On Free Will, Obesity and Nutting the F@#& Up

Be forewarned, this is a rant.

I was listening to the radio the other day and they were speaking with a bariatric surgery doctor of some sort (unfortunately affiliated with one of my alma maters) about some recently published statistics that show, to no great surprise, that people are getting fatter and fatter.

Canada's obesity rates triple in less than 30 years

This doesn’t even seem to register as overly troubling anymore.  This guy’s response, as a supposed expert, was that it’s a real surprise that not everyone in our society is obese.  Basically, he argued that our society is set up in such a way, specifically with respect to the 24-7 availability of food and our reliance on computers (i.e. sedentary work and lifestyle), that predisposes people to be obese. His lacklustre advice was essentially (despite the outright error of avoiding ‘fatty’ foods) keep taking your drugs and statins, keep getting your stomachs stapled so you can’t physically cram any more food into them, and just basically accept that ‘society’ is going to make us more and more obese and we better just hunker down and fight the long defeat.

Well, I’m calling bullshit on that.  That argument fails for precisely the reason that there’s still a sizeable (ironic word choice) portion of the population who aren’t fat and never will be.  Those are the people that have learned and developed a sense of free will and responsibility with respect to taking care of themselves and their bodies.  They’ve learned the capacity, as all functional adults should have, to delay gratification.  They’ve realized that despite the absolute ubiquity of shitty fast food and temptations everywhere, that no one is holding a gun to your head and telling you to eat that donut.  No one is holding you down and forcing you to waste hours playing Candy Crush on your phone or watching reality TV.  So if ‘society’ is to blame, why aren’t all those other people fat too?  Well, it’s because society isn’t the culprit.

Here’s the harsh truth.  If you’re fat, it’s your fault.  Unless you’re a kid – then it’s your parents’ fault (and I think there’s a special spot in hell reserved for parents who let their kids get obese…it’s tantamount to abuse).  But if you’re an adult human, it’s your fault.  I’m sorry if that sounds mean, but it’s the truth.  That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.  Hell, you might be the nicest person in the world.  But being a fatty is your own doing, and you’re also the only solution to your problem.  It’s not your friends, your family, your upbringing, your ‘genes’, or ‘society’ (whatever the hell that means) – it’s you. And it’s time to nut the fuck up!

CT Fletcher says it best in relation to training and weightlifting.  At the end of the day, you can complain all you want about your various excuses and limitations, but all that matters is that you get into the gym and do the work.  IT’S STILL YO MUTHAFUCKIN’ SET!  How refreshing would it be if we all carried that attitude over into all aspects of life?  Fast food restaurants beckoning you on your way home?  IT’S STILL YO MUTHAFUCKIN’ DINNER! Go home, take 5 minutes and cook some eggs instead.  Sedentary job? IT’S STILL YO MUTHAFUCKIN’ JOB!  Get out on your lunchbreak and go for a walk and do some pushups.  Do squats while you’re on the phone.  Whatever works.  Too busy in the evenings to exercise?  IT’S STILL YO MUTHAFUCKIN’ FAMILY!  Do chin-ups at the park while watching your kids play...or better yet play with them, play tag, run around.  Get off your ass.

The way I see it, this whole victim mentality, this passivity, is the root of the whole problem.  I’ve read studies that show a person’s satisfaction and happiness at work are directly related to the degree of control that they feel they have.   I would extrapolate that out to life more broadly.  If you feel like you are in control of your life to some extent, not in the sense of barking out orders and being controlling, but simply in having the feeling that you are influencing the outcomes of your own life by the choices and decisions you make, I would wager that you feel a sense of contentedness.  Conversely, I think most people who consider themselves pawns on some cosmic chessboard, or slaves to other people or agents in their own lives, probably don’t feel very happy or content.  And while I’ve never experienced it personally, I’ve heard that one of the main reasons that people overeat is that they’re trying to exert some control in one area of their lives to make up for powerlessness elsewhere.  For this perspective, the whole victim mentality becomes a pretty vicious cycle:  Eat to feel in control – Get fatter – Blame external circumstances for your weight problem – feel more passive and powerless – Eat some more….

