Day 109, Shirtless and Storytime

Well, it's officially summer in Japan. That means one word, humidity. Beads of sweat on your hairline, moisture in all your creases, T-shirt sticking to your chest.

But this year I'm feeling pretty good about it. And for one reason. I'm not embarrassed to sit around shirtless! It's hard for your t-shirt to stick to you when you don't have one on. I'm planning on spending the whole season topless, at least while I'm in my own apartment. Here's me as I type this post.


Before, it wasn't like I was so shy that I didn't want anyone to see me without a shirt. I would just get kind of disgusted by my gut after a few minutes and put something on so that I didn't have to think about it anymore. I'm sure pretty much all out of shape guys go through this.

I've always thought it was the most unfair thing in the world that guys can go shirtless but women can't. Take it off ladies!

But you want to know the worst thing about the humidity? I have a scar on my head that runs from my forehead to about halfway to the middle of my skull.



Normally it's no problem (except that it makes my hair messy) but when it gets humid, the scar swells up and becomes tender and painful to the touch. On the worst of days I can feel it throb with pain in time with my heartbeat. This is how I perform my famous slowing down and speeding up my heartbeat trick that you may have experienced if you know me personally.

How did I get the scar? When I was 12 I went to summer camp. One day we were hiking down to a swimming hole called Sliding Rock, for obvious reasons.


It had rained the night before, and the trail was a little slippery. I can't remember much, but I've been told that as I turned a corner on the path I slipped and fell right off the trail, down a ravine and cracked my noggin on a rock. I was sitting there by myself for a minute or two while the counselors tried to find a way down there. I had ended up propped up against a rock like I was lounging on a patio chair, with this hot fountain of blood shooting up into the air and down on me, and I kept saying to myself. "I've gotta get to Sliding Rock so I can rinse this red stuff off me."

A counselor finally got to me and he started carrying me back up, and I was like, "No, Sliding Rock is that way, you're going the wrong way! You're going the wrong way!" Ha ha. Good times, good times.

But there is a real message here. If you're dealing with someone who's had a head trauma, remember their brains are totally addled. Just ignore whatever they say and keep them awake.

Day 108, 108

You may or may not know that the number 108 is a mystical number in Hinduism and Buddhism. There are a number of reasons for this, which I know you don't care about. But if you want to know more check the wiki page on 108)

I've always thought it was silly to get wrapped up in numbers because of special properties they have. Prime numbers, the Fibonnaci sequence, Pi, etc... it always seemed to me strange to give some of them meaning over others.

Today was special for me too because we had our annual "All you can stretch event" to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of Yoga Garden.

So I'm very tired tonight and this is about all I can manage as far as blog posts go.

Day 107, Don't Get Caught Up in Being "Ripped"

Lots of heavy physical labor today and again, as I described in Day 32 I was able to get through it with tons of energy left over for the rest of my evening. At one point I was carrying a large plant in a heavy pot, and I noticed how easy it was after doing all those curls. It really made the job more pleasant.

All of this work was done out in the heat of the day and I was very thankful to not have that extra layer of body fat around me. While of course I still feel hot, there isn't that clautrophobic sweltering feeling anymore. I also don't sweat as much as I remember in summers past.

This is all great stuff as it is examples of the PCP working well in real-world situations. One of the things that I don't want to encourage too much is just looking good for the sake of looking good. Actual health and vitality have very little to do with how big your shoulders or or how defined your six pack is. There are a great deal of inner muscles which we never see that do the majority of the heavy lifting in life. If you want to a great example of being in superb health just look to yoga masters. They sure don't look like well defined models, but they live for years and years with perfect health and can do things like this at age 91:



Really, the only thing that looking super cut and defined is good for is your self-confidence. But that's a pretty big deal for most of us I guess.

Day 106, One More Band

Getting stronger. As you may recall I broke two of my resistance bands on Day 44.

Following that I figured out that I needed to distribute the force over more bands. So for the past 2 months I've been using two bands. But recently I wasn't feeling so much resistance so I went ahead and added a third band, which is the last one I have.


So I'm getting stronger, but what I'm most pleased about is that I've kept my muscle lean through this whole thing. We managed this by keeping the overall amount of food low and the protein high, coupled with low weight exercises.

