Day 58 : The Meaning of It All

I read Adrian and Emiko's blog today saying their motivation and energy have been low and I felt a bit the same today. The post sickness "bounce" lasted one day!! Nevertheless, I had a good set of skipping (on the porch because it was raining). This week, I have to do three sets of six minutes. I'm still slow and trip up over the rope a lot but in the three sets did 375, 402 and 352 skips, so 1,129 skips in eighteen minutes, so much better than when we started. But I couldn't get myself "up" to do well with the workout and took a long time to get through it all. It was a good thing that I had nothing special to do today.

Getting back to Adrian and Emiko's blog, I put myself on a strict diet about eight years ago and got my weight down from 106 to 81kg (a medical examination had told me I was 25% overweight - I didn't believe it until I actually got the weight off). Recently it had edged up to 92kg.

Anyway, the point of my ramble is to comment on what Abel and everyone is saying. It isn't actually that Adrian is too skinny, it is that modern society accepts being overweight as the norm - so many people told me that I had become too thin, even though I was exactly where the doctor told me I should be. You know, "you are tall, you can carry it" and other similar comments. The fact is that being overweight is not good for us but we just accept it most of the time. And we then come to equate overeating with pleasure and the feeling of being too full as being the way we should feel after eating.

So Tim's answer to the question "when are we supposed to start caring about our diets?" is straight away!! A lot of our eating habits are just that, habits. I still retain a lot of good patterns from the previous diet. I'm not sure whether it was actually bad for me or not, but I decided to cut out gluten. This means no wheat, barley, rye or oats. That is no bread or cakes and therefore no hidden calories in the form of butter and sugar that gets put into those things. I was brought up on sandwiches. particularly as a bedtime snack, but once I had made the change, it was easy to say no. And I had already switched over to brown rice (I actually think it tastes better too).

I can only second what Adrian and Emiko said "moderation is actually the key to happiness". We can always imagine that we need to have "more". More food, more travel, more possessions. But they don't make us happier and the desire for more can never be fulfilled so it just makes us unhappier. The people who are content are that way because they accept that what they have is, by and large, "enough".

And of course, PCP is not about doing more (although that is not the way my workout seems this week), it is about doing enough, the right amount to get us into peak condition.

By the way, I get a bit introspective after I've been sick. Having too much time on my hands makes me question the human condition (and mine in particular). I watched a video on YouTube this afternoon called " Zeitgeist Addendum" suggesting that we should switch from a system driven by profit maximisation to the detriment of the planet and the human race as a whole (why do we permit so many people to go hungry?) to one that is committed to the intelligent management of the Earth's resources.