The corollary of this is that in some places, being super fat is now considered a disease!  To me, that’s the ultimate in passivity – throwing our hands up in the air and treating it like some kind of plague foisted upon us from afar, rather than accepting responsibility that it’s a condition wholly within our control.  Smallpox is a disease.  Polio is a disease.  Sitting on your ass too much and shovelling garbage into your mouth is not a disease, it’s a choice.  Furthermore, the health care costs of this choice are astronomical, with some recent studies estimating it at one fifth of all heath expenses in the U.S.!  Now I’m no libertarian – I’m proud that in Canada we have a health care system that attempts to take care of everyone.  If you get hurt or get cancer or some other actual disease, I want my tax money paying for treatment.  In many ways, a society should be judged by how it treats its weakest members.  But when people refuse to make simple choices that would avoid those costs from the outset, the whole thing becomes unfair and unsustainable.

The whole thing comes back to free will.  No matter your epistemological leanings, we either evolved as sentient hominids out of our more instinctual ‘animal’ pasts, or we were granted the ability by [Insert  deity of your choice here] to make up our own minds on how we behave.  Even some of the more deterministic Eastern traditions would allow that, within a broader context of fatalism, we have the power to choose how we behave and react to discrete events.  Maybe I’m destined to get hit by a bus in two days.  Who knows?  But in the interim, it’s a precious gift that I get to exercise my own free will in how I conduct myself.

You see this lack of personal accountability everywhere.  I keep hearing a commercial on the radio for some sort of credit management firm.  The gist of the commercials is that a big mean collection agency has been leaving messages for someone who hasn’t paid their bills.  The person is screening calls and then suddenly picks up the phone and says, in the most dismissive and sycophantic tone, “Hi, Mr. So and So, I’ve called BDO.” And hangs up.  Problem solved!  The whole implication is, how dare this collection agency keep hassling me about my unpaid debts.  What nerve!  No sense of embarrassment or remorse that I’ve borrowed money that I can’t pay back.  No sense of culpability.  I’m the victim here!  And now I’m passing the buck to someone else who’ll clean up my mess.  Calgon, take me away!

Again it all comes back to ability to exercise free will, take responsibility for one’s actions and their consequences, and to delay gratification when necessary.  It’s really all the same concept.  Deciding that hey, I really want a new pair of shoes but you know what, I can’t fucking afford them right now, so I’ll wait until I can.  Or thinking, wow I’m really hungry right now, but instead of stopping at Tim Hortons I’ll wait the 10 extra minutes and go home and actually make myself a decent meal using actual food.  Or thinking, I’m tired and I don’t feel like going out into the cold for a run, but I know how fantastic I’m gonna feel afterwards so suck it up buttercup!  And I’m convinced that free will responds just like a muscle, in the sense that it grows stronger with frequent exercise and it atrophies from disuse.  You start taking responsibility for your actions and start making the harder choices, and suddenly the ‘harder’ choices don’t seem as difficult anymore.  They become the default.  But that can’t happen as long as we continue to deflect and externalize the real causes of our problems, without realizing that each of us holds the key to our own liberation.

Pain and Gain

“The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. 

You are afraid of the pain now, Unk, but you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain.  And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain”

This is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan.  I was reading it this past week while relaxing on a beach in Mexico, pretty much as far as humanly possible from any sort of pain or displeasure.  It made me reflect on why we, as athletes or regular exercisers, routinely subject ourselves to activities that open the door to pain and discomfort.  Why am I motivated to do something that will hurt and leave me in a crumpled, sweaty mess on a gym floor, when the option is there instead  to recline on a beach lounger with a cool drink in hand (or at the very least, when not on vacation, on the couch with a cup of tea)?  Why is it that, despite being a nice break in the middle of winter, sitting around all comfortable on a beach gets reeeeaaalllly fucking boring!  Quickly.