In my mind, the absolute worst outcome would have been to look like these guys:

These guys are actually very fit and incredibly strong. They can probably lift a car, but the question is who wants to lift cars? I'd much rather be strong enough for daily life and a little martial arts, flexible enough to be comfortable in my body, and toned and slim without any unnecessary mass. The few times I went to the gym with Chen as part of my studies I could feel a weird kind of pressure from all the dudes there that bigger is better. And you start comparing the size of your bicep to the guy next to you. This is all very silly.

If you look at Bruce Lee, he is actually a very small guy. You could probably wrap your arms all the way around him.

But what power! What speed! He could actually do something with his body, rather than just lift heavy things like a plodding ox. This is the same philosophy that informs my yoga practice. Find out how a pose fits into real action in your daily life and work from there. The kung-fu and yoga approach also has another important benefit. You can do them all the way until very old age, when all the muscle and flash has faded.

I've met several older kung-fu guys and even though they appeared to be small old men, when I got near them I could feel enormous confidence and power radiating off their bodies. I'm not trying to get new agey and talk about their chi force or anything. I'm just saying they held themselves and moved in such a way that told you they could still release a lot of power if called upon to.

That's what I want from my life. As I wind down my PCP I'm actually going to try and get smaller. I've gained a little too much shoulder and arm mass. It's the beginnings of another project Chen and I are cooking up. I don't have much more than the name of it, which I'll share with the public now for the first time... The Kung Fu Body!

Day 105, When Carbohydrates Are Scarce

Felt very strong and limber today. Maybe because I had one of those perfect sleeps where you lay your head down, fall into a deep dreamless sleep, and wake up the next morning totally clear headed and ready to go with no jostling around in the night to pee or open the window or anything.

I've been really cruising with my evening meals, especially letting the extra carbs slip through. The truth is that it's very hard to have anything resembling a familiar meal when you only have 50g (I piece of toast's worth) of carbs to work with. Pretty much any kind of tortilla, bread, or pasta based dish is out as the required vegetables and protein will swamp the measly carbs.

So I'm working on figuring out entirely different meals that don't require a starch to hold them all together. One of the easiest ways is to stuff something. Stuff a zucchini or a bell pepper and you're doubling your vegetables with the same bite. It's funny though, because most of the stuffed recipes ask that you fill your outer vegetable with rice or bread crumbs, which gets us back into carboland. So I'm working on various vegetable mixtures that will hold together without being like baby food.

One thing that does work is rice paper. Because the stuff is so thin but strong you can put a ton of veg in them with very little carbohydrate. But the fine chopping and rolling take time.

So most nights I end up eating a big bowl of steamed vegetables over a little pasta or rice with some kind of fish. I alternate between 3 or 4 low calorie dressings (radish, basil, sesame soysauce, tomato vinegar) to put on top.

Did you ever see Castaway? Like in his first week on the island he's all cooking the fish and stuff, and then they fast forward 4 years later and he's spearing and eating live fish right on the beach, with a wordless 200 yard stare the whole time.

Wilsuuuun!

That's kind of where I am with these steamed vegetable meals. They are my nutrition source and beyond that I don't expect a lot from them, either in taste or presentation.

I know most people will feel this is kind of a sad state to be in, and in a way it is. But it's also incredibly liberating to be free of the idea that every meal will have some kind of big flavor sensation. Our overly spiced and complicated modern foods are very out-of-sync with how people ate for thousands of years (those agricultural based thousands of years themselves being out-of-sync with the millions of hunting and gathering before them)

As I have lived in the developing world I have noticed the local people getting very excited about this or that feast coming up, or that this or that fruit is finally in season, and I also got excited. But when we actually sat down to eat this special food, I found it unremarkable and not really worth all the fuss. I realize now that we were operating from a different palate. For them, used to blander and less varied diets, it really was a treat to have, say, a marinated sheeps gonad (real example). From my McDonalds and Pizza Hut upbringing however, it was just some more odd and slightly gross food.

I'll never forget the time I visited a family in Turkmenistan and with pride they offered to cut me a piece of meat from a rotting goats leg, sticking straight up in the air with flies buzzing around it. For them it was a real honor to serve meat to a foreign guest. I made some excuse about how I couldn't accept such hospitality and was already full from visiting so many people that day, but what really took away my appetite was the enormity of the economic gulf between our two countries.

Every single day in America is a feast, and if you think about it, that's a little messed up. Our bodies also don't know what to do with such culinary overload, and it's making us sick. So, maybe something is lost with my rather bland and predictable dinners these days, but something is also lost when every meal is an extravaganza.

