it – what they’re really saying is Make Life Count. Let me parse the campaign idea then. Nike is all about sport, and it knows how to measure and celebrate sporting achievement. But all the rest of life is a sport too, which means Nike can therefore now annex any human activity under their broad umbrella. That’s quite a ballsy land grab.

Three issues:

Why exactly do I need to count running, walking, dancing and whatnot, which is Nike’s definition of “life”? Why won’t it count if I don’t count it? If I dance my ass off at an Ukrainian cultural event on Brighton Beach, will it only count if I use a Fuelband? Would all that be irretrievably pointless – literally – if I don’t count? I know that counting can act as an encouragement, but to suggest that life is not lived until it’s counted is, um, a little arrogant.

In their three-card-monte trick of a campaign idea Nike boldly states that ‘life is a sport’.  Really? Sport is competitive, often corrupt, focused on winning, sometimes done at the expense of health, single-minded, chews people up and spits them out, often unintellectual and often unfair. I guess life can be all of those things too, on a bad day. But life doesn’t have to be a sport all the time, in fact is usually better when it’s not a sport. Nike, I get that you see life through the lens of sport because you’re in the business of selling gear, but please don’t force that vision on all of us. When I go on long walks with my 89 year old friend, that’s not a sport. When I meander through the Lower East Side looking at art that’s not a sport. When I canoe through the apocalyptic beauty of the Gowanus Canal I am not participating in any sport. Don’t try and hijack those things under the umbrella of sport. Those things count, but not in ways you will ever figure out a way to measure.

Finally, much of what makes humans humans involves no movement at all. Reading, writing, talking, dreaming burn up no calories and don’t show up on the display. It’s part of life but not a sport.

I know we live in age of big data, where numbers will ultimately explain everything and all of us, but for right now I revel in everything that remains elusive, inexplicable, mysterious and intangible.

Food as religion?

When I first decided to give the paleo diet a try I asked on a popular message board what changes to expect. I explained that I was already eating a pretty healthy diet and that this was merely an experimental tweak.

Here are some of the things that people suggested would happen: that my skin would feel wonderful, that I would feel more energetic, that I would sleep better, that my body would be less inflamed, that I would have better digestion, no bloating, strong nails, less body odor, no toenail fungus, better mood, more focus, no headaches, faster recovery time, better teeth, less tartar, not getting sick, better healing, less greasy hair. Just short of the ability to walk on water, this was a pretty promising list.

Now, I’d say most the above actually turned out to be true; however it had already been true before I started on my two-year paleo experiment.

I once took part in a 30 day paleo challenge  (of the Whole30 variety) at my gym, where I followed the most restrictive form of paleo to the letter (no alcohol, no dairy) and it really didn’t make a difference.

There were also times when I ate a bunch of grain-y foods and ice cream and whatnot, like on vacation. And that really didn’t make a difference either. I didn’t suddenly turn into an inflamed, sweaty, bloated, fungal mess. There might, of course, be an impact much further down the road if I always ate like that , but that’s much harder to measure.

I would argue that there’s little difference in effect between eating a diet that follows a paleo or “primal” template and just eating a diet that’s got lots of fish, meat, vegetables, fruit and fermented dairy in it. The fine detail of whether quinoa or not, quantity and type of nuts, whether coconut oil or olive oil, rice or not, beans or not probably doesn’t matter, unless you have a specific issue or sensitivity.

The thing that depressed me most about the whole episode is how easy it is for any particular brand of healthy eating to become part of your self-definition, just like Crossfit, or even some kind of secular religion – something that gives meaning and purpose to your life, rather than being fuel, which you spend about 2% of your day consuming. It’s not that food isn’t important but other things are important too: friendship, pleasure, creativity, adventure, surprise, exploration, helping others, making mistakes, music, art, books – insert whatever you care about.

And while I absolutely believe that switching to a paleo diet will do lots of great things for people who come from a crappy diet, I think the specific benefits have been vastly oversold. And fueled borderline eating disorders in people like me.

Eat some meat and vegetables and then go on and do something interesting and useful with your life.

Self-tracking experiments

Clearly, the various tracking tools and devices out there (whether it’s a handwritten list or something like a FitBit) function to reinforce certain behaviors. You set goals, like walking a certain number of steps or getting a minimum amount of sleep. But the promise of the quantified self idea is that tracking devices can also be used to generate data sets that will reveal unexpected correlations, pointing to causation, and creating new insights about your health and wellbeing. Which allows you to tweak and fiddle and optimize.

This was an alluring idea. I’ve tracked for a long time but never really used the data for anything but self-discipline. So I tried to figure out how to use it to optimize myself. However, the problem from the outset was that there wasn’t a ton wrong with me. I was almost a bit envious of the people who had big issues to fix, serious health conditions or some kind of metabolic derangement.

