On Fitness, Part 1

  Getting fitter, being in shape, dieting, exercise; it’s a very popular topic, and the basis of an enormous industry.  With all the talk about fitness and the plethora of gyms popping up on every corner, you’d think that a question as simple as “What does is mean to be fit?” would be as easy to answer as “What’s 2 plus 2?”  Initially we may even think we have an answer, but dig a little deeper and things start to get complicated. 

  Some years ago I found myself in a parking lot standing outside my car with my keys, wallet, and phone locked safely inside.  Seeing as it was summer, I took off my shirt and flipflops and ran the 7 miles home, climbed up to and through my second story bedroom window, grabbed my spare key, and ran the 7 miles back to my waiting car.  Great story, no?

  As inconsequential as this experience may seem at first glance, it actually serves as a perfect illustration of the concept “Fitness,’ which, for the sake of argument, I’ll define as nothing more than being capable.  With that said, understand that Fitness is not the 14 miles I ran or the second story window I climbed through.  By this I mean that Fitness is not something defined by some measurement; it is not quantifiable.  To understand why, it’s necessary to mention life and one of its defining characteristics; randomness.

  

  To put it simply, life, as part of nature, is full of random events and processes.  As such, it is unpredictable.  And it is precisely this unpredictability that doesn’t allow Fitness to be quantifiable.  Think about it this way; unlike that 5K you’re running next month, I did not know a month ahead that I would lock myself out of my car.  This means that I didn’t spend that month training to run 14 miles and working on my ability to climb through my bedroom window. 

  This takes us back to the idea of Fitness as capability.  If this sounds vague, that’s because it is.  Specificity does us no good in anything but the most controlled, man-made environments.  In order to be capable in the face of randomness, we need to be generally capable.  Can you run home to grab your spare keys? Can you swim to shore when the boat you’re on sinks?  Can you climb that tree to get your son’s kite?  Sure these may sound far fetched, but there’s no way to know what life will bring.

  Where does that leave us?  For better or for worse, viewing fitness in this light doesn’t provide any easy answers.  What it gives us instead is a way of viewing Fitness as a continuous process that is never quite finished.  If this sounds daunting, I invite you to read my previous post “Means without Ends.”

  As for myself, I can’t tell you how much I bench, how fast I can run a mile, or how high I can jump.  I don’t know, and I don’t care to know.  What I do know is that I love the randomness of life too much to not be fit for it.  To do so is to view everything as an opportunity for improvement; faster, stronger, smarter, fitter.

Means without ends

When I was in elementary school, I remember participating in a program that offered students $1 McDonalds coupons for every book read.  Maybe some of you remember similar programs, and perhaps you also think that it was a great idea.

Let's say little 7 year old Andrew is offered such an incentive.  Let's look at two of the shortcomings of such a program. (I'm not going to get into the dangers of awarding with food at this time.) 

• Knowing that 1 book = $1 at McDonalds, what sort of books do you think he'll choose?  Obviously the shorter and easier the books, the more he can get through, and the more coupons he'll get.  Instead of choosing longer books that may be more interesting and challenging, thereby actually having a chance of increasing his enjoyment of reading(for this post, I won't go into flow state theory and its effect optimal enjoyment), Andrew will instead take the path of least resistance.  Not only will this not increase his enjoyment of reading, his abilities will not be improved either.
• By creating an end goal wholly unrelated to the means, an inequality between the end goal and means develops.  To Andrew, a new implicit equation, where reading < McDonalds coupons, builds upon the explicit equation of 1 book = a $1 coupon.  By default, means are always worth less than the end goal.

Thus Andrew does not go to the library to find books he'll enjoy, he goes in search of the shortest and easiest books in order to build up his coupon stash.  What happens when the incentive is eventually taken away, as it always will be?  Do you think Andrew will continue to read?  Research shows that not only will his interest in reading not have increased, it may actually have decreased from whatever level it had been at the start.  

That was a bit of a long winded example, but think of the underlying mechanism in relation to the previous post.  I mentioned at the end that a key element in creating positive cycles was finding something that you can love "in and of itself."  