Day 104, Alcohol

I've been thinking over how to present this post for a great many days. I'm still not sure what exactly I want to say so I'll just muddle through as usual.

One of the things you stop doing on the PCP is drinking. Alcoholic drinks have a lot of calories considering you aren't getting any nutrition out of the beverage. People in the business refer to these as "empty calories" and they are the first thing to go when you want to cut fat and get lean.

It was also one of the harder things for me to let go of. One of the nicest parts of my day was getting home, kicking back and having a cold beer. It's probably the most prototypical male thing I did, actually. Always just one beer. About 5 times a week give or take.

I noticed that I was looking forward to that beer more and more, especially during stressful times. I would start thinking about it first on the way home from the station, then it would be on the train home, then it would be in my last class before getting on the train, earlier and earlier.

This puzzled me because I never drank more than one beer, and was never really tempted to. My craving didn't seem to be just the drug content of the alcohol, although surely that was part of it. I think it had just gotten to be my routine. And I didn't realize how attached to it I was until I had to break it up with this project.

But I just stopped. I had one beer on day 15 and that was it. So I was satisfied that it wasn't a physiological thing, like my body had to have beer or anything. Why then was it such a big deal for me to give it up?

I try to winnow down my attachments every day but beer still sticks around. I pass the cold beverage aisle now without even going down it, because if I do I really crave a beer. But just one. I don't get it.

If you take the novice vows of Thich Nhat Hanh's order, which Gwen and I have, you promise not to consume stimulants of any kind, all the way from cocaine to beer to mind-polluting TV shows. We grilled a young nun about what was so bad about having a glass of wine with a good meal. The nun explained that every time we spend our money on beer or wine we support a system that ruins untold lives through alcoholism, drunk driving, liquor fueled violence and domestic abuse. If we are truly mindful of all the pain that our choice to drink comes with and can still enjoy that glass of wine, then we are quite free to have it.

This argument gets me pretty good, because it is the same one I use to explain vegetarianism to people. "If you can truly understand all the stuff that happened to that animal for it to arrive on your plate, then you are welcome to have it. But if you're just eating it carelessly there's something wrong with that."

The nun's explanation is an extension of the Buddhist concept of interdependence. Every action results in numerous consequences, most of which we have no way of guessing. But some we can see if we just look a little deeper. The negative effects of alcohol and supporting the alcohol industry being one of them. So I feel really guilty whenever I dwell on that side of my beer routine. But I also really like beer. So I go around and around about it.

I know most people think this is far too much analysis over something as small as a can of beer after work. But that is what the PCP is all about. Not just accepting things being "pretty alright" but being the absolute best you can be. Setting high goals and not accepting mediocre results. Most people will think it's overthinking the issue but that has stopped bothering me. Many of those people are the same ones who don't understand why anyone would do the PCP to begin with.

High-reaching goals that require all of my resources and creativity are the only kind that interest me recently. Maybe I can make getting beer out of my life forever on of those as well. I'm still undecided and sitting with the issue. This is usually the only way I can resolve anything, so I'll let "just sitting" do its magic

Day 103, Evaluation

Today is the first day of July. Three years ago today we opened Yoga Garden. It's also the month Gwen's and my birthday is. And it's also the month that my Peak Condition Project will end. It's very strange to be here. I remember starting in March and looking at the calendar and thinking I would never make it to July, that everything would be so different in July.

But change happens so gradually I can't exactly say what's different. Of course I've got some new muscle and less fat, but that stuff is only the beginning of the PCP's effects. When you succeed in something like this your mind changes in a subtle way. When you look at a challenge the first question isn't so much "can I do it?" as "how will accomplishing this help me?" or perhaps "what will I do after I accomplish this?"

Every other project seems much more plausible when you've gotten control of your own body. It's easy to focus your energy when the wetworks is all running smoothly and supporting you.

If you've ever ridden a bike or run with a tailwind, you'll know how much a little push can help you and make you feel like you're flying. Well, when you're in Peak Condition you feel that push all the time, and it makes everything more fun. (I suppose being in really bad shape and carrying around a bunch of extra weight would be like pedaling into a headwind)

So I find myself in the odd position of feeling like myself but also knowing I've been changed by this project. I'm still figuring it all out but I hope that by the end in 22 days I'll be able to make a more complete report on the big mental rewirings that happened through the process. I'm going to start with tomorrow's post which will be about my relationship with alcohol. See you then!