exercise – Jill Domschot

Eating & Exercise

This is a follow-up from yesterday. What is my actual eating philosophy? To some, it’s dangerously, weirdly healthy. To others, it’s S.A.D., which stands for Standard American Diet. The truth is there are way too many eating philosophies out there that are polar opposites. So, I eat what I want and adhere to a few principles, but those principles are also to my taste. As in, I can’t stand the taste of soda, diet or regular. Thus, I don’t consume it. That’s not really much of a principle, is it?

I don’t eat foods I’m allergic to, except corn…oops. I love my local Mexican food. I try not to eat it often or hives are the result.
I balance my macros. E.g. breakfast might consist of plain yogurt with whey protein and blueberries and buttered gluten-free toast.
I eat whatever fruits and vegetables I want because I love their tastes and textures. The anti veggie and fruit crowd can…. This is a family-friendly site.
Potatoes are the staff of life. Take that haters.
Carnitas are amazing.
Chile must be consumed regularly. Bonus points for cilantro and raw onions.
Black coffee is the other staff of life.
I really don’t like sweets and am principled about cooking with only butter and olive oil. Even high-end restaurants will use soy or canola oil, both of which taste like sweaty gym socks. Thankfully, spices cover that flavor.

My exercise philosophy is not that different. My only principle is to do it every day. I don’t care what gym bros say. They can shove their philosophies up their narcissistic… family friendly. If I want to bee-bop up the street to Los Huracanes or Los Dos Carnales (my current favorite band), I will. If I end up with flaccid arms because I’m only doing weight training two to three times a week, sobeit. If I look older than my age, who cares? If I drop dead because I’m not bench-pressing 200 lbs, then I will die happy with the plaintive sound of the accordion in my head.

Choosing an exercise or diet philosophy is like choosing a religion. If you have no real convictions, then there’s not much point because you won’t stick to it. This is the one area where I listen to and learn from the hedonistic Janis Joplin philosophy of how can it be bad if it makes you feel good? That philosophy killed her; I understand that. But I’m not mainlining heroine. I’m eating food that makes me feel good and exercising for enjoyment. Now I just need to work on my personal relationships. Not having them is just as likely to kill me young. Loneliness will eat up a person’s soul from the inside out.

And now for some Los Dos Carnales:

Dietary Dictocrats

There is a comedic Wodehouse story in which some Hollywood folks are put on a diet consisting of a half grapefruit for breakfast, another for lunch, and, you guessed it, another half grapefruit for dinner. Naturally, this diet turns the adherents into crazy people. It’s good for a laugh and a romance that emerges from it, as two of the diet victims find each other, as they can understand each other’s pain.

What’s a harder laugh is knowing these diets and their dictocratic pushers are real, and their advice for health not that different from “eat a half grapefruit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Of course, they couch it all in scientific language and show graphs and use fancy words and catchphrases. I used to listen some of these lunatics when I was doing keto to, in theory, reset my digestion and help my insomnia. If a keto guru made a video on how to fix a health ailment, from skin tags to cracks on heels, the cause would be “insulin resistance” and the cure “keto diet” involving organic free range meats and eggs and, if they hadn’t gone the carnivore route, pounds of organic salad a week, skip the veggies like carrots because they will knock you right out of keto and increase your sugar addiction.

Recently, YouTube has been heavily pushing a diet dictocrat called Dr. Boz. I’ve watched a few of her videos out of curiosity and had to laugh because her “what I eat in a day” was possibly more repellent than a grapefruit and a half, consisting of coffee, “bubble” water, and two cans of sardines. I don’t know if these people are liars or have serious eating disorders they’re using the internet to flaunt. Some people just need attention for their disorders to really shine. I laughed, but it’s a little sad when you consider that these people have an audience that laps up their advice. I’ve seen a couple of her other videos, in which she eats entire sticks of butter, and my gallbladder and stomach gave shrieks of pain at the thought of it. So, apparently, her diet consists of two cans of sardines daily, plus the occasional stick of butter…? I have no idea. That’s a problem with YouTube — random, out of context videos. Still, it’s on the creator to give a little more context to very weird health advice.