Potential tweakable issues:

I’ve never really had a ton of energy. Enough to get me through the day (and walk eight miles and work and go to Crossfit and hang out with my family and friends), but I’m not one of those people who wake up and bounce around with boundless energy.

I’ll occasionally have days when I wake up with a headache and feel a wee bit nauseous, and generally depleted. Usually when I haven’t had a good night’s sleep or have had as little as one glass of wine or beer the night before.

Even though I’ve been doing Crossfit for a year and a half my strength has plateaued early on and have barely made any gains in the last year. Visually, however I’ve changed a lot, for the first time in my life, and somewhat to my surprise, I have visible abs and arm muscles. Body fat is anyone’s guess since my scale has such a broad range.

According to 23andme and Promethease I have two genetic conditions: issues with Gs224 (double CAT), and the MTHFR gene mutation complex. People with either condition often experience a multitude of symptoms from the mild to the debilitating. In my case, none of the symptoms seemed to correspond, apart from potentially some dopamine issues (relative flat response to stimuli other people find rewarding, like food, winning, praise etc).

Results

After 18 months of looking at data and trying to identify causes I’ve come to the following conclusions:

Energy: increased by good quantity and quality of sleep. Other factors such as what I eat, how much I eat, macro ratios or exercise make no difference. A second coffee can help. Supplements like rhodiola rose didn’t make any difference. Melatonin sometimes helps a bit with sleep but gives me wacky dreams and can make me sad the next day. Magnesium didn’t do anything.

Headaches: appear to be caused by not enough quantity or quality of sleep, especially if two or more days in a row. Also, drinking a glass of wine on an empty stomach the night before can cause them (um, lightweight hangover).

Strength: I am guessing it’s partially a Crossfit problem – too many diverse exercises so that no skill or lift is trained consistently. If I really focused on just a few lifts I might see progress. I also think that I am in that part of the bell curve that doesn’t respond well to training and exercise for genetic reasons. Also, my technique has never been great; aggravated by poor spatial coordination (I’m a klutz).  I’ve experimented with pre and post-workout nutrition, glucose and carbs, and this has not made a difference. I’ve considered creatine in my insaner moments, but then reminded myself that for me strength is not a goal in itself. If I really wanted to make significant strength gains I would be to take private lessons and focus on just a few lifts. But I am perfectly happy with just getting a good workout in the company of good people and spend what’s left of my energy on other things.

Gene stuff: I’ve tried lots of supplements, from the MTHFR protocol (fancy B12 and methylfolate/Metafolin), potassium and zinc, to mood-boosters like tyrosine, 5-HTP and tryptophan. Nope. Nothing. Made not a blind bit of difference.

So, in summary, what did I learn? Good sleep prevents feeling lousy in the morning and boosts energy. Not much of a revelation, is it? It’s the kind of thing my grandma would have told me if she was still alive.

I guess I’ll leave the experiments to the people who really have issues to resolve. But even there, it might not always work out. I was very taken by a recent post by the always astute Michael Allen Smith who gave up on zeroing in on the exact causes of his headaches:

“On September 1, 2013, I ended the hunt. I’ve given up for now. It is time to take a long break from this experiment. I have enough data to know MANY things that aren’t causing the headaches. Besides obvious headache triggers such as gluten and alcohol, which I avoid completely, I know that caffeine plays a prominent role in my headaches. Collecting more data isn’t going to change that.”

That’s where I am right now. Collecting more data isn’t going to change anything for me right now, and might actually get in the way of doing something more useful.

 

What the heck is wrong with me?

Now, if you’ve read this far you might still be a bit puzzled about what exactly brought on this urge to de-quantify. To the casual observer I look like the epitome of someone leading a healthy lifestyle. I’m doing all the stuff that the surgeon general tells you to do. I exercise a lot, I eat a healthy diet, I am not overweight. And yet:

Sanctimoniousness: I’m kinda ashamed about this, but this obsession with my health, food an exercise made me a mean person. I started judging people by their appearance and their oh-so-unhealthy behaviors. I got cranky with my vegan girlfriend, I sneered at people’s lunch choices, I’d turn down someone’s homemade cookies with a scowl, I started lecturing my kid on nutrition. It took me a while to figure out that not everyone has such an easy time of sticking to some ridiculous plan, that people have other priorities, have other things going on in their lives, and that perhaps pleasure might just as fundamental human need as the right O3:O6 balance.

