Making Connections

A crispy edge cuts the air. Red hues creep across the leaves. School begins today. The seasons are changing, and so is this blog.

Over the summer I have done interviews about my book What a Body Knows with radio personalities around the country—men and women, Christian and new age, conservative and liberal, credentialed and not. Many times I have been heartened by the words: People need to hear this. Some people. Some where. I am starting to listen.

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear some report or read some news piece and think about how my work could offer a different perspective and enrich the discussion.

Hence the new focus of this blog: I plan to make connections with articles and authors, books and blogs that are concerned with issues raised in What a Body Knows. It is time to map the range and reach of my emerging philosophy of bodily becoming, and provide a place for others to do the same. Chime in! Here goes.
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On August 18, Natalie Angier, one of my favorite science writers, published a fascinating column in the New York Times about how the “Brain is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop.” In its August 17th issue, Time magazine weighed in with a cover story by John Cloud on "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin."

Both stories miss what links them together and what What a Body Knows teaches: that bodily movement is the key to helping us find wisdom in our desires.

Take the stress loop. As Angier reports, researchers have discovered among deliberately-stressed (i.e., shocked, bullied, and nearly-drowned) rats, that the rodents were “cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over.” The centers of the brain governing habit formation bloomed. Provided with a bar they could press for a food pellet or a squirt of sugar water, the stressed rats “had difficulty deciding when to stop pressing the bar,” even when they no longer wanted to eat.

Angier links these findings back to the allostasis of our dynamic stress response system, which is designed to maintain control by causing marked changes in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle activity, and the like. As she says, we “dance to the beat.”

Meanwhile, Cloud reports that exercise does not lead to weight loss. The reasons are many, but one rises above the rest. Most exercise does not burn enough calories to make a difference. Even when we burn some calories, we tend to overcompensate for whatever we have burned, rewarding ourselves for our efforts and eating more than we otherwise would have done.

Angier characterizes the stress loop as “vicious” and “sinister,” though she admits it might be helpful in a crisis for shunting as many behaviors as possible to “automatic pilot.” Cloud laments that exercise is of little value in the fight against obesity, though reminding us that it is still good for our general health.

What is missing from these discussions, and what links them together, is what our bodies know.

In the case of Angier, for example, heightened habit formation is not the problem. Nor is stress itself. The problem is that we get stuck in stress because the habits we form are ones that reinforce the causes of the stress. In What a Body Knows, I call it cereal box logic. In responding to our sense of frustration or dissatisfaction, we resort to the same strategies that got us into trouble in the first place.

The fact, then, that our stress responses are making us more stressed is a sign of our bodily wisdom not stupidity. For this finding indicts the mind-over-body thinking, feeling, and acting that most people raised in American culture rely upon to cope. As I have described in earlier posts, this mind-over-body sense of ourselves is what we are taught, what we master, who we believe we are. It is one way of sensing ourselves, but not the only one.

If we were to adopt a stress response that shifted our experience of ourselves away from a mind-over-body sense, then the repetition of it would work to release us from the self-reinforcing stress cycle.

Doing so, however, is not a matter of willpower. Nor is it simply a matter of "relaxing." It involves cultivating a sensory awareness of our bodily selves regardless of what we are doing. It involves moving to breathe and breathing to move (see posts in Jan-Feb 2008), engaging in the kinds of bodily movement that draw our attention down and out and through our sensory selves.

Here is where exercise comes in, and its crucial role in our relationship to food. The value of exercise in this relationship has little or nothing to do with burning calories. More important is the bodily movement itself. Bodily movement has the potential for drawing our awareness out of our minds and into our bodies, and so that the loops of our mind-over-body stress responses loosen and fall. When they do, we stop pushing the bar for that extra squirt of sugar water. We don't have to--we don't want to--for we know a deeper pleasure, the pleasure of feeling and finding our own sense of enough.
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I spent last week at the Washington County Fair. My three older children were there for the week, showing their Jersey cows. The fair overloads the senses. Barn fans whirr with an incessant, fly-chasing drone. Milk-machine-powering generators hum. The screams of truck and tractor engines pulling harder than they should punctuate the afternoon. Voices crest and collide. Dust and dirt swirl and stick. It is a stressful situation for a new mother, namely me, with infant in tow. I empathize with Angier's rats.

After a few hours, a feeling of disease slides over me. I start retreating from my sensory self. I start thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. I can’t stop thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. And the butterscotches. The coffee treats. Then I know. It is time for a walk.

