Eight Days in the Grand Canyon (Supplement 1): My Physical Take-Away

A few months ago, I was texting with a friend of mine and I mentioned that I'd been working on getting in shape for our trip to the Grand Canyon. (See previous post for a full account of the adventure.) He immediately made fun of me: he had seen the trip and knew it was motorized -- not a paddling trip like one we had taken on the pretty deadly Upper Gauley river in West Virginia, a few decades ago -- so he good-naturedly accused me of being dramatic. I shared a laugh at the joke; but I told him that I really wanted to be in shape for the side-hikes and other physical challenges of the trip. And the heat. (Though, there really was no preparing for that heat.) 

For a few months, I went, every day, to a three mile system of trails near my New Jersey home. I'd wait for the hottest time of the day (or, at least, not worry about how hot it was) and I would walk my usual paths and then speed-climb a central hill (the lazily-named "Blueberry Hill") two or three times before going back to the trail head.

On the Canyon trip, as a result, I was pretty proud of how I held up. I felt strong on the trails, the whole time. My back was good (occasional issues there, in the past) and I suffered no aches and pains. (I had started out taking Advil, preemptively, at night, but I stopped that on the third of eight days.) My cardio was pretty solid the whole time: no excessive panting with climbs and camp setups/breakdowns; no insane heart-thumping. 

It all raises the question of the connection between weight and fitness -- a question that has been a central one for my wife and me for the past year or so. 

I am simply not at a weight I want to be. I'm at least twenty pounds over, by my standards. Maybe, at this point, I have to admit that I have been telling myself a lie for years: that wanting to be thin is not out of vanity. I think it may be, but I also think that might be okay.

I used to say that my desire to be thin is a result of two things: 1) How I feel. 2) Having this notion that I have a "thin mind," so I want my body to follow suit. It just helps with social clarity. 

Well, when it comes to No. 1: I feel pretty good now and it is because I have been moving. I'm 54. My joints and muscles feel good. My back is fine. I can motor along on a trail or scramble up rocks with the best of them... If I keep my regimen of hiking and stretching up, I should keep feeling this way. 

Then, I see myself in pictures, and I think: Who the heck is that? He looks neither like the guy in my head nor the guy in the mirror. (I can only hope that it's true about pictures adding ten pounds and some quick research shows it is probably true, so I got that going for me...) Sometimes I look at pictures of myself and tell my wife that I look like Peter Griffin, from Family Guy. I say this to be funny, but it also kind of hurts the old pride.

I do have thin mind. That, I keep in shape with constant exercise. I may not be a genius, but there is certainly no belly flab in the old mellon. 

Maybe I need to see all of this as a prompt for a separation of thought. I used to look at diet and exercise the way we are told to: as partnered weight-loss efforts. For me, it's better to think of them as separate goals: Exercise makes me feel good, physically; weight loss makes me feel good mentally. 

And both are important, right?

In the end, I guess it is more important to be strong than to be pretty. We'll see where that takes me. 

It's Bad to Be Fat

It's bad to be fat. It's bad for your body.

Agreement, so far? We all know this. The medical community is pretty much solidly behind the idea.

Big guy. 

But in a world in which the the popular concept of "freedom" is that nothing is wrong and that nothing that can be considered "offensive" can be said, one has to -- unless he is wearing a lab coat -- be careful about saying that it is bad to be fat. (Not only that, but a word other than "fat" needs to be used...)

One might, heaven forbid, become a "body-shamer."

So, obesity, slowly but surely, has become "curvy" and women have started to "own" their obesity -- to strut their obesity. No one is allowed to say anything, because it is okay to be "big and beautiful."

Sure it is okay. As long as you don't want to live a long and active life. As long as you don't mind little diabetic inconveniences, later in life, like blindness and amputations. As long as you are cool with a fatal myocardial infarction at forty-five. Sure -- go ahead. Be big and beautiful. And you can be beautiful at any weight; it's just not good for you. If you can be fat and beautiful but still be beautiful if you are thin, the logical choice is to be thin and beautiful, for you. It ain't easy, but it does make sense.

We a culture of extremes; of the proverbial pendulum. A normal woman of average weight is "plus-sized" in the modeling world and a woman who is morbidly obese is "curvy" in popular discourse. Sophia Loren is curvy. Melissa McCarthy is obese. Sophia, as far as I know, remains healthy in her eighties. Melissa might not be so lucky -- though I hope she lives to be a hundred, God-willing.

And guys? The "dad-bod" is now, according to the media, officially "in." I hear men saying, I'm a "big guy." But I would argue that while Liam Neeson, at 6'4and about 225, is a "big guy," John Candy was fat -- and how I miss him; maybe my favorite comic actor of all time.

Of course, I am not suggesting that we go around telling people how fat they are, but that we should stop teaching our children, by tip-toeing examples born out of a collective social desire to make everyone feel perfect, that all of the pressure is off when it comes to body size.

Obese guy. 

Anorexia and bulimia are still horrifyingly prevalent problems, especially for young women, but for men, too. For God's sake, lets get the message out that your average American woman is in the 160s, not in the 120s. Let's get the impossible role models in check; let's get the word out that 140 is plenty sexy. But let's not send the message that obesity is a good choice.

As with everything, balance is the key: let's not encourage obesity and let's not set impossible expectations of skinniness. Can we do this? Fat is fat. and it just is not good for your body.

I and mine have worked hard to fight being fat for as long as I can remember. For me it is a quest meant to help me, when I am older, to "go down standin' up." I want to be strong as long as I can. Sure, I think I look much better at 205 than I do at 240, but there's stuff that is more important than that. And I can't stand by and watch my sons eat themselves into bad health. It has to be about facts; not image. It has to be about logic and not emotion.

If we can't be honest, the Utopia of Non-Offense that we are trying to create is worthless.