One-dimensionality: I used to make art, I used to love music, I used to read far and wide, I used to stay up late, I used to drink, I used to be fun. And then I stopped drinking (because it killed my workouts the next morning), I went to sleep at 10pm, I spent more and more time reading nutrition blogs. Maybe I’ll live a few years longer if I’m doing all this super-healthy stuff, but if I’m going to be a boring person, with no adventure, and discovery, and craziness and debauchery in my life, maybe those extra years won’t be so interesting. Not saying, life fast, die young, but balance the virtue with some vice.

Borderline eating disorder: When I first started tracking in earnest I was at a BMI of 18.7 Once I had a good grip on manipulating calories and exercise I started to eat just a touch below my daily caloric need, just to lose a bit of weight and fit into skinnier pants. A deficit of 50 calories doesn’t sound like a lot, but over the course of a year I’d lost seven pounds and had a BMI of 17.5. And that’s in the gray zone; not quite anorexia, but definitely not healthy either; irregular periods, cold all the time, less energy. But I wasn’t starving myself, just eating a teeny little bit less than what my body needs. Because I had a total grip on my numbers I could micro-calibrate all this.

Borderline over-exercising: You know you’ve got a problem when you’ve got a painful heel spur and yet you just must go on an eight mile walk – because it’s nice out, because your fidgety, because you need fresh air, because you’d feel just too guilty if you didn’t. Or you’re going to Crossfit again even though you’re still sore and you really haven’t fully recovered from the last time.  Now, there might be a touch of genetics in here. Most of my family are dedicated, enthusiastic walkers. My father hunts and he used to think nothing of hiking for many miles to get to just the right place to stake out deer. However, a lifetime of physical work and a couple of botched operations have left him with a bad back and constant pain, and he’s now mostly on crutches. One of my sisters has hiked for weeks at a time while fasting – she was then prone to breatharianims  (extreme, us? why, of course not).  My mother is perhaps the best, or saddest, example of this extreme compulsion to walk. She’d go on long walks every day, in the vineyards, the forest, to pick berries. She swore by fresh air and sunlight, no matter what. One sunny, brilliantly cold January morning in 2010 the radio announced dangerously icy conditions and warned people to stay indoors or stick to salted roads and sidewalks. My mom ignored those warnings, put on her favorite comfortable walking shoes and made for the hills. Which is where she slipped, fell backward with her head hitting the road, was found unconscious, was in a coma for six weeks with serious traumatic brain injury, and yet, defying all the odds, made a full mental recovery. Her physical recovery is still only partial; she can only walk a few hundred feet and only with a walker because the part of the brain coordinating motor skills was heavily damaged.

Now, I’ll say that this almost bizarrely gruesome example isn’t meant to a be a warning against walking. Walking’s great, humans were built for it, it’s in our bones. My mom’s example is really just a reminder that obsessive walking in adverse circumstances is foolish, and that if you’re going to go out in slippery conditions, have the good sense to wear shoes with grippy soles.

It’s also a reminder that even if we engineer a supremely healthy life, maximize food and exercise for longevity, do everything right we can still end up with a life we haven’t anticipated.  We live in a random universe of unexpected gifts and unexpected accidents. But marvelously, we also receive the mental strength to deal with the unexpected and find happiness in a life that we didn’t want and hadn’t planned for.

I’m writing all this and it makes such perfect sense …. if only I could truly believe it and live by it. But that’s why I’m writing, so that one day I will.

What I’m quitting

As of tomorrow, I will no longer track a whole bunch of things. It will be weird, because I’ve been tracking some of them for years, and the bookkeeper in me is  slightly upset about terminating those logs, entering a dark numberless age, using nothing but intuition. And yet, there are mostly no good reasons for tracking all the stuff I track – let’s take a look:

Steps/miles – this started so innocently; a challenge to myself to walk 10,000 steps a day, be a little healthier, get off my butt. It came at a time when I was working late at the office a lot, in the winter, and when I had mostly given up running. But I’ve always been an obsessive walker – six miles to the office every single day, even at 41 weeks pregnant, in the middle of summer, anyone? So I should have known that this would get obsessive. In the beginning I stuck to the 10,000 step goal, then it crept up to six miles a day, then to seven. The last few months I’ve been walking for more than eight miles a day on average, some weeks even nine. And it’s not the only exercise I do. And all that walking takes a lot of time, time that could get allocated to other interesting things. It wouldn’t be so bad if these were walks of discovery, but it often ends up just re-walking the same old routes, just to hit the numbers. Where’s the joy in that? My walking heroes WG Sebald and Will Self would not approve. Besides, I don’t even really have to count. I kinda know how many miles I walk in a day. I live in New York City. One city block = 0.05 miles. That’s why this measurement definitely has to go.

