Health

There are some things that I share, and others I don’t, while writing this blog. While I firmly believe in authenticity and standing behind whatever you say, write, do or don’t do - there are also some boundaries we should put in place. That’s not universally recognized sadly, and many of the troubles we see in society are those caused when someone seems to misplace their understanding of what is appropriate in our culture.

And today, I’ll play on the edges of these rules, just for fun and also with the knowledge that while whatever we digitally commit to our online record lasts forever (hello dumb FB postings) the long tail effect also means sometimes we can help one another through shared experience.

 Huge build-up, no ? 

I’m about to be 48. I know, you’re thinking that I don’t write like a day over a 12 year-old level, but it is the truth. Like many white western males, I have lead a sedentary lifestyle and was overweight for much of my life. That’s acceptable in our culture and there are even proactive efforts to embrace our imperfections - our weight, our table manners or lack thereof, or whatever cause du jour is. {As a complete aside - I think many of these self-serving “love me for my imperfections” statements and posters and cards that you see more and more of are indulgent crap b.t.w. I can’t help it if I prematurely bald, or if I never grew above 5’8 as an adult, and sure, you can embrace that. But eating too much, or being a slob or any of the other poor choices we make are exactly that - choices. Embracing those poor decisions celebrates the wrong thing. OK, rant done, and the aside is now over.}

With a life-long fight against carrying extra weight deeply burned into my experience, I’ve elected to eat healthy for the next 6 weeks as an experiment. There, that wasn’t really worth the build up, was it ? (The “next blog” button in the upper left takes you to someone that celebrates N-scale model trains, be sure to catch that one too).

The eating healthy approach compliments a daily fitness regime that has taken me 90% of where I want to be. I’d always hoped that the time at the gym would be enough – and it isn’t. I can’t eat like I want to and be healthy like I want to. Those two aspects in my life seem divergent and so I’ve taken on this experiment. Six weeks isn’t going to kill anyone, and I’ve elected to remove gluten and eat vegetarian in this time period. (I’ve been at it almost 3 weeks btw, and do feel better.).

What I do miss are easy choices. Keep in mind that I don’t have Celiac disease (the folks that must eat gluten free to stay alive), and I have no moral grounds to be a vegetarian. So, yes McDonald's has beckoned. Yes, I’m craving a nice steak or some BBQ chicken .. but less and less as the time is passing. Choices are easy in normal circumstances, but not at present. While I can shop for gluten free foods for home preparation, going out proves a challenge. But again – it’s six weeks and I’ll survive.

What I will also do is come back at the completion of the experiment to report results. Not this many pounds/ kilo’s/stones etc as that is somewhat pointless without a reference baseline. Rather I’ll offer how I feel, what I want to do going forward, and any body changes noticed. What I'll also try to do is to capture the impact of the change on my life.  I think there are both personal and professional implications to this change, so as they say... stay tuned.