Plus Sizes and Personal Expectations

Intrepid PCPer Melanie wrote a post the other day that gets at something that's been on my mind for a while. At issue was the following photo which was buried in the back of Glamour magazine a few months ago next to an article about finding what's beautiful about you as a woman and not beating yourself up about your flaws.


Pictured is a plus size model looking extremely happy and content with herself, despite some extra dimples and rolls on her stomach and thighs. The readers of Glamour were apparently elated at the image of a "regular woman" and showered the magazine with thanks and praise.

Now, here's the question Melanie raised and which I've been pondering myself for awhile.

"Is this lady in good shape?"

Clearly, she's healthy (she's 20 years old so that shouldn't be a surprise) but she's not what we'd call in Peak Condition. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if this model approached me and said, "I'd like to lose these last 15 pounds and get some tone," I'd be all for it and get her PCPing with the very next group, without fretting that at a size 12 she represents the average American woman.

The balancing act with body image is being comfortable with who you are but still open to improvement and exploration. Getting in shape need not be an exercise in self-flagellation about how fat you are and how thin you'd be if you could only muster the willpower. A healthy approach is to say, "Ok, this is where I am now, and I'm going to give it everything I've got and see where it takes me."

Being overweight or carrying around a few rolls of fat is not the end of the world. It's just the state your body's in, and can be changed relatively easily given time and consistency. If you don't have the drive or desire to give it those two things, then stop worrying about it and get comfortable with how you look. But if you feel some psychological dissonance, a pesky voice in the back of your head that says, "I look like this, but I don't feel like the kind of person who looks like this," then start making changes.

Here's the bottom line. Those rolls of fat are perfectly fine. They pose no serious risk to health and don't detract from this woman's beauty. But they didn't magically appear there. They were added on layer by layer through a consistent consumption of calories that were never burned away through exercise. There's no shame in that, in fact, any diet that has even a small portion of modern food products will almost inevitably lead to that result simply because we can now cram so many calories into unfulfilling processed foods.

But to celebrate this woman as an average sized American is to airbrush over the fact that the American average is severely out of whack. Here's a recent batch of statistics for the US:

• 58 Million Overweight; 40 Million Obese; 3 Million morbidly Obese

• Eight out of 10 over 25's Overweight

• 78% of American's not meeting basic activity level recommendations

• 25% completely Sedentary

• 76% increase in Type II diabetes in adults 30-40 yrs old since 1990

So, embracing the average will, in this case, still make you look and feel pretty terrible. Not that the uberskinny models gracing the other 200 pages of Glamour are a good alternative.

The way through all this is simply taking long, lighthearted look at yourself in the mirror. Give yourself a wink and a smile for the parts you like, and assess not only what parts you're dissatisfied with but how much you're willing to do to be more satisfied. If you're not ready to put the time in and take the snack foods out, then you should probably work on accepting those unflattering areas. But if you feel a serious and steely drive to finally get your body exactly where you want it, then go for it. A steady application of a good diet and fitness plan will get you results, it's not a matter of faith, it's just the physics of calorie consumed/calorie used.

I'm not in the business of telling people they can't do things or that they should accept "pretty good." In all of my work I demand a lot from my students and clients, and they consistently deliver in spades. When you set low goals for yourself, like losing a few pounds before beach season, output is similarly lackluster. Big goals result in deep drive, if you've got a plan.

In other words, while we should be happy to see a healthy well fed person depicted in a fashion magazine, that doesn't mean we can't do a lot better.

Dumb Muscles

If you've ever spent time in a gym, you've probably seen some figure like this on the side of one of the circuit training machines.

So you contort your way into the machine, and crank away a few dozen reps, secure in the knowledge that you're strengthening your quads/triceps/lats or whatever the little diagram says you're working. You work your way through all the machines and voila, you've hit every muscle group and gotten a total body workout!

I'm not going to lie to you, doing machine workouts will get you results. Your muscles will gain a lot of size and if you're one of the few people on top of your diet you can get amazing tone. I can tell the moment I meet someone if they work out primarily on machines. They have what I call "machine molded" muscles. You know the type, each muscle group stands out on its own, and they resemble the "textbook" musculature found on superhero action figures.

But, (and you knew this was coming) here's the catch. Machine molded muscles are also "dumb muscles." What machine users are missing is that your workout happens primarily in your brain. Every time you do an exercise, you are etching that pattern into your cerebral cortex. By isolating a muscle with a machine, you are also isolating the neuron pathways that accompany it. What this means is that your hard won muscle isn't very useful for anything besides that one exclusive action that the machine guides you through. So you've got a body bulked up with dozens of muscles that don't know how to talk to each other. The result? You can do 100s of lat pull downs,


...but barely eke out 6 pull-ups.I have tried this with lots of people at the fitness center and found it to be true every time. Try it on your local gym rat-friend today! The reason? A pull-up is a compound movement calling on the back, core, shoulders and forearm to smoothly lift the body through space. If you took a brain scan of someone doing a pull up I'm sure you'd see areas of the brain lighting up everywhere.

The lat pull-down, while almost the same movement, is calling on one specific muscle group moving along a guided track. It's a "dumb," boring exercise. (Did you note that TV on the wall in that circuit training picture? Ask a PCPer if it's possible to watch TV while doing one of our workouts!)

Machine workouts were certainly a revolution when they came out in the 70s and 80s, but I'm not sure they're doing anyone that much good. The irony is that using all these machines doesn't seem to give you any better athletic performance.

No professional athlete will ever have that bubbly molded look. From gymnasts to "worlds strongest men" competitors, muscles built on the real work of moving the body through 3D space just look different. Furthermore, the gains from machine built muscles tend to evaporate quickly when you catch a cold, go on vacation, or have a busy few weeks at the office. Not so with integrated smart muscles based on compound real world movements.

