Allergic to Happiness?
The relationships between my body and my emotional states are (understandably) inextricably intertwined and complex. But sometimes the cause and effect is so simple that I don't even really recognize it for a long time. When I first got contact lenses, I loved them, though they were difficult to put in and take out. A few months after that I started feeling really tired all of the time. I couldn't understand my exhaustion, I (being something of a hypochondriac) kept thinking I had some thyroid problem or some such. I would sleep a lot, but mostly it was just like I was tired all the time. In class I would yawn consistently. I would want to close my eyes. I would rub my eyes a lot.

Wait. My eyes?

And that's when I figured out that what was happening was that my contacts were drying my eyes out, which my brain was interpreting as he needs sleep. When I changed brands and started using eyedrops, no more sleepyhead. In fact, I sometimes still use eyedrops to wake up. So, it's kind of like method acting, except unintentional.

I'm discovering a similar relationship between depression and allergies to pollen-ish stuff. One symptom of depression for me is an acheyness in my face. That sounds weird, I know, but it is a pretty definite way in which I feel depressed. When I'm depressed, my eyelids feel heavy, I feel like I have huge weights on my lower lids, my face feels puffy. Part of the listlessness that can come from depression for me is how my whole face feels droopy--my whole body too, but I feel it more in my face. I get a sort of tunnell-vision when I'm depressed, too, and--strange as this may sound--it sort of feels like it comes from my face being unmovable to some degree.

All of these things are difficult to describe. Pehraps I can get better at describing it as time goes on.

The interesting thing for me is that I also feel a lot of this when I'm perfectly happy, but having some reaction to pollen. Springtime usually consists of some adjustment of my sinuses and such. Usually I do adjust, but for a while my face and body feel achey, my eyes feel heavy...many of the same things that I feel when I'm depressed. And the thing is, I think I sort of become depressed as a part of that. Not to a huge degree, but there it is. My face feels lazy, I feel lazy...and the connection between lethargy and depression is a close one for me as well.

What to do about it? Well, recognizing it helps, because I can think to myself, "Hmm...actually, I think I just need to take an allergy pill or exercise a bit (which seems to relieve the symptoms for a while no matter the cause)". But here's another thing--I think knowing this I might just try to do something like face exercises or something. This seems all-too-new-agey for me, but I think it might help. I think that one of the reasons that, say, laughing makes me happier might be because it mixes up my face a bit, gets me out of that lethargy somewhat that my brain associates with a droopy little face. Maybe smiling some might make me happier? Or, maybe even frowning some might!
Filed under:Health and Therapy

Body Flux
Changing my exercise regimen yet again. I suppose at some point I have to recognize that part of the fun of exercising is mixing it up, making changes. Part of me would just like to do the same thing all the time, forever and ever, actually. I definitely have a facet of my personality that embraces habit to the nth degree. But I think it's important for me to see exercise as something that I enjoy for various reasons, something that I enjoy for the long-term effects (i.e. health), but also because of the intrinsic joy it can bring (i.e. the good feelings during a workout). Another facet of enjoying exercise can be the planning/listmaking/goalsetting/goal achieving involved.

My goal has never been to 'loose weight'. From the outset that just seemed like the wrong sort of goal to set; it buys into the various unhealthy attitudes about the body that I want to avoid. Which is not to say that the goals I do have (to feel healthier, to be healthier, to enjoy my body more, to feel more attractive--this is not an exhaustive list!) can't be tied to 'losing weight'--but they can't be directly tied to it, and, in some cases, may be antithetical to it (i.e. I want to gain muscle mass, and gaining mass tends to mean gaining weight!).

The Way Things Have Shaped Up
For the first 8 or 9 months of my exercise changes, while I resisted the goal of 'losing weight', I embraced some effects that aren't unrelated to losing weight. Mostly I loved that my waistline was getting smaller. More holes in the ol' belt, and that felt good. It felt good for other reasons--I can breathe more easily, I'm more comfortable sitting at a desk for extended periods (though I fidget more now, I think, as a kind of weird exercise) and the like. I also was obviously losing fat in various parts of my body. My arms were showing more definition, my face was losing some of its fullness, my shoulders look more taut. My legs, which have always been sort of the region of my body that I was most happy with, became even more muscular and showed even more definition. My chest was getting slightly more definition, too, and losing a bit of fat.