The fact is that most of us, in the middle-class ‘developed’ world lead lives that are, for the most part, fairly free from pain.  Despite the constant bitching about how busy or stressful our jobs or lives are, a thorough self-examination surely leads to the conclusion that compared to the vast swath of human history, we have it pretty sweet.  I’m not denying that bad things happen, often to good people, but in the broad context we’ve crafted a society that by and large allows a good deal of comfort and freedom from genuine misery.

Many of us work jobs that have become fairly second-nature and are not overly demanding, certainly from a physical perspective at least.  We don’t have to hunt, gather and toil for our food.  Entertainment is plentiful – we’re awash is the proverbial ‘bread and circuses.’  Creature comforts are everywhere.  You deserve that Starbucks latte, you really do.  Put your feet up on that new Ottoman, you’ve had a long day....

Intense physical exertion, the kind that temporarily makes a person wish that they had never been born, seems to be an antidote to the kind of ennui that accompanies such a well-fed and well-cared for state of being.  The fact is that running a 6 minute mile, hurts.  Loading up a barbell, laying it across your shoulders and squatting down ass-to-grass, hurts.  Flipping a tractor tire in the snow, sucking cold air into your lungs, hurts.  I know, however, that by subjecting myself to that pain, hopefully I’ll learn something about myself that I didn’t know before.  I’ll know a little bit more what I’m capable of enduring.  Few things in life give you that.  And it’s a gift.

It’s a gift that’s available to all. But herein lies the trouble in convincing non-exercisers to ‘get off the couch’, so to speak.  From the perspective of someone on that side of the fence, who’s never come through and seen the benefits, exercise (at least the strenuous kind that actually pays dividends) just looks like a lot of pain.  They don’t see yet that, when that temporary pain has passed (as it always does), one emerges on the other side with a completely transformed sense of self.  It’s not invincibility or arrogance or complete fearlessness.  But perhaps it’s a little bit of fearlessness.  It’s the sense that someday, something will certainly take me down and beat me.  But it won’t be that thing.  It won’t be that weight I just lifted.  It won’t be that time I just beat.  It won’t be that pain that I just endured.

What’s great too about that Vonnegut quote is that it comes from a letter that the character, Unk, has written to himself.  He’s had his memories erased several times and is writing the message to his future self as a means of instruction and encouragement.  When the character first reads those lines he weeps because he thinks that the letter has been written by someone else who clearly has a greater pain tolerance.  He imagines someone heroic and fearless, far more so than himself.  It’s not until later that he realizes that he himself is the author, and the one that has already been capable of enduring such intense pain in the quest for truth and knowledge...a realization that makes him “courageous, watchful, and secretly free.”  I think that that’s a telling metaphor, in the sense that most people are capable of far more than they give themselves credit for.  The gym is a great place to discover that.

For the science-y among you, there’s even some data to suggest that regular exercisers show greater levels of pain tolerance than other people, even without recent exercise: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1295850/?page=5

That’s significant in my mind, because it implies that once you’ve been baptized in the fire, it’s a permanent adaptation...  Something you’ve earned that can’t be taken away from you.

And speaking of Stoicism, old Marcus Aurelius has some advice in this regard:

Be like the promontory against which waves break. Am I unhappy because this happened - not a bit, rather happy am I though this has happened because I continue free from pain, neither crushed in the present nor fearing the future. Such a thing could have happened to any man, but not every man could have continued free. There is no misfortune, only the course of nature and our adaptation. What event can prevent you from being just, magnanimous, temperate, prudent, secure against opinions and falsehood? Remember when vexed that to bear misfortune nobly is good fortune.
M.A. IV.49.

That is, we might to not be able to control the things that happen to us, which are just part of nature.  What we do have the power to control however is our reaction to those events, how we respond, and our resiliency toward them.  Furthermore, Cicero writes, “For what shame, what degradation will a man not submit to in order to avoid pain, if he has once decided it to be the highest evil?”