I leave the fair grounds, striding hard through the surrounding fields packed with parked cars. The attendants look at me strangely, wondering where I am going. No where. Just around—around the largest perimeter I can make. Striding. Breathing. Releasing. Being. Becoming. Feeling. Knowing. Dropping into my bodily self.

Suddenly my thoughts shift. I am the movement that is making me. Visions of caramels fade into pictures of what I really want. To write that article. To connect with this friend. To make plans for the school year. Back in myself, I head back to the fair, reconnected, ready to begin again.
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What connections can you make?

On Television!

I had a problem. It was a high quality problem, yes, but a problem nonetheless.

I was going to be on television--Albany's channel 13, interviewed by anchor Benita Zahn about my book, What a Body Knows. I had already recorded the interview at the studio, earlier in the week on Wednesday, after arriving an hour before I was due in my determination not to be late. The interview had been short and sweet, and I did want to see it.

The problem was that we don't have television reception here at Hebron Hollow. How was I going to watch the show?

While this problem was challenging enough, it was compounded by two others having to do with timing. For one, I wasn't sure which day the interview was going to air. At first we had planned it for Sunday morning, May 10th, Mother's Day. However, at the studio I watched as Benita recorded a second interview with a more-time-sensitive competitor for that same Sunday spot. So, I learned, my interview might air on Saturday, May 9th instead. Fine enough, I could be flexible, but how would I know when to tell people to watch... and record?

The second sub-problem concerned the time of day. The interview was supposed to air on the morning news, sometime between 8 and 9 AM. Whose house could I crash at that hour of the day?

On Friday night I hear the news: your interview will air on Saturday, between 8:30 and 9, probably close to 8:45. I am still chewing on my multiple-part problem.

A sudden brainstorm bursts: the health club where I have been swimming through this pregnancy. Don't they have a television in that front conference-area room?

I call. "Sure, we have a television you can watch."

Saturday morning I go to the health club early, pop in the pool for a bliss-stirring swim, and dress in time for my channel 13 debut. I go to the trainer who has kindly promised to set me up with a screen. He leads me into the weight and cardio room. I haven't been in this part of the club before. The curtains are always closed, and it isn't on the route connecting front desk, pool, and showers. He leads me to an exercise bike, which I instantly see is equipped with its own closed circuit television. There is a beautiful flat face, clear controls, and a pair of comfortable earphones. Looking around I realize that nearly every piece of cardio gear has its own television, and on the ones in use, those televisions are on.

I sit up on the seat of the bicycle--not exactly an arm chair--and we find the channel. I am good to go. I look around again. I can only see two other machine-users' screens, but they aren't turned to channel 13. Don't they know?!

I wait through a few advertisements, and then the weather. It is a very long weather report. I hardly hear any of it. Finally, the moment comes. Here I am, alone in a crowd, propped up on my exercise bike, watching... myself.

Towards the end comes the line that I know is coming. I am talking about the kind of bodily movement that can help us shift our experience of our bodies and desires. This movement, I am saying, is not where we treat our bodies like pets needing a walk--or propel our exercise bikes while watching television. At the time, I hadn't meant to say that such exercising is "bad"--it isn't!--only that it is more likely to reinforce than to evolve our felt sense of ourselves as minds over bodies.

Still, the irony persists. Here I am, on a health club exercise bike, watching myself on television talking about (not) watching television on an exercise bike!

Glad I had my swim.

Here is the clip:

Myth 4: Exercise to Lose Weight

“I can’t do yoga!” said the voice that clanged in my head. “I need to burn calories!”

There was a time when the voice ruled. I was convinced that unless I did some vigorous aerobic activity—running, biking, swimming, or walking—I was sure to balloon out. I needed to exercise and daily, so that I could eat without worry.
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It is a familiar line—a causal link drawn between exercise and weight. We hear it and barely blink. It seems so reasonable, the flip side of the diet myth (Mar. 18). If the difference between energy in and energy out determines the heft of our fat stores, then all we need to do is add more exercise to our lives and the pounds we don’t need will disappear. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that we exercise to maintain weight. The American Heart Association and American College of Sports Medicine agree. Nutritionists say so too. Because science says so. Or does it?