And then recently I recognized how much time I was spending exercising, and started to feel a little bit strange about it--there were other things I wanted to do. Part of this is finally seeing light at the end of the breakup tunnel: When I first started exercising, part of the whole thing was to give myself something healthy to do, to keep my body and mind more occupied, so that I didn't dwell on the sadness as much. Now that I'm less sad, my interests are multiplying again, and exercising must be factored in among them more than it had to be before. So I compromised, decided to cut down on cardio a bit, do a little bit less on the weights, but keep the number of times a week I did things the same. I wasn't sure what effect this would have, as my body is just in a general state of flux all the time these days, what with changes in mood, diet and exercise.

Part of the effect is that I ended up just doing less exercising. Which isn't a bad thing necessarily. But then, my appetite began to grow again. Exercising, for me, seems to be the best sort of appetite suppressant, and more than that, it focuses me on eating more healthy--I tend to crave better stuff when I'm exercising, presumably because my body needs that stuff more when it's getting worked. So, combine less exercise and more eating, and what do you get? It's a pretty easy equation--the changes in my body began to slow, and my waist actually grew a little bit.

But even these changes aren't that simple. The whole time, I've been building muscle mass--and part of that has been in my abdomen. At least part of the gain in my waist has to do with this, I think. I've reached a point now where losing fat off my belly doesn't mean that my torso will get smaller--it might stay the same or even get bigger. And it will take a looooong time for definition to show in my abdomen, if it does at all. Different people carry most of their fat in different places, and that's where I carry mine. In fact, there's a way in which it might actually be unhealthy for my belly to lose enough fat to show much definition--it might mean that the rest of my body has less fat than it needs to have. And what I'm after is mainly health, so it's something to keep in mind.

Changes in the Making
So I do want to balance the various things I want to do in life, but I've come to realize something that is sort of suprising to me. I like exercising. At first I thought that maybe I was just trying to fool myself--the days where I decide to walk my bike up the hill after exercising for an hour and a half seemed to be evidence that I don't really like exercising: If I did like it, wouldn't I just do it all the time, whenever I can? And of course that's silly, and I'm srtarting to understand that the walking up the hill time simply reflects that I'm not as healthy as I'd like to be, and also reflects that there are different times to do different things. It does not mean, and I'm trying to keep this in mind, that my 'default' is to not be active. I'm figuring out that I don't think I really have a default, or that it can be changed through effort.

And keeping all that in mind changes how I decide to weigh (pun intended) my various options as far as what I like to do with my day. That is, for the first time in my life, really, I recognize that, sometimes, I want to exercise just as much if not more than I want to, say, read a book. Exercise is a priority. More importantly, I want it to be a priority. Which isn't to say that it's always the top priority--it clearly isn't, and I don't want it to be. But it's up there. And that's new for me.

Either/Or, and Identity
The either/or fallacy always creeps in here, and I begin to think that if I become more athletic, that I have to become less, say, academic. And there's some truth in that, in a way--if I were to always exercise instead of reading (which is infinitely rhetorical, because that would never happen, then it may be the case that things shift that significantly. But that's either/or thinking, and it doesn't match up with reality very well. In fact, if I increase exercise a bit, I may actually end up doing more reading. This is because these aren't my only two options--and that exercising more might actually cut out some other options. I'm less likely to sit and watch a movie, for instance, when I've been more active. I'm more likely to read, or to play guitar, etc.

And the thing is: I can be both a thinker and athletic (to various degrees!). Why is it that I have to keep reminding myself of that? The nonexistent dichotomies have grown some deep roots, that's for sure.
Filed under:Health and Philosophy

Back to the Body
I haven't posted in a while about how my exercising stuff is going. Contrary to consclusions to which one might jump, things are going pretty well on that front, which is partly why I haven't talked about it for a while. It's also changed from something that I am very, very excited about, to something that--while I do get excited about it from time to time, in good ways--has become part of my daily life to some extent, so it gets talked about and thought about less.