Weight/body fat/calories – up until recently I’ve been pretty much the same weight since the age of 14, give or take a few pounds, pregnancy excepted (and even there, I was back at my normal weight within ten days). When my clothes feel a little tighter, that’s when I know I might have put on a pound or two. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out. And body fat is a joke. My scale will show anything between 16% and 26%, depending on what time of day I measure. All I know is that I do a ton of exercise and that I’m slightly underweight. Body fat is not a useful measure for me right now, especially with a scale as capricious as mine.

Macros/micros – I eat healthy, always have. I know there’s a ton of discussion on the fine details of what makes the ultra-mega-super-perfect healthy diet, but let’s agree that if you don’t eat processed garbage you’re already three quarters of the way there. I eat fish, and good meat, eggs, fruit and tons of vegetables, and I ferment my own dairy (buttermilk/quark, yogurt/labneh and kefir). And then occasionally I’ll have something that’s got sugar or grains in it, if it’s worthwhile stuff. I don’t restrict or go on crazy binges; eating this way comes easy to me and always has. Having tracked the fine details of the food I eat over several years I know I’m good as far as vitamins and minerals are concerned. And tweaking my macros has never made any difference, except when I’ve tried to eat lower carb, as an experiment, and it made me feel weak and tired.  And tracking food intake is fiddly and of all the tracking by far the most time-consuming. No more of that; life’s too short.

Mood – I tried to track that with an online tracker for a while but it’s so basic that now I just use a spreadsheet. And guess what – my mood is pretty much the same every day, alas. Genetics and a fairly stable life mean I’m usually pretty decent mood. There’s maybe a couple of days of mild despair in any one year and one or two days of feeling just grand. The rest is average. I sometimes wish for a bit more ebb and flow, but then I talk to someone in a crappy mood and decide maybe I’m better off the way I am.

More later on the few things I will continue to keep an eye on.

 

Leaping into the void

 

Two more days ’til I stop with all that crazy, compulsive yet mostly pointless counting and tracking. The other thing that’ll have to go is the giant health, fitness and nutrition echo chamber that I’ve built for myself.  The echo chamber that feeds my obsession. So this evening I weeded through my feeds and my social media and unfollowed tons of people, unsubscribed from feeds and deleted bookmarks. And realized how much of the time-sucking rabbit holes I fall into when I could be doing something else comes from that corner. It will be mighty quiet, unless and until I figure out what other nutty interest I’ll devote myself to. Or, radical thought, I could just spend less time on the computer. It will be interesting to see. Because I reckon, all the tracking and health related reading I do ate up between half an hour to an hour every day. That’s several weeks of my life, every year. Yikes.

I know I’ll miss it, at least in the beginning. There are many people in that crazy sphere who wrote well and thought deeply – sorry Go Kaleo, Melissa McEwen, Sean Flanagan, Dr Andro, Anthony Colpo, or Chris Kresser, it’s not you, it’s me.  I know that there are many interesting scientific discoveries happening. And I do think I’ll check into Science Daily once in a while. It’s just the endless debating and slamming and repeating and rehashing that get so pointless. There is more to life than discussing food, exercise and body image.

I only have one life, and I’ve finally decided, that’s not how I am going to spend it.

 

In the daylight for everyone to see

Anyone who knows me knows of my obsession with the village of my birth. I’ve talked about it here and here. I’ve been photographing and researching it for at least a decade. A couple of months ago a friend invited me to take part in an art exhibition at a New York City university, with a loose theme around apparitions in the landscape. My central thesis is that the 20th Century is buried just outside the perimeter of that little village, and there are traces everywhere, for those who care to look.

So I said yes, reluctantly.

First of all, I don’t really like my own pictures. Never have, even though I’ve had a bunch of shows. In fact I can barely even look at them.

Secondly, I didn’t just want to show pictures without context. I wanted there to be enough fragmentary evidence for people to begin to do their own excavations. Even publish a little book to accompany the show. Which means, doing a lot more research, fast.

Which is what I have been doing over the last few weeks. Which has become obsessive and painful.

I’ve managed to pull together more information from the village archives, from a distance. I’ve also found, for the first time, people who passionately care about what happened 70 years ago. I’ve been handed the information on the forced laborers who are buried beneath the 665 numbered grave markers. Names, birth and death dates, names of parents, villages of birth.

And that information just breaks my heart. It’s teenagers and young men and women from the Ukraine and Russia. And many of the young people from Ukraine were likely orphans, survivors of the Holomodor – that terrible genocide by famine. They were double victims of the vortex of evil created by Stalin and Hitler. So young. Dying of tuberculosis, mostly. At the rate of one or two a day. In that beautiful countryside.

I asked the question to my informant how the mayor of the town must have felt signing one or two death certificates a day, for boys and girls, for babies, for young men and women. When normally he’d sign one or two a month, for old people.

