All posts tagged work

6-Pack Abs Are Expensive

…unless you’re a teenage boy, or a hard-gainer.

The guy on the cover of Men’s Health Magazine is a professional model. His job is to look good, and he doesn’t look that good by cutting back on carbs and doing crunches.

That guy probably pays money to look that good. A lot of money.

I work in a body building gym in San Francisco. It also just so happens to be San Francisco’s “gay gym.” Sure, straight people are allowed in, but the member base is predominantly male. You’re either a body builder, gay, or both.

It seems to me that body image is as important to this particular member base as it is for women! Everywhere you look, there are tight, hard bodies pumping iron. There’s the core group: the members who arrive every day, without fail, and work out for 2-3 hours. Lift-pause-lift-pause-lift-pause.

…and then some “cardio:” slow, deliberate steps on the stair mill–forever.

I don’t know enough about body building to give an in-depth analysis, but what I can tell you is that these guys have the most expensive bodies of anyone I’ve ever known in a neighborhood gym.

$200 a month for supplements: protein powder, meal replacement, BCAAS, and more.
$100 a month for extra food: shakes, smoothies, and chicken. Lots of chicken. Insane amounts of chicken.
$0-$400 a month for personal training and accountability.
$80-$200 a month for body work, including stretching, massage, hair removal, and tanning.
$$$ = Time. Tons of time exercising and eating. Time planning meals. Time commuting to and from the gym. Time waiting between sets. Having a solid body is one of the most time-intensive exercise goals of them all. It’s like playing a sport, only your “practice” is 2-3x longer every day, and you have to invest 2-3x more time fretting about your food, and 2-3x more time recovering (every workout aims to demolish muscles; every workout aims to leave them twitching, dying, and torn at a microscopic level, in order to repair and grow bigger and stronger). What is an hour of your time worth?

Don’t get me wrong. I have tremendous respect for body builders. It is a sport that requires insane precision and dedication.

But I’m weary on their behalf. I’m weary for the time they spend fretting about whether one shoulder looks bigger than the other, about whether their kidneys are okay, whether they are coping with their body dysmorphia constructively.

Hey! That’s just for body builders! I don’t want to be a big massive guy. I just want that 6-pack!

Take a ticket. You and everyone else who doesn’t want an ounce of fat on them. And there are two ways to get rid of every ounce of fat:

1) Just don’t eat. Ever. Give up food.

2) Don’t eat carbs. Hyper-dose yourself on protein. Stick with natural, unprocessed fats when needed, and lean protein the rest of the time. Oh, and when you’re ready for your photo shoot, dehydrate yourself.

The body is designed to have a healthy layer of fat on it. Your brain is wired to seek out fat and sugar. When it ingests fat, it thinks, “Awesome! Let’s eat more of that!” When it finds sugar, it says, “Whoa! Cheap, delicious energy!” When the two are combined, “Holy shit! The is the most amazing food stuff I’ve ever encountered!” It’s fat and carbs that the body wants.

Fat keeps the body feeling full longer than anything else, and it keeps the body running slowly. Carbs are the body’s preferred energy source, and they allow for fast, rapid movement; they also make you feel happy.

The body does not have the same hard-wiring for protein. Of course, protein is an essential macro-nutrient, but after you eat a sufficient amount, the brain says, “Boy, I don’t want another bite of chicken. I’ll throw up. I’m warning you… No more!”

Eating massive amounts of protein is hard work. And it’s hard work to digest as well. You’re net energy decreases, and your organs work over-time. It also requires a lot of water to digest. If you aren’t getting sufficient fiber and vegetable intake, you run the short-term risk of constipation (uncomfortable) and the long-term risk of colon cancer (life threatening) and other types of cancer (if your protein is predominantly animal-sourced).

On the plus side: you will have very healthy hair and nails, and big muscles.

If you have a good ethic of regular exercise, including a variety of exercise activities, and you are fretting about your abs, know that for most people, 6-pack abs take an extreme level of dedication that may not be lifestyle friendly.

1 Comment

by demogirl06 on June 21, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Fitness & Lifestyle, Nutrition

Tagged 6-pack, abs, body building, body dysmorphia, cancer, carbs, dehydrate, energy, fat, gym, health, image, kidneys, model, muscle, protein, time, water, weights, work, work out

Posted by demogirl06 on June 21, 2012

http://mariamaestevens.com/2012/06/21/6-pack-abs-are-expensive/

STRESS: How It Affects Your Health

We’ve all heard it before. Stress (and its associated hormone, cortisol) wears us down. It lowers immunity. It makes us unhappy, tired, angry. It has us in a constant state of “survival mode.” And it could very well be the source of all illness.

Let’s take a look inside the body for a minute.

The body is an amazing, intelligent machine. It has healing powers rivaled by nothing in science or modern medicine. Your body knows what it has to do, but is typically hindered stress and/or energetic imbalances.