But the most damaging thing about machines is that they take away your independence. Fitness and strength become outsourced to your local gym. You get the message that without that special building with that special equipment and that special trainer you don't have a shot at getting in shape. As we prove here week after week, that's simply untrue. Your own body-weight and the most rudimentary of tools will get you farther than the most high-tech of gyms.

We're learning the hard way that you can't just take a vitamin supplement and be healthy. You have to eat a bunch of vegetables as part of a balanced diet. Similarly, working on a very small sliver of your musculature on a machine does very little to get you towards true fitness. You might look fit, but in essence the changes you've made are primarily cosmetic.

So, to state it flatly, are you training for the life that awaits you outside, or for the mirror in your bathroom?

3 Techniques to Disarm Mallory Eating

When asked why he continued his pursuit to summit Mt. Everest, the explorer George Mallory famously said, "because it's there." So I've coined a term for a very peculiar type of eating that we've all engaged in at one time or another.

You're sitting around the house, kind of restless, and you notice a slice of cold pizza in the fridge. You're not particularly hungry, but without a second thought you take it and nibble on it while surfing the web for something interesting to read. If someone stopped you there and said, "Why did you just eat that!?" you'd probably end up saying something close to, "well, because it was there." That's what I call Mallory Eating. It can take on many forms. A bowl of nuts, a stale piece of bread at the end of the loaf, an open bag of sweets, a half drunk bottle of soda, leftovers from Chinese takeout, it doesn't seem to matter much, if it's there on the counter or shelf, it has a high likelihood of ending up in our stomachs.

I'm sure there's a deep biological reason we fall for Mallory Eating. Our hunter gatherer ancestors must have been constantly on the lookout for the chance berry or small animal. If it was there, you had better eat it, because who knew when the next food supply would come?

These instincts only serve to undermine our health goals in a world of plentiful food however. Because they seem like such small snacks, we don't realize that over the course of a week Mallory Eating will add several hundred calories to your daily intake.

So I offer three techniques to free you from Mallory Eating forever.

The first is white belt level:

Just remove all these snack-type foods from your home. Easy as that. The pull of Mallory Eating is the accessibility and ease of eating. It's not as if you are suddenly seized with the desire to whip up a soufflé. If you take away easy to eat stuff, you won't eat as much. Simple as that. It's easy to beat a craving when nothing is there to trigger it.

This also has the advantage of clarifying how bad you really want to eat something. If you're willing to do some cooking or make it to a store to get the snack you're after, that must mean you really want it, and it's probably ok.

Next, a blue belt technique.

Replace the unhelpful snack foods with healthy ones. The bowl of salted nuts changes for a bowl of baby carrots. The half-eaten bag of potato chips becomes a half eaten apple. The soda becomes herbal tea. Surrounding yourself with these kind of foods will turn Mallory Eating into a diet booster. If you eat healthy food frequently throughout the day, your metabolism will stay ramped up and you'll end up burning more calories than the old idea of 3 square meals a day. This is a blue belt technique because it requires a bit of planning and discipline to make sure healthy choices are not only in the house in raw form but prepped enough that they are ready to go as a snack food. Some of my favorite healthy snacks include:

Carrot, daikon, celery and cucumber sticks (often eaten with miso or yogurt dip).
Hard boiled egg whites with cottage cheese in the hollow instead of the yolk.
Apple slices in water.
String cheese.
Dried fruit.
Steamed vegetables.
A jug of iced herbal tea.

You'll have to change some shopping and eating habits to get to this level, but it's not that hard.

Finally, the black belt counter to Mallory Eating.

Surround yourself with as many unhealthy, fattening foods as you can, and simply don't eat them. Buy a bag of delicious cookies, open it, give one to a friend, and then just leave the bag there. Pass it everyday, think how easy and tasty that cookie would be, but don't eat it. Because that's not the kind of stuff you eat anymore.

This technique is especially useful if you live with other people, but will obviously take a lot of mental strength. Anyone can resist the first 3 or 4 times, but it's only the truly strong who can let an entire bag of cookies be eaten or go stale without having a single one. Ultimately this final technique will be the one that will benefit you most, because they second you step out the door you are in a world of Mallory Eating. Every newstand, checkout counter, bakery, and cafe, will have dozens of scrumptious snacks there for the taking. Moving through this glut of snack food serenely and without attachment is the mark of someone with a mature and balanced relationship with food. This doesn't imply that you'll become immune to the desire for unhealthy snacks. The black belt level simply means that you hear the cravings and urges, but recognize them as passing and meaningless feelings, not things you must act on.

Good luck. George Mallory didn't survive his fascination with Mt. Everest, but I'm sure you have a shot at beating all the little Everests that make up an average day trying to be as healthy as possible.

Chew on This

I was thinking today, I've taught over 2500 yoga classes in the past few years, which comes out to over 3000 hours on the mat and who knows how many students.

I've been teaching meditation since my freshman year of college, again, thousands of sessions, thousands of people.

And since I got fed up enough with my weight issues that I created The Peak Condition Project, I've led hundreds of workouts with all kinds of people.

And you know what? In all those thousands of experiences, I have never seen a single person leave the studio, zendo, or workout space in a worse mood than they came in. Not one.

It's pretty incredible actually. We have at our fingertips the ability to feel better, more balanced, more positive, and it costs next to nothing and is available anytime.

And yet on any given night I can find more people in the nearest bar than at my yoga studio. Many many more. Expensive, short term, drug based happiness, that sip by sip tears down the body and brain.

When I lay it out like that it makes me kind of sad. But all I have to do is look at all those hard working people rocking their PCPs and I feel refreshed and ready for the next day. So thank you clients, students, and friends for all the inspiration you give me.

We're definitely on a two way street here!