She surprised me with her answer. She noticed he would always note not only the day but the hour and minute of their death on their death certificates. There was no pattern to the numbers, so they were likely real, not made up. It could have been a Nazi bureaucrat doing his diligent best to do his paperwork. Or it could have been a human being, doing one small thing to honor the humanity of another being, recording the exact time of their death as if it really mattered.

Maybug, fly

I have previously remarked on the lack of melodic complexity of German children’s song. But sometimes those simple-minded melodies create ironies that are powerful in their brutality. A short and popular children’s song – a nursery rhyme really – has the following lyrics “Maybug, fly. Father’s in the war. Mother’s in Pomerania. Pomerania burned down. Maybug, fly.” One brutal reality, written for the voices of little children.

I came across “Meine 960 Tage im Reichsgau Wartheland” (My 960 days in the Reichsgau of Wielkopolska) by Erik Thomson in 2002, when I was doing some research into my grandfather’s past. In it, my grandfather is mentioned once, briefly, towards the end. He’s referred to as the “HWH, the Kreisleiter of Wielun, tall as a tree”. I became fascinated by the book, a humble, self-published affair. After a long preamble it becomes a diligent documentation of running a (presumably confiscated) farm in occupied Poland from 1944 to 1945. It goes over, in loving detail, the different crops he experimented with and how they fared. From potatoes to rape seed, sunflowers, flax to serradella to kok-sagis, a dandelion producing a latex-like substance. He also documents his successes in raising pigs and horses.

‘Wartheland’ – a national socialist administrative region that included today’s Wielskopolska and the Łódź area – is where millions of Poles were forced to leave toward the East, where large ghettos such as Łódź existed up to 1944, and large extermination camps such as Chelmno. Millions of people were starved, worked to death and murdered not very far from the rural idyll of the Gallwiese estate that Thomson farmed with such devotion and care.

Erik Thomson may well not have known all that much. His obsessive focus on tracking the success and yield of his farming experiments were far more important to him than the war and destruction raging around him. There is comfort in focusing on your own life. On metrics and numbers you can control. I do so understand the draw of that narrow field of vision, on the quantifiable, on just putting one foot ahead of the other. And yet, by so obsessively measuring and optimizing the numbers relating  to our own lives we are in danger of being blind to everything else? This is a question I ask myself, with some guilt.

Gaumarjos saqartvelos

Back in 1988 when I lived in Berlin for a few months before going to college, alone, cold, and cleaning out duplicate names from a large database, my aunt-in-law invited me to accompany her to a concert. She was then a card-carrying member of the SEW, the West Berlin branch on East Germany’s state party.

This meant that she’d been to numerous trips to the Soviet Union and its satellites, and therefore interested in the cultures behind the Iron Curtain.

I was utterly transfixed by the music I heard in that concert, of an unearthly masculine beauty, by a group called Ensemble Kolkheti, from Georgia. A place seemingly very far away, entirely foreign and unknowable.

I proceeded to buy their LP and played it many, many times.

Which meant that I spent a lot of time looking at the cover, and the more I looked, the more beautiful Georgian writing looked to me.

Which, a few years later, led me to decide to learn the language. The fact that it was so different from Indo-Germanic languages and relatively useless in early 1990s Britain made it all the more alluring.

But who would teach me? Even though the Soviet Union was in the process of dissolving, no large Georgian diaspora existed.

I posted a note at a Russian bookstore in Great Russell Street, and waited.

Eventually, I did get a response. My teacher was Vasily, a man in his forties, born of a Russian father and a Georgian mother. He was the night security guard of a beautiful modernist building, an icon of its time. His job was to sit in the silent empty building from dusk to dawn, staring at the security cameras. Teaching me Georgian in the evening was a welcome distraction and he did it for free. We’d also wander through the empty building admiring its glassy expanses.

I learned how to write those beautiful letters, to master the plosives and non-plosives, to read Georgian poetry, and to begin to understand its history and unique way of looking at the world.

But I left the country and I never persevered. Now it’s just another atrophied, melancholy skill.

The mystery of far-away countries has decreased. Georgia seems reachable and understandable. I miss the times when there were places utterly out of reach.

The birth of empathy

After having run away I spent ten months working at a McDonald’s on Finchley Road, London. And then went off to India for a few months, avoiding my first full London winter. This was just after the Bhopal disaster and Indira Ghandi’s assassination and travel visas had just become available again, and India was in a strange mood.

Global travel wasn’t as widespread at the time, but the hippies had beaten a trail through the country and back then in 1984 they were still in evidence. We stayed in cheap hotels and ate one thali a day, which meant that my life savings of 250 pounds or so lasted for many months.

