Weighty Matters
Strict pull ups have never been my forte; they have always been a struggle for me. So, after two weeks away from the gym for travel plus one week of brutal illness I was very surprised to discover that my first set of pull ups in more than three weeks felt easier than ever. Did I get stronger during my time off?
Lighter, Not Stronger
And then it dawned on me, I hadn’t gotten stronger, I’d gotten lighter. Two weeks of constant walking fuelled only by Japan-sized meal portions plus one week too sick to eat a proper meal had reduced my bodyweight by ten pounds or so, enough to make pull ups feel crazy easy. Ten pounds may not sound like much but believe me, I suddenly felt superhero strong.
By the time of my departure for Japan, it had been several months since I last was able to squeeze into my lifting belt. I didn’t weigh myself, but if I had to guess, I would say I probably weighed in the neighbourhood of 207-212 pounds, a record body weight for me. And no, it was not all muscle. For reference purposes, my lifting belt was tailor made for me over 20 pounds ago when I was competing at the CanWest Games at a lean 185 pounds.
My time in Japan shamed me. There were plenty of tourists from North America and removed from our cultural norms and placed among the diminutive Japanese our body composition epidemic is starkly highlighted. It made me embarrassed for us.
Skinny-Fat vs. Fat-Fat
Look, I’m not saying that the Japanese are fit. Most of them lacked the muscle tone required to protect them from the chronic diseases that afflict most industrialized nations. The medical term used to describe them, I suspect, would be normal weight obese. In gym parlance, we say skinny-fat. But we North Americans, we’re just blatantly fat-fat.
We will make all sorts of excuses for it, but at day’s end, it really just comes down to the fact that we are unwilling to endure the discomfort of being hungry from time to time. I wasn’t trying to diet during our vacation, I sampled plenty of tasty local cuisine, but faced with Japanese food portions, I was hungry all day, every day. That was just the reality. The result was I lost weight. I wasn’t trying to. Apart from walking all day, I didn’t even work out while I was there. Without enough food to refill my fat stores, I got thinner.
The Comfort Crisis
In the Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter (Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self), the author points out how the comforts of modern life are killing us. Whether it’s the absence of cancer-preventing brown fat from the adult population due to a life spent in temperature-controlled environments or a loss of functional mobility in the knees, ankles, hips and spine due to a life spent in chairs, our comforts are destroying our health. Furthermore, the abundance of ever-ready, highly palatable foods available to us, coupled with our absolute dread of hunger, has turned us into a snack-dependent culture of metabolic illness.
Don’t think a plain, dressing-free salad tastes good? Try denying yourself food for a week (no, don’t really do this, it’s not a great idea, but I’ve tested it for you - twice). Deprived long enough from a ready supply of foods processed to optimize palatability and your taste buds will quickly resensitize to the degree that they will savour the abundance of life-sustaining sugars contained in a plain, unadorned leaf of lettuce.
We make a big deal about weight loss like it is some impossible mission to achieve our body composition goals. It’s not. Just be hungry. I don’t mean starve yourself. Just stretch out the time between your meals a bit longer. Push away your plate before you’re absolutely full. Make yourself eat your 30 grams of protein plus veggies before you stuff a fork full of starch into your face.
It's not difficult. It’s uncomfortable. That’s a different thing. CrossFit training is about becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable. Not everybody can hack it. But if you can hack it in the gym, you can hack it at the kitchen table. In the end, you can’t escape discomfort in any case. You can either have the discomfort of making healthy choices or the discomfort of poor health.
Future You Will Pay the Price
If this is the case, why do people find it so hard to make the healthy choice? It’s because the healthy choice requires a bit of discomfort endured by present-day you whereas the discomfort of illness is suffered by some future you that you have not yet met. But unless some tragedy cuts short your lifetime, you will one day be that future you and you will be paying the interest on the health debts you have incurred today.
After a two-week vacation and a few post-vacation sick days, I can, for the first time in many months fit into my lifting belt again. A little bit of hunger goes a long way.