Another diet myth is fading. The exercise-equals-weight-loss hypothesis took root in the late 60s, and since that time its veracity has been impossible to prove. (In preceding decades, it was assumed that exercise promotes weight gain or at best, slows the rate of loss.) When the myth hatched, it was based on two studies that have not been replicated. Still, it spread rapidly and for decades it has reigned, despite the lack of clinical evidence. A review of relevant literature in 2000 concluded that the relationship between exercise and weight is “complex.” While exercise may help some who lose weight keep it from coming back as quickly; it helps others who lose weight pack it on again. (See Taubes)

Why the lack of confirming evidence for what seems like common sense? A story line is emerging.

For one, experts say, the vast majority of us don’t exercise enough to make a difference. We overestimate our calorie expenditure—often forgetting to subtract our base metabolic burn off, for example—and then overcompensate in what we eat. We run a quarter mile (expending 25 calories) then “treat” ourselves to a piece of pie (for 400). (See Kolata)

Second, even when we do exercise strenuously, our hunger keeps pace, holding our body weight in place, if not immediately then in the next day. In the case of lean athletes, moreover, it may be that a biological propensity to spend energy propels them into extreme sports in the first place, rather than the reverse.

Thus, just as scientists are discovering that diets don’t work and offering an explanation based on a body’s weight-maintaining powers (Mar 18), so too they are discovering that exercise doesn’t work, and for a similar reason. Our bodily processes for metabolizing food are so crafty and complicated that they defy our efforts to control them, whether we diet, exercise, or both together. Desire is to blame.

Are we doomed to a fruitless struggle with a voracious desire and an expanding waistline? Is there no way to guarantee that we can and will have the bodies we want?

The questions betray the anxiety that our diet culture breeds. We are obsessed with food, with the pleasure we might have or miss, with the shape and size and look of our bodies, and spurred on at every turn by a sensory education that trains us to think and feel and act as if we were minds living in bodies. If our bodies defy control, what will become of us?

When we shift to the perspective of bodily becoming, however, these apparent “failures” appear in a new light: offering proof that our mind over body strategies for navigating our relationship to food are not giving us what we want.

How so? The movements we are making are making us. From this perspective, the apparent resistance of our bodies to diet or exercise is what we are creating. This resistance is not an unfortunate obstacle we encounter on our path to pleasure; it is what our practices are generating in us. We are creating ourselves into people who are addicted to diets, anxious about our fitness, and arduously at war with ourselves in the name of our own well being. The movements we are making as we attempt to reduce our energy intake or increase output are creating us into people who sense and respond to our desires with suspicion and dread—as if they were alien creatures, rather than who we are. We learn to believe that we can and should hold this stance over and against our desires for food, and feel guilty when we cannot. Yet doing so is like trying to hold our breath. If we go too long, we black out. Our bodies take over and we breathe—or eat—again.

The problem, then, is not that our bodies lie beyond our control. The problem is that we are creating a relationship with ourselves in which our bodies feel like they are out of control. We act as if they are, failing to cultivate their potential to guide us in eating in ways that will nourish our health and well being.

From the perspective of bodily becoming, our desires for food are us. They are who we are. And how we sense and respond to these desires, whether we move with or against them, creates us as the bodily selves we are.

We are born needing to eat, but not knowing how. The genetic potential is there, but not its expression. We know enough to suck and swallow, but not much more. Our sensations of pleasure and pain guide us in popping in and spitting out. Over time, as we move towards what gives us the pleasure of being nourished and away from what doesn’t, we create and become the patterns of sensation and response that focus and refine what it is we want. We not only learn what to desire, we also learn how to sense and respond to our desire when it wells in us.

It is this learning process that scientific methods have yet to map or measure. It is this learning process that has proven exceedingly vulnerable to the myths of our desire-denying diet culture. And it is this learning process that we can choose to participate in consciously by cultivating our sensory awareness. As we do, we can shift our experience of our desire for food, strengthen its powers of discernment, and learn to follow the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough.
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It took a while, but the lived experience of practicing yoga finally won out. Yoga, I realized, doesn’t just exercise my muscles. Its value is much greater. Moving in and out of the yoga postures exercises a sense of myself that counters my mind over body training—and the voice that screams "burn calories!" My movement is making me (Feb. 13).

My experience of my desire for food shifts. Suddenly it is no longer a question of struggling to control calories in and out. It is a question of learning to honor and trust the rhythms of my hunger, the subtleties in my experiences of eating. Then I know too what good any "exercise" can be: an opportunity to move, to breathe, to open our senses, and to drop in to what our bodies know about how, when, and what to eat. This wisdom is the best resource we have in finding the satisfaction we seek.

Next week: what we desire from food, and why we can and should develop our capacity to trust it.