Getting off the treadmill

I started running at age forty, and after working myself up to a five-mile habit, began to notice knee pain. I kept at it, and ended up with sore knees. So I moved indoors, and ran on a treadmill, five miles still my benchmark. That ended in knee surgery and sound advice from a doctor: Stop doing that.

All the while my weight was increasing. It was almost as if there were no correlation between exercise and body fat, because I was surely in the upper percentiles in terms of physical exertion.

What I needed was a new lens through which to view the whole dynamic of self-discipline, exercise and body dynamics. I stumbled on it one night in a YouTube by Gary Taubes* in which he described the bloated and squat bodies of so many current-day Native Americans as opposed to the sleek, almost Adonis types that early settlers encountered. I followed his work and came to learn that exercise does not cause weight loss. It burns calories, and as a result we get hungry and eat more than we normally would. But calories-in-calories-out is a wild reduction of how our complex bodies really function.

These days I still use the gym, but I am not that grotesque and sweaty calorie burner pounding out those treadmill miles. My workouts are relatively mild, just for muscle tone and to get my heart rate up for a while. It also helps to heat up the muscles before stretching to avoid pulls and tears. My favorite exercise is walking, and because I have lost so much weight just by eliminating refined sugar from my diet, I am in equilibrium. Since I am not pounding my legs on the treadmill, they feel springy and energetic. Walking is a most pleasant experience. Uphll, downhill, it doesn’t matter. It’s just pleasant.

There is no magic elixir in life, no guarantee about future health or longevity. I might drop dead tomorrow and at age 61, and the Big C looms large for all of us as we get older. It has claimed my three brothers at ages 57, 67 and 69. (I am taking Social Security at age 62, by the way. Longevity does not seem to be in our genes.)

But I do know that most dietary wisdom in this country is bunk, that fat is a good thing and does not cause a buildup in body fat, and that all of the obesity and adult and juvenile diabetes going on around us is caused by sugar intake. Refined flour and rice might also play a role.

I also know that at the grocery store most of the aisles are filled with sugar-based products that are highly profitable to the manufacturers, and that in our society science is a stepchild of money. So people will be told to exercise like crazy to burn them calories, and to avoid fat in the diet, and that as a society we will keep getting heavier and sicker.

Oh yeah, and the dietary experts will blame it all on couch-potatoness and inability to do simple calorie arithmatic as they construct their money-centric food pyramids. The real cause of our problems, sugar, gets a pass because the people who manufacture our sugar-based diets also finance the research that says that treadmills are good and fatty diets bad.

Life is counterintuitive, very little is as we perceive it to be, which is why I am having such a fun time being alive. There is so much mystery about! I hope to make it to 70, which will be a family record.
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*Do your own stumbling.