Yummy tummy

On Saturday, I ate a bagel and cinnamon roll for breakfast. Not in a long while have I felt as horrendously out of energy, unable to concentrate, and distanced from my own body. My eyes were droopy, my head pulsating a soft headache in my right-side cranium, leaving my body feeling awfully slack and reminding me of my cat, Mars, stumbling through the house while waking from his anaesthetics after his annual haircut. It truly is marvellous how influential diet is on our behaviour and physical well-being; how defining what you feed your body and soul is to the quality of your day.

This morning, I started the day off with a natural yoghurt, raspberry, and granola smoothie. This allowed me an hour-long session at the gym, with core and cardio galore, increasing my training program weights and speed. When I came home, I ate seven slices of pancetta, with zucchini and capsicum tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper, before heading off to a power walk through Perth zoo. And only at five o’clock this afternoon, seven hours after waking up, was I once again hungry. While I only had to do four hours at the shoe shop yesterday - four sluggish, draining, long, long, long hours - I managed to enjoy a highly active Sunday today, without struggling with neither concentration nor awareness. These obvious facts still seem to amaze me every time I practice them in reality. 

I think it’s only in the last couple of years that people (wholeheartedly including myself) have truly started to realise: no matter how many times you sweat your butt off at the gym each week, it’s gonna make practically a squat, zero, nada, niente difference unless you accompany your hard ass self’s ordeals with a proper diet. Never in my training life have I encountered someone on the adjacent treadmill or weight’s section who’s convincingly said to me: 

“Oh, yeah, totally, I had a donut right before the gym and I feel great!”

You are what you eat, they say, and as I’ve mentioned in previous entries, I couldn’t agree more. But then again, maybe it’s the other way around, too. I certainly think that after a hard workout at the gym, there’s nothing more satisfying than a juicy, deliciously fresh apple. So perhaps it can kind of go like this too: You eat what you are. 

Goaldigger

I believe that the single most important thing when attempting to achieve an ambitious goal, is to be gentle and compassionate with yourself on the path towards it. Don’t feel too bad if you stagger along the way, or if you have to take unexpected rest stops in your climb to the top. Now, I’m not at all a good example of this attribute; for me, there’s nothing worse than saying I’m going to achieve something (no matter how ridiculously impossible it is), and then have something not go exactly according to my second by second plan. Thus, if I don’t go to the gym when I’ve said I would, it’s a personal disaster. Not because I feel less healthy or happy. Not even because I think I'm being lazy. If I don’t train on my scheduled day, I will criticise myself for the rest of that week. At the very least. If I don’t go, I’m the biggest failure in the world. So you can imagine the internal wars I’ve had going on this summer; in November, I decided I would go to the gym every single day until uni started (disease not inclusive, of course) in the beginning of March. I should’ve known better, if for no other reason than from my extensive experience in failing not in my goals, but in my time frame of those goals. Have you got any idea how hard it is to get your ass to the gym every single day? I would almost go as far as to say that, unless you’re a professional athlete whose job it is to work out, it’s almost completely impossible. 

This is how it always goes with goals and me: I set them up, and then I fail in the utterly unrealistic time frame, and then, usually, I give up. The interesting difference this summer has been that I haven’t wanted to give up. I love going to the gym. It was quite an intense realisation once I had it some time in December; I knew I wasn’t getting myself to the gym every day as per my goal, but that was no longer the point. The point was the absolute joy I felt spending 60-70% of my weekdays working out. So, I modified my goal. In fact, I kind of removed it. It’s weird, isn’t it? I managed to find something I like so much that I didn’t need the goal anymore; the absolute necessity of completing my now habitual sessions turned into a magic potion of energy and motivation. Now, I’m a bit more realistic; I do a two days on, one day off schedule, and have set up a calendar to monitor my progress. For fun. Can you believe it? I even bought a little sticker book, so like when I was a child and got my piano homework right, I can reward myself with a star, a snail, or even a small sailboat. It’s back to basics with me now; pure pleasure drives me to the gym, and that annoying, criticising, obnoxious goaldigger has vanished in its entirety. 