In order to understand stress’ affect on the body, one must understand the autonomic nervous system, which breaks down into two types: the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). The PNS is responsible for the growth, healing, maintenance, and repair of bodily systems, without our being conscious of it. For example, when you eat a carrot, you don’t think much more about it–how it is being handled in the stomach, passed through various parts of the digestive tract, and having its nutrition extracted and sent to appropriate places in the body.

The SNS is different. Think of it as responsible for your “fight or flight” response; its like an alarm bell. There’s a fire in an office building, and everyone panics, dashes about, and either tries to put out the fire, or gets away safely. Normal office routines don’t continue. Papers are not being filed, calls are not being made.

When the body is in fight or flight mode, things don’t run the same way. Blood flow changes; there is less to the stomach for digestion, less to the kidneys and liver for cleansing, less to the frontal lobes of the brain for creative thought. The majority of the blood is directed to parts of the body that need it the most, in order to save your life (or family, or house, or career). Blood, its purity, its nutrient density, its concentration of red and white blood cells determines a major part of optimal health and functioning (and how efficiently blood is pumped, by a well trained heart and unobstructed arteries).

This redirection of resources, over a short term, is necessary for survival. But over the long term–due to periods of constant stress–it is detrimental to health. Lack of blood to the organs can ruin the immune system. It doesn’t matter how many good things you put in; if you can’t make good use of them, they are wasted. When the body is in fight or flight mode, cells don’t receive nutrition, sufficient oxygen, building blocks, etc. The cells also don’t eliminate waste products. Everything stops, except for what is necessary to “survive.”

Our fast-paced, high-tech, high-speed modern lifestyles are wearing on the health. Much of technology, which is supposed to make our lives easier, is making them busier, more jam-packed, more stressful. There are more things to worry about, more demands for performance, for our time. That’s stressful!

The name of the game is stress management. It’s about work-life balance. It’s about taking time for yourself. It’s about winding down. Rest, relax, recover.

Allow your body to heal.

Work, Injury, Illness

The three things that kill your exercise program.

Being a fitness trainer isn’t exactly a difficult job. Let’s face it: we’re paid to watch other people work out.

Okay, I’ll try not to discredit the job too much. Fitness trainers are crucial when it comes to guiding exercise, and lending the client energy he would otherwise not lend himself. We’re the extra motivational push, we hold our clients accountable, we create a process for the accomplishment of an otherwise elusive goal.

Three things that hurt the trainer-client relationship are work, injury, and illness; and negotiating around these things can be difficult and tiresome. The first time a client cancels due to a work-related issue will typically not be the last. Illness may continue to re-cur. Injury is likely a permanent end to the relationship.

Whether you are working with a trainer, and going solo at the gym, if you intend to achieve your goals, handling these three things well is crucial. I always say, if you can’t get your life under control, you won’t have your exercise regime under control. It just doesn’t work that way.

Each person is responsible for himself. If you have a job that pushes you around, disrespects your free time, coerces you into working longer and longer hours at the expense of your well-being, then you are suddenly attributing responsibility for your missed gym sessions and missed appointments to someone other than you.

I’ve had clients go through hell and back in work and still never miss an appointment. The difference? Their personal health is their priority.

Illness is a result of poor attention to one’s health: not merely coincidence or chaos. Stressed out, under-slept, over-worked, unhappy, and under-nourished people get sick more often. If you try to change your life by undertaking a fitness program and you are not able to control the factors that tend to cause illness, you are being unrealistic. Your fitness goals will contribute to your illness.

Injury–perhaps the most misunderstand of the three. Injury is less often a result of pure accident, and more often the result of a misunderstood intention. I see people get injured all the time, mostly in minor ways that go unacknowledged but ultimately set them back weeks when the compromise in their workouts is compounded. Catastrophic injuries are likely the expression of a larger desire–for an excuse, and out, a way to call attention–whether we know it or not. (It took the highly offensive opinion of a Beglian man to wake me up from the memory of my life-threatening illness, when he told me I wanted to be sick. It was the best “out” from responsibility in my life that I could will upon myself. In hindsight, he was probably right.)

I’ve also seen people push themselves so hard that they cause serious injury, or more permanent conditions that hinder and chase them for months on end. These are the people, unable to rest, unable to compromise, who are the most difficult to reason with. Time off does not compute. Injury does not register. They don’t realize that the same factors which cause illness contribute to their exercise-induced injury.

When something hurts, you monitor, test, eventually stop and rest. Recover.

When you feel sickness coming on, you stop, rest, eat, sleep, recover.

When work gets in the way, you stop, assess, re-arrange, re-prioritize, and re-approach your goals when you are ready. You do not stagger through your work week, a victim of your boss.

You are not a victim. You are responsible for yourself.

Maria Mae Stevens

All posts tagged work

6-Pack Abs Are Expensive

STRESS: How It Affects Your Health

Work, Injury, Illness

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