Decided – that’s the key word.  Pain is just pain.  It’s neutral.  We choose to place either a positive or negative value on it through our interpretation.  Is this an invitation toward unbridled masochism?  I don’t think so.  But it might be a hint that pain has more to teach us about ourselves than does the siren song of perpetual comfort.

Blast from the Past

I just stumbled across a poem that I wrote a long time ago....almost exactly 10 years to the day  (February 2004).  In the absence of making any kind of New Year's resolutions I thought that maybe I reflect on this and see if I'm being consistent with the kind of life I envisioned a decade ago, when I was a scraggly haired hippie, living on a farm and studying Latin poetry in graduate school.  A lot has changed obviously, but I think I still identify with the core values that I wrote about back then.  You have to get past the bad poetry, but I think i was kind of writing a manifesto of sorts on the idea of simplicity and authenticity.  As Kierkegaard wrote, "Whoever you are, eternity asks you just one thing: whether you have lived authentically or not."  The title refers to an ancient Greek political/philosophical concept roughly translated as 'self-rule', or what might be extrapolated to self-reliance or self-sufficiency (I was reading a lot of RW Emerson at the time). Some of this stuff is still what I'm trying to convey with this blog.  I.e. the real good shit in life (be that in the realm of fitness or more broadly) doesn't have to cost anything.  It isn't complicated or hard to grasp.  It's right in front of you at all times, if you care to see it.  I look at this poem now and I see a lot that still resonates with me today.  When I wrote this, those 'straw-haired children' were just a glimmer in my mind's eye, still many years off.  But nowadays, with them 5 and 3-years-old and growing so fast (although only one has blonde hair), I still can't think of a happier way to spend a day than sitting beside them, putting worms on hooks and tossing lines into the water.

Autarcheia

Split wood, blow life into woolen hands,

frosty beard.

Stalk deer in the crackling dawn

of November.

Study overnight cottontail triad prints in the soft powder,

piecing together the scene.

Drink Lapsang Souchong on a stump in the vernal woods.

Wade swift trout streams with your straw-haired children.

Gather cattail pollen by bicycle, shaking seedheads into Tupperware,

Bake golden bread.

Sprout mung beans and lentils in glass jars on the windowsill.

Build a stanchion from scrap wood,

To milk your goats.

Pick beets and kohlrabi,

Steam and eat with butter.

Gather acorns from the white oak, boil out the tannins

Several times.

Learn to carve wood like your grandfather.

Build wind turbines like your great-uncle did

In dust bowl Saskatchewan nineteen thirties,

Outta the rear axle of an old Ford van.

Learn the plants,

Gather mallows as Hesiod did, and lamb’s quarters,

Mint for headaches, wild ginger for the stomach,

Plantain and spotted touch-me-not for stings.

Clip fiery blossoms of staghorn sumac,

For sun tea, sweetened with honey from your hives.

Plant a Linden tree for the bees,

Learn the craft from Aristaeus,

Smoke from burnt sumac calms them.

Waft sunset clove cigarettes,

Reclining on porch steps.

Learn the language of birds,

Coverse with crickets in the dewy crepuscule.

Re-use everything.

Catch rainwater in beautiful glass vessels.

Save seeds.

Scribble poems on rafters,

Read Milton by firelight,

Watching wax drip from the candelabra.

Shudder beneath Orion

And the inky black of January skies

To glimpse chimney smoke and the brilliance

Of undulating snowbanks refracting the moonlight.

Make noontime love in the summer grass

Backs of your knees sweating.

Take long hesperial walks along dusty roads,

Holding your wife’s slender hand.

Feed your chickens

Grains and crushed eggshells, like your grandmother said to.

Cut lilac sprigs for the kitchen table

Stain your teeth violet

With wild grape wine

And howl at the coyotes.

Value simplicity.

- DB (2004)