I lost a lot of weight, from that frugality but also the local protozoa, ending up at a fragile 106 lbs draped over my 5’9″ frame. I was so skinny it hurt to sit down. At night I would be tormented by vivid dreams of my family and the home I had run away from. It was my first Christmas abroad and I guess I was still getting used to being all on my own in a large and indifferent world. I sent my family one postcard, which must have scared them just a little. Not only knowing that I had run away, but that I was in India, with all its perceived dangers – drugs, Bhagwan, disease.

From Bombay to Goa by ferry, along the coast, to Mysore, Trivandrum, Cochin, Ooty, Kanyakumari, Pondicherry, Tiruchirapallii, Madras, Bangalore and back to Bombay(the old names were still used back then).

I never took any pictures, being too poor to own a camera. Recently I have been going through other people’s pictures from the same places and times, to evoke more memories than I managed to retain. India, before it got run over by global corporations, smelling of diesel, wafts of music from everywhere, the sound of human voices.

I wasn’t bothered by the desperate poverty all around me, the begging children, the cripples, the desperate mothers, the people sleeping on the streets, the seemingly endless slums. When I was 18 I was almost incapable of empathy. I did not really know how to put myself into someone else’s place and to feel their despair or pain. I had never really learned in my many years of reading books. Feelings were something I had only read about.

I went on to study psychology and philosophy, and to choose a career which is built on grasping how others feel. This is surely not accidental. I was genuinely curious, from an outsider’s perspective about how emotions were built.

In college a friend had lost both parents in fairly short succession in the most miserable circumstances. He spent hours sitting with me, talking about it. He said “with you I worry less about sharing all this, because I know you can carry this and not break” and that was very true.

I did fall in love and marry, but it was only when I had a child that my capacity for empathy suddenly broke through, to a point where it became almost painful. I can no longer listen to babies cry, watch sad movies, read books about the Holocaust. It all just destroys me.

I’ve recently discovered a genetic peculiarity:

My genetic profiles states: “You have a SNP in the oxytocin receptor (rs53576) which may make you less empathetic than most people. When under stress you may have more difficulty recognizing the emotional state of others which impacts loneliness, parenting, and socializing skills… people with the (G;G) genotype were better able to discern the emotional state of others than those who carried the A-allele (which is what I have).”

Not the whole story, but interesting.

Further excavations

As I have written before, the village of my birth is a place of layers upon layers. Everyone has been here from the Celts to the Alemanni, to the Romans to the Nazis to the Americans. On a recent visit my father told me that the mystical square mile – his hunting grounds (he’s a hunter), where American Nike missiles used to be buried deep in the ground, where a small labor/sick camp once stood, where planes used to take off heavy with bombs during the Second World War – is about to become an industrial zone.

Porsche already has a large storage facility there and other buildings and distribution centers have gradually colonized the area. But the latest wave of development will obliterate, or at least cover up most of the remaining evidence. He also reminded me of old stories about the village, when had was a military airport, that planes would get stored in the woods for protection. American or British planes would bomb those woods and there is still so much shrapnel in the old oak trees that no-one will fell them. The metal in there would ruin any saw blade, so old oaks grow majestically, undisturbed. It is for those mystical oaks that I first set out, to see what I would find in the dark fairy tale forest of my childhood.

This is what I found. Foundations of buildings, with cellars beneath them. Trees with damage to their bark. Traces and signs.

My town for many years was home to its small American village. Many people harbor happy memories of their time here. But after the Iron Curtain came down many military bases were closed down and dismantled. Few traces remain of the radar towers, the barracks, the compound, or the place where missiles facing Russia were buried deep underground.

Soon, even fewer will be left.

I also tried to find out more about where the camp once stood but did not find out anything further.

Actually, I just found the map that would have pointed me in the right direction

I did however notice a gravestone for the camp’s Jewish unofficial doctor Adolf Levi (who died there, like so many others in 1944), among the gravestones of people who died in the final days of the war.

As I walked back to my father’s house, musing on how inside village limits everything looked as if forgotten by time, a strange apparition entered from left field. A young black man on a unicycle, wearing headphones and a baseball cap. What could it all mean?

What’s wrong with Germany?

That’s the question I often get asked by my relatives and other locals who are puzzled by my peregrinations (left 28 years ago) and nationality changes (two). After all, it’s not a bad country. It has more than its fair share of culture; of great writers, composers, artists, photographers. It’s clean, people are reasonable, landscapes can be amazing, the wine and beer are lovely.

My desire to leave Germany started early; I’d say when I was around eleven or twelve. I still have my very first atlas, an atlas which happened to contain detailed maps of major global cities. I marked up both the New York and London maps with a view to where to settle in the future.  (While I have in fact managed to live in both, I never actually could afford to live on Green Park and on Central Park West, but never mind).