I have mixed feelings about this. Mostly I don't want to get bored by exercise, so I want to sort of stay excited about it. On the other hand, things that I don't get specifically excited about like eating, breathing, masturbating--are still very important to my life and aren't boring in any sense of the word, really. Ok, well, I guess I just threw 'masturbating' in there to see if you're paying attention. I still get specifically excited about that.

But as exercise becomes part of 'what I do' in my life, I'm more likely to just get excited about a particular new exercise or activity, I think. And that will happen, has happened. I walked around the lake the other day, and that was fun and new. Someday soon I may try a jog around there, which will be the first time I've run/jogged outside--the first time I've 'done a lap'--since high school, probably. So there is newness/excitement on the horizon in that way. (Oh! And I'm hoping to start doing yoga again in a few months. It's a cash-flow thing, but I think I've got it worked out, mostly.)

And the plus side of exercise just being a habit? Well, just that exercise is now a habit in my life. That is just something that I never really was hoping to achieve, really--or that I never let myself hope to achieve. And of course it's not something static; it could turn out that I get out of the habit rather quickly. But it's been around a year now that I've been exercising at least a few times a week. And that's pretty exciting. Not to mention it's been a few years now that I've been biking around. If I feel bored, wondering what I ought to do, I'm as likely to go for a walk or a bike ride (especially now that it's not raining) as I am to read. Ok, maybe not quite as likely--but it's now an option on the table, something else to enjoy. And that sure is nice.

One primary worry is that once I have some other things in my life--like, say, friends who make plans with me ahead of time or, wonder of wonders, a lover or two--the exercise will be the first to go. But here's my plan to keep that from happening: Don't ever make new friends or find new lovers. That should be easy.

No.

My real plan: Moderation. That's been the key to keeping the exercise stuff going, for turning it into a habit for me. The important thing, really, is that I keep doing it. Even if 'it' drops off quite a bit, or I have to start watching what I eat more, or paying more attention to how many calories I'm burning, the key is to just keep exercising, keep it as a habit. And the longer I do it, the easier it gets--in fact, it's getting sort of compulsory at this point. I'm finding that sitting around for 5-6 hours, something I used to be able to do no problemo, makes me antsy. Riding my bike home from Movie Night the other night at midnight showed me just how antsy I can get. I am now relieved when I get some exercise, a good deal of the time.

And how has all of this affected my body? In some ways, it's hard to tell. I look at pictures of myself from, say, 5 years ago, and I don't look that different. (Pictures from two years ago tell a different story--I've defninitely toned up since then, for instance.) But I know that I am different. I'm not in peak shape or anything--I still get winded when I wish I didn't, going up certain hills on the bike, for instance. But I'm certainly in the best shape of my 30s. Which are half over, by the way, next month. And in some ways I'm in the best shape of my life--especially where the mental and the physical intertwine. I don't tend to like to escape reality by binge eating as often, for instance--and exercise plays a big part in that. I also have some of the best body image of my life, even in the face of having my last lover find herself just not attracted to me any longer, which was a pretty bad blow. There are some wrinkles (erm, literally as well as figuratively): I tend to also be more picky about my body, to maybe look in the mirror too much, to want certain parts to change even more than I used to--but I think this is balanced out by the fact that I can sit in my chair at work and feel, really feel better about, say, my gut--not that it's so very much smaller than it used to be, but that it's getting smaller, and--more importantly--there's a layer of muscle under there that was never as thick as it is now. I'm stronger than I've ever been. That's my favorite mental/physical improvement: I'm optimistic, even about the stuff I don't enjoy about my body. And not only am I more optimistic about what I can become, what I may become, what I will become--I'm strangely more optimistic about the possibilities of lovers finding this body an object of desire. Which is, y'know, a pretty nice perk, even if it's all theoretical at present.



Filed under:Health