Keto dieters are insane, in my not so humble opinion. I suppose it has its medical use for obese or diabetic people who can’t control their diabetes. But otherwise it comes across as a religion, much like veganism. Vegans rattle on about heart disease, while keto dieters obsess over insulin resistance. If keto had aided me in any way for my chronic sleep and digestive problems, I might have stuck with it despite the side effects. But it didn’t help with anything. It rather made everything worse, if that’s possible. It’s definitely possible to have worse digestion; my digestion is mostly stable if I remove hard to digest grains like corn, wheat, and oats from my daily eating. The insomnia I consider incurable at this point, and it gets better or worse. Keto makes it worse.

After doing keto for a while, I suffered from massive stomach pain and upset from too much fat, as well as a cessation of my female cycle. Don’t bother telling a keto nutcase about the infertility it can cause in women (I’ve read it’s around fifty percent of women who suffer this way from keto); they will make excuses and claim the dieter is doing something wrong. I had an MD at one time that tried to convince me it was my fault, as he was a big believer in keto. Any food that contained carbohydrates, such as an apple or a whole grain teff tortilla, he called “sugar bombs.” That doctor was into the AIP and wasn’t much a believer in vegetables such as bell peppers or raw salad or…I can’t remember what vegetables he was okay with, but the list of foods worthy of consuming was very small. Surely, if I only ate this list consisting of three different foods, my female cycle would work spotlessly, and I would sleep like a baby and float on a cloud of organic cotton.

Worst among all diets is vegan, however. I call it worst because the symptoms of stomach pain and massive inflammation occur after a week in my experience. Kudos to anyone who can manage veganism long term and remain healthy. You are probably a genetically superior human. And no doubt another big time religious nutcase. Healthy body, unhealthy mind? Or it could be the reverse, I guess.

There was one diet that helped me sleep and didn’t bother my digestive system, but it came with intense migraines: fasting. I’ve fasted for three to ten days at intervals, simply to reset my body or for prayer, and I admit I do sleep while fasting. That isn’t really a long-term cure; it simply means my body has no fuel, and so I pass out. And get migraines. It’s really awful for my health but definitely useful for my prayer life.

Most of the long-lived people in the world are clustered on islands and eating a varied diet that involves plenty of carbs, such as potatoes or pasta. My takeaway from centenarian studies is one must move to an island, be genetically isolated, and drink a lot of alcohol. That doesn’t seem to work for the Irish, however, which is my ethnicity, albeit clustering with Irish Americans. I don’t much care about living a long life. At the same time, I find it fascinating looking at the habits of centenarians. They tend to drink alcohol, eat carbs, and exercise and/or stay active physically. Some are dedicated athletes and others walk daily and do gardening and light housework. They also seem to have let go of grudges and are thankful for life. All I know is carbs, alcohol, walks and gratitude sound a whole lot better than bubble water and sardines.

Organization!

If it seems that I’m trying to write more on my blog, yes, I have been. I get overwhelmingly busy, and this is the first to go. I no longer wish that to be the case. As today is a day off, and I’m being lazy more than I am productive, I thought I would write a simple note here on productivity. It happens through A. hard work and B. organization.

I’ve long been organized with my exercise routine. I walk for 30 minutes every evening, and do a focused exercise for 30 minutes in the morning. I follow a routine: cardio, strength, stability, repeat. That makes 6 workouts a week, with Sunday reserved for one long, relaxing walk only. This combination, which has some overlap — e.g., some stability workouts are combinations of cardio plus balance and standing abs — works. I’m only exercising an hour a day, but my organization keeps me fit.

As I’m staring at my laptop from the office shed I rarely have time to use, I’m wondering why I can’t apply this kind of organization to finishing my current novel or playing the accordion. To be fair, I subscribed to the Acordeonisticos website to try to create a more focused approach than playing an hour a day of whatever I feel like playing. But I’m still prone to playing whatever I feel like playing, even after subscribing. I need a focused plan! An example might be: music theory, practice old songs, learn a new song, repeat, with Sunday my anything-goes day.

Re writing, my organization amounts to writing 1000 words a day. This is an extremely disorganized plan. I need those 1000 words to be focused. I need to do more mapping and editing. My mapping exists, but it is very slapdash. I will provide a pic, so you can see how slapdash it is. I will also provide a pic of my beloved office that awaits me, a dusty place shut up most days because I have an office at the parish I use 45 hours a week. But I can’t use that office to write; my only shot at that is to sit in the office kitchen on my lunch hour and slam out a few words.

I’m not one for outlining. It gives me the horrors and bad memories from failing at English class in my childhood. I probably should have paid more attention to it. I need to start outlining. Following an outline is the only way to write a book, unlike the pattern of threes that could work for music, as it does for exercise.