So, why? It wasn’t just a case of getting away from my family – that could have easily been accomplished by moving to Hamburg or Bremen.

I think I never really like the German language in its spoken form. Many of my favorite authors – Sebald, Bernhard, Klemperer – write in German. But spoken German has always sounded harsh and unmelodic to me, with little wit or elegance. A language particularly well suited to giving orders or filling in forms. I’ve never found it easy to express affection or be funny in German. I am sure this is just a deficit on my part. But it’s why I’ve always loved Yiddish, a language I discovered at the age of 13 and that I started studying in earnest last year. It’s soft, generous, witty, tender, wistful and melodic – everything German isn’t.

And while Germany has produced wonderful classical and serious music I’ve always felt that its “people’s music” – it’s children’s songs, radio hits and other mainstream music – was an abomination. What you hear played on TV and radio lacks any kind of subtlety, there are no minor keys, no complexity, no beauty. It also has a complete tin ear. A lot of German popular music in the 1960s and 1970s was sung by supposedly exotic singers with foreign-sounding names about locations far away. I guess it was a way of reconnecting with the world after the thirties and forties. But how could anyone sing along to “Theo wir fahr’n nach Lodz”, “Das Polenmädchen” or “Moskau” and not feel a shudder?

German children’s songs are all the same few notes in the most predictable sequences. It is then not at all surprising that Germany has so miserably failed to produce any popular music of world note. Appreciation of complex melodies and complex emotions are never developed unless a child happens to get exposed to classical music or music from other countries and cultures.

Rock ‘n’roll, punk and new wave music from the UK and America were a revelation to me – they lit a spark in me, opened new worlds and made me determined to leave Germany behind.

Bettina

Another small memorial to a person with an unknown fate.

Bettina was my my best friend when I was in my early teens. Early puberty is not an easy time for most people; in my case it had turned me into a highly combustible package of shyness, insecurity, defiance and yearning.

She picked me; I didn’t pick her. This, by the way, is how all of my friendships with women happen. I tend to find women puzzling and hard to fathom; I have always had an easier time relating to and making friends with men.

I had somehow become trapped in a small, solipsistic universe all of my own, not sure how to reinvent myself from the carefree, bony bookworm that I had been. Since I felt misunderstood and alone, I decided to become a one-person outpost of the punk universe, adopting a homespun version of the aesthetic and philosophical tenets of this nascent movement.

Bettina joined our class after having to repeat 7th grade. She took one look at me and adopted me (“I could see in your eyes that you were DEEP”). This was a rather complex and not entirely welcome embrace. She was a chain-smoking, overweight (rare in those days), pothead, vegetarian lesbian with no interest in academic achievement. She stood out like a sore thumb.  She was rude. She did not fit any beauty ideals, either conventional or unconventional. She was hated by the teachers and rejected by the class.

I found her scary, and did not know what to do do with her interest, affection and proclaimed love. Thus commenced a complex dance, a perpetual chase in which she tried to get through to me; I who had spent years building extremely strong fortifications and defenses. I truly did not know how to have a real friendship with another human being, never mind a romantic relationship, and certainly was not interested in letting this strange, unruly person into my solitary confinement. We fought, we argued. She hated my music, I hated hers. I did become a vegetarian, which did send me down a spiral of disordered eating that took years to repair.

She had older friends, all enthusiastic pot-smoking hippies who hung out in the one local bar who would have them. She was also loosely acquainted with the hard-drug using fringe in our towns. Heroin was cutting a swathe through middle class society at the time. My punk-ness certainly saved me here; pot was not considered acceptable by the punk gods of my imagination, and harder drugs seemed to lead to victimhood rather than self-determination.

After a couple of years of doing only the bare minimum of school work Bettina was expelled. There followed psychotic episodes that landed her in mental hospital. A clear link has been established between smoking pot and awakening a predisposition to schizophrenia – that might have well played a part. Her trail disappeared and reappeared – prostitution in Southern Spain to support a heroin habit, time in mental hospital, a marriage of convenience to an Arab immigrant in need of a passport, a baby that died of SIDS. I would get occasional letters from her even when I lived in London, sent from the mental hospital near my village. And then nothing. The trail disappeared.

The internet was built for finding people whose fates you are curious about. I’ve often googled her name, nothing comes up.

Did she contract HIV+ of Hepatitis C? Is she permanently institutionalized. Or living quietly somewhere with a changed last name? In any case, I haven’t forgotten her, and I am grateful that, unlike anyone else, she did see something in me then that others didn’t.

Vladimir

I’ve always seen it as my obligation to dive into my family’s secrets, perhaps in a quest to figure out what cast the long shadows that have always hung over it. With my mom’s family that was easy. There were archival documents, references, a long paper trail.

