Day 118, There Was a Star Inside Me the Whole Time!

All of the PCPers and I have been going on for weeks and weeks about how different we feel eating right, getting stronger, and learning how our bodies work. This project is definitely one of discovery.

Some of the discoveries are just plain neato, and I've been meaning to share this one with you ever since I noticed it a few months ago after I lost all that weight.

As I wrote about at the time, when you lose weight you lose it from your arms, your butt, your face, everywhere. In fact, the place you lose it last is your belly and love-handles, which is frustrating because that's where you want to lose it first!

Well, one of the places you lose that fat layer is your chest, and I don't just mean your man-boobs (which I had) but your actual chest wall, as in the skin covering the solar plexus. Well, once that fat layer was gone, I found the coolest thing. For some lighting reason it's really easy to see as I get out of my shower, so that's where I took this picture, after my shower today.


Can you see it? Right there on my solar plexus there's this meeting point of cartilage which I can only describe as a starburst. Here's the pic from one step closer.



In my 28 years of life, I had never seen this part of my body before. It was there the whole time, just under the fat I guess. I think it's so funky. I feel like I've seen similar things on other people, but I couldn't find any pics on google images. What should I search for? Starburst cartilage on chest?

Anyway, I'm going to use this little star as a kind of yardstick. As I mentioned yesterday I'm quite happy for my weight to fluctuate throughout the year and season, but I'm making a little rule for myself. If that star starts to get faint and disappear, it means I'm slipping back into some bad habits and need to address whatever's going off track.

Does anyone else have this star? And what is it exactly? I have a ton of anatomy books, but I can't find what exactly this thing is. All my books skip right to the muscle, then the ribs!

(want to find out things about yourself you never suspected were there? Apply for the second round of the PCP at thepeakconditionproject (at) gmail.com)

Day 117, Remember Day 47?

Day 47. That was a long time ago, 70 days to be exact. It was just after I had lost 11 pounds of fat. One of the unexpected side-effects was that I was freezing my ass off. I hadn't realized how much extra warmth that layer of fat provided. Here's a cross section showing the subcutaneous fat layer undeneath the dermis.


You see how it's all spongy and bubbly? Remind you of anything? How about this?



All those pockets between fat globules act as a protection against the cold. And when you lose them you really do feel like you've left your jacket at home.

Ah, but now it's summer, and you can guess what I'm going to say next... I've never felt so cool on hot days before! It's great. When I have to wear long pants for work or something I don't feel like I'm roasting from the inside out. And I haven't turned on the air-conditioning once and I intend not to all summer (for ecological and economical reasons).

Now I'm not saying I don't feel hot, I do, but it's just on the surface, and when I get out of the sun my body temperature returns to normal pretty quickly even though the ambient air temp is still high. And the most obvious proof is when I spend time with someone in Not-So-Peak-Condition who is sweating profusely and peeling off layers, cursing the heat the whole time, while I'm cool as a cucumber.

So, knowing this, I think when winter rolls around again I'll put on some pounds to get that layer of fat back a little. This seems like a very natural and obvious thing to do. Nature designed this excellent system for keeping warm, it'd be a shame not to use it.

And if you want to experience these fun side effects for yourself we're still accepting applications for round 2 of the PCP. Apply today and change your life! ThePeakConditionProject (at) gmail.com

Day 116, "Spirituality" and The Peak Condition Project

Recently, our podcast, Zen is Stupid has received some criticism for not talking enough about Zen. We've been talking about pretty secular stuff lately, like movies and video games, but there's always an element of "how can we do this more mindfully" in every episode, so I'm not really worried about the comments. Sometimes not talking about Zen can be the most Zen thing you can do. However, it does highlight something I've found on the PCP as well.


I'm just thinking out loud now, but it seems that the modern world has drawn this sharp line between the base "physical" and the elevated "spiritual." I think it must be an offshoot of the idea that the body is unclean and undesirable and the mind/soul is pure.

Every passing year we find out more and more that the mind and body are so intertwined that it's quite misleading to even call them two things. So there's all this study into the mind-body connection and so on.