Defiant dead weight

While I was sitting on one of the rowing machines at the gym yesterday, I looked through the window onto the adjacent street to Aqualife. On the sidewalk, a woman was walking her dog. She was perhaps seventy, although I find it incredibly hard to tell, and was assisted by a stroller, to which she seemed inevitably attached, like a snail to its house crawling slowly on the ground. I found myself sympathising with the woman, feeling extremely thankful for my own body, and all it lets me do, both at the gym, but more importantly in my everyday life. 

It truly is a gift, being able to simply decide that I want to go running, or cycling, or swimming, or training, and having the physical means in my body to do just so. I thought back to September, when my doctor told me I had subcromial bursitis that inflamed my left shoulder and made it impossible to lift my elbow above my head. He also told me I had an inflamed tendon in my thumb, explaining my difficulty in holding onto things, and suggested I lay off the weights and stretches for a very long while. It was an incredibly disheartening message to receive. I can only imagine the horror it must be for any person to be told they are physically unable to do something, however small or big that thing may be to them. Our freedom to move is perhaps one of our most liberating tools in life, and being disadvantaged physically in any activity can be terrible for morale.

I do believe, however, that anyone can choose to be defiant with their bodies and, working around the pain, ache, or handicap, rather than against it, succeed at things they never thought possible. My own experience with this has been particularly positive at my gym, where no less than two training instructors (one of them a student of physical recovery) spent over an hour creating my personal training program. This takes into account both my shoulder’s and thumb’s weaknesses, and attempts to build strength around the inflamed areas, in order to further protect them. My shoulder never aches anymore, and my thumb is rarely more than an annoying ache when I’ve done a heavy session of training. I think to my mum, an absolute champion in the way of determination and persistence, who has pieces of cartilage on the loose in her knee and still attends the gym weekly. I suppose that even if it’s as small as an inflamed thumb, or as big as needing assisted walking, anyone can rise to the challenge of maintaining their inherent right to move with independence and dignity.

Unusually normal

Normality is a much stranger thing than it appears be. After a holiday like the one Ariz and I just enjoyed in Norway, we are once again reminded of this fact, and I seem to be re-learning (although at a quicker pace than a toddler would) all the things that is my “normal” life. The sting in my eyes from onion being cut in the kitchen; the pace and settings of the treadmill at the gym; the fantastically expensive vegetables in this country exceeded only by the selection of sun dried and pickled tomatoes. It’s in the little things I notice I’ve been on holiday, and to me, the little things include both food and exercise. But while I’ve indulged in inhumane amounts of pork, gravy, potatoes, potato chips, cookies, chocolate, and much too little physical exertion while I was away, it was nice to feel that I was fully capable of completing my horrendous lunge/jump/push-up supersets when I once again entered our much loved gym on Saturday. It was almost like an extra treat, after all the deliciousness of Norway, that we were still (albeit a tad less) fit. 

On our last day at home, Ariz and I went shopping for a cookbook. 

“We need some inspiration,” he said to me, “if we’re going to keep up with cooking homemade food.”

In Scandinavia, we pride ourselves in the culinary art of husmannskost, literally “houseman’s food,” meaning basic, nutritious, and tasty food that fulfils your dietary needs all day long, even through the arduous skiing and mountain climbing we do every day at home. Maybe not the last bit, entirely, but it does keep you alert and concentrated. So we roamed the aisles of a small bookshop in Oslo, and finally came upon a cook book literally called “The Cook Book”. Which is saying a lot in Norway. We paid the 80 dollars it cost, and soon realised that this book is the most marvellous thing to have hit our shelves; separate sections for fish, pork, beef, vegetables, grains, and anything else you can think of that is a basal element of cooking. This thing has everything from standard cooking measurements to basic sushi craft; how to fillet a cod and how to make the perfect steak. I’m thankful that in my slow, and somewhat reluctant, ease into the everyday life of Perth, I have this guru with me; just as a reminder that even a boring stew can be mixed with spices I won’t even begin to attempt spelling here.