My father’s family always seemed bland in comparison. Decent, modest, hard-working people who kept out of politics and out of trouble. My father lived in a small village in the countryside as a child, and was 12 when the war ended. My beloved aunt was 14. I’ve been gently begging them for any kind of story, of anything they knew or had seen. A few gradually emerged. Here is one:

During the war, when all young, able men were off fighting somewhere far away, it was left to women and the old to carry with farm work and other labor. Which is why the government allocated to them “forced laborers”, slave laborers from occupied countries, often just teenagers. My father’s village had workers from France, Poland and Russia.

The mandate was to treat these laborers as badly as you could get away with; they were supposed to worked to exhaustion, and fed and housed poorly.

The villagers, and there were only a few of them, did not have that kind of contempt in them. Faced with a frightened group of other human beings they behaved decently. For example meals were taken together – a violation of the rules that could have gotten everyone into deep trouble. But the little community held together. Later, after the war was over, several of the former laborers from France and Poland got back in touch, some even came to visit, to exchange memories and catch up on where life had taken everyone.

The biggest challenge to his covert arrangement was when one of the Russian laborers became pregnant by her Russian boyfriend, and had a little boy, Vladimir. The official directive (as my aunt tells me) was that children born in these circumstances were not to be fed, so that they would starve.  The little band of people rallied together around the baby, summoning up clothes, diapers and even an old baby carriage. They managed to keep the existence of this little boy secret from all outsiders and authorities.

When the Russian laborers heard that the war was over, and that they were to be repatriated, they wept. They must have felt that nothing good was in store for them. Returning forced laborers were often treated as traitors, as being ‘contaminated’ and of “questionable loyalty”, and sent off to hard labor or gulags. Many suffered a lifetime of abuse and suspicion.

None of the Russian laborers of my father’s village were ever of heard again.

I sometimes wonder what happened to little Vladimir, born between the fault lines of two merciless world events.

Patterns: running away

Another pattern emerges. The stuff that seems to make me happiest is all about movement, disappearing, vanishing, being isolated, unreachable. And I ran away from home. I’ve left several countries, changed nationalities twice.

Yesterday I saw the documentary about the making of Alec Soth‘s Broken Manual, Somewhere to Disappear at the Sean Kelly Gallery. No surprise that it got under my skin. Those men – all men – have taken the impulse I feel in myself and taken it to its full conclusion.

from Alec Soth, Broken Manual

I used to take pictures of men who lived by themselves, bachelors I’d call them, not quite urban hermits. It’s hard to do this, because however you take pictures people will stereotype them as loners, eccentrics, lost souls. I am not sure Alec Soth gets around this either, even though he professes to identify with these men (I don’t doubt that he’s genuine). The stereotype of the crazy man in the woods,Ted Kaczynski, Into the Wild, is too well-established, even in a country who holds up Walden as a defining narrative.

I felt guilty and embarrassed much my life for wanting to live like this. Perhaps I can pull it off in my old age?

When I was happy #3

My father’s German and doesn’t speak much English. That didn’t stop him buying a share of a buffalo farm in Saskatchewan in 1998. This resulted in friendships and visits. It’s one of his favorite places on earth, and once I started visiting also became one of mine. Now, years later, the farm is sold, and my father’s health fragile, so who knows if we’ll ever go there again.

But in the last few years we had to go twice; once for a funeral and once to help wind up the financial aftermath of a land sale. These visits turned into road trips, with my dad driving and me navigating, interpreting and organizing visits to his Saskatchewan friends.

We’ve never been close when I was a kid – no-one was close to anyone in my family – but sitting in the car together, not saying very much, I felt at ease, almost protective.

I was truly happy in those few days, just driving in that magical landscape, with the many ponds, the epic, cloud-filled skies, the stops at little restaurants serving diner food and Eastern European specials, the endless low, scrawny forests. No cell reception for days.

My favorite places among favorite places is a lake with a little lodge near Lake Montreal used mostly by bear hunters. It’s behind a gate but a friend of my father’s, and mine, has a key. The only people you will see are the local Montreal Lake Cree Nation people, especially a local trapper who lived in a little hut nearby but would sometimes wordlessly walk in, watch TV and disappear again.

Every morning we’d find new tracks, moose, bear, coyote, elk. We’d fish, just watch the leaves (fall comes early) or the sun setting. Gathering chanterelles, pine mushrooms and picking blueberries on the soft, spongy forest floor.

I often ask myself the question “would you, if you had the chance, go on to live another lifetime, or are you happy having lived just once?” Mostly I’d say, once is enough. But if my next life had more moments like these, I’d be tempted.