Let's use running as an example again, but this time it's about losing weight.  Initially, a cycle built on running to lose weight seems to work.  You want to lose weight, so you start running.  Running gets you fitter, you're losing weight, so you continue to run.  Everything looks great so far.  What happens when the weight loss tapers off, as it eventually has to?  Maybe you'll continue running, acknowledging the fact that you need to keep active to stay fit.  How long will that last though?  It is a cycle that is bound to fail.  The same goes for people who sign up to run the marathon.  They run to be able to finish the race, but what happens when the race is over?  Some stop running.  Some sign up for another one, and another and another, always chasing that end goal.  The run is never purely for the run, and as such, it will never purely be enjoyed.

When studying at Elmhurst, I had to create my philosophy of teaching.  In it I included this paragraph:

In terms relating strictly to physical education, it is my goal to focus on the affective aspects of fitness, with secondary foci on the psychomotor and cognitive, so that participation in physical activity is motivated by a love of movement and the enjoyment of being active.  By piquing their sense of curiosity for exploring the world through the use of their bodies and minds, I hope to lead my students towards an attitude which views physical fitness and activity as not only enjoyable, but also as  an equal of any other sort of personal development.

Can everyone learn to love to run?  I honestly don't have an answer to that question, but it's something that I can't stop thinking about.  In a time where everyone knows they should exercise and has enough basic knowledge of exercise techniques to be able to exercise, finding a way to tap into the affective is the key to creating life long change.

   

A Vicious Cycle

We've all heard of the term, and perhaps some of us have even experienced what it's like to be caught in one.  Take for instance someone who eats junk food because he's feeling depressed about something.  That can lead to weight gain, which can lead to feelings of depression, again causing poor eating choices, leading back to more weight gain.  It's a horrible place to be, and it's never easy to break through this type of behavioral loop.

In general, I tend to believe in the duality of life, and just as a coin has two sides, perhaps the vicious cycle can be both negative and positive.  And if so, maybe tapping into positive cycles can be viciously effective.  Take for example my love of long distance running.  It is truly one of the greatest pleasures in my life.  My love of running distance motivates me to actually go out and run.  Running forces the body to adapt, which enables me to run further.  So enjoying running leads to running which leads to the ability to run more, which brings me even more joy, which makes me want to run more which allows me to run more and so on and so on.

Is this a simplistic way to look at it? Perhaps, but the idea is not without its merit.  However, there is another principle at work in my example that warrants exploration of its own; the idea of enjoying the "in and of itself" of something.  That'll have to wait until another day though.

Calories In, Calories Out?

Diet and nutrition is one of my absolute favorite topics to study, and as many of you may know, I'm my own favorite test subject.  Aside from the topic itself though, one of the things that is most interesting to me is listening to people talk about their diets.  And let me tell you, most of what I hear blows my mind.  

With that said, let's talk about calories.  They're at the top of every nutrition label and tip of everyone's tongue, and most people have absolutely what a calorie actually is.  Yet that doesn't stop us from abiding by its rules, going along with blind faith as we slowly get fatter and fatter.  So what is a calorie?

A calorie/small calorie/gram calorie, is nothing but a unit of measurement of energy(heat) that approximates the energy needed to raise 1 gram of water by 1˚C.  However, this is not the measurement we use in terms of nutrition.  For that we turn to to the kilocalorie.

A kilocalorie/big calorie/food calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise a kilogram of water by 1˚C, and is equal to 1,000 small calories.  

Still, that doesn't tell us anything about how this applies to food.  To this end, we can turn to the work of Wilbur Olin Atwater, who's Atwater System laid the ground work for our current reliance on calories as a measure of food energy.  A very basic explanation reads as such: let's say a can of soda had a total of 200 calories.  If we were to set the soda on fire and have it burn completely, it would create 200 kilocalories, enough energy to raise the temperature of 200 kilograms of water by 1˚C.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure I don't have an open flame in my stomach burning up the food I eat, and therein lies the problem.  The human metabolism is a far more complicated system than a simple flame, and the best scientists in the world are still working on discovering what all the different biochemical taking place inside us actually do.  

What has become clear in the past couple of years though, is that while calories may be a convenient way to measure a food's potential energy, it is far from accurate, and it should not be the foundation on which to build a healthy diet.