However, in India and Asia there isn't such a historical divide between the physical and spiritual. The whole practice of yogic asana is a way of using the body to reach a spiritual destination. And in Buddhism (well, Zen Buddhism) the body is always your home base, where you return if you get stuck in too much circular mental thinking. This can be seen in meditation, where we return to the breath, or to the pain in our legs, or to the straightness of our backs, when the mind is wandering. Or in koans where the student asks an esoteric question and is answered with a smack to the skull. The message is clear. Get your head out of the clouds and truly inhabit the moment, which is where your body is.

Your mind can take amazing voyages to the past or the future, but your body will never leave the present moment. And that's where real life is.

But, I've received a little blowback and a vast amount of silence from the Buddhist community during The Peak Condition Podcast. This doesn't surprise me but it makes me somewhat sad. Buddhists in general are a very cerebral bunch, and all too many do the majority of practice in their heads. In all the retreats and Buddhist events I've been on I've never seen someone in really good shape. Most people are a little thick around the middle, which isn't a shocker as Zen's main event is sitting on your ass.

I get the impression people feel that spending time working out, getting your portions right, and exercising are all a bit shallow. Certainly when compared to the deep wisdom of meditation. Again, one practice is considered base, and the other, pure. And many Buddhists would hint that spending time building muscle and getting strong is just a form of attachment and craving. Attaching to your good physique, craving the validation of others, etc...

Well I'm here to say all of that is misguided. In Zen we are working towards mental clarity. Trying to see the world as it really is, without delusion. And I have found that being in good (peak) physical shape has brought me a lot of clarity. Whereas before I would go around and around with a problem in my head, I'm finding making choices has become easier. I've become less mopey and more motivated, and I'm finding that I want to talk less and act more (except on the blog of course, where I can't seem to shut up!)

And I've written about in this blog before, but zazen has become much easier physically and more placid mentally since I got my core and back muscles toned up.

And finally, doing a difficult set, with your muscles screaming and on fire is a guaranteed ticket into the present moment. You sure as hell aren't thinking about how you'll pay for retirement in those times. The PCP has been the most life-affirming practice I've done in my life, and that includes countless complicated meditations on the body and long periods of meditation.

So, I'm thinking about a new kind of Zen retreat. Where you do your zazen, and instead of the classic "go sweep the leaves mindfully" BS worktime, all the students workout and learn how their bodies really function. If anyone out there has the ability to organize this, I have the whole thing laid out and just need to hear the word "go."

And I don't want to hear any more masters with a huge stomach tell me I need to control my mental states. They need to control their physical states! I leave you with a Bruce Lee quote.

"Too often one of those big-belly masters will tell you that his internal power has sunk to his stomach; he's not kidding, it is sunk and gone!"

By the way if you're interested in applying for the second round of the PCP leave a comment or email me at ThePeakConditionProject (at) gmail.com. We'll be starting three more people up soon.

Day 115, Baby-Hands

One week when I lived in Morocco my community village decided to put in a concrete tarqua, which I guess in English is known as an irrigation ditch. (There is a whole range of agricultural words I only know in Berber and not in my own native tongue)

So anyway, the first step to make this thing is that you have to dig a big ditch through the village. So of course I'm trying to help out and show I'm part of the community or whatever. I get down there with a pickaxe. Within 30 minutes I got blisters on my hands and couldn't go on. Which leads all the guys of the village to laugh at my "baby hands." There isn't much going on in Berberland, so it became the running joke in the village for a few weeks. "Hey baby-hands, can you come rub my face with your so soft hands?" or "Which of these scarves is softer, baby hands? We can't tell because we don't have baby hands." Eventually my hands toughened up but my reputation never did.

Anyway, I've been doing all this bar work, with the chin-ups, leg ups, and the stuff I was talking about yesterday, and my hands are getting pretty raw, with raised callouses on the pads of my palm. Chen was like, "just get used to it" but I know he was thinking something along the lines of "baby hands"

I was down with getting toughened up hands again, that's no problem, but it occurred to me that this time around things are very different. I use my hands for my job, adjusting people in yoga poses, and for that you need as soft a touch as you can get. Would you like some rough scratchy hands on your shoulders as you're trying to move deeper into Up-Dog? I know I wouldn't.

So this time I decided to not try and be a hard-man about it, and just get some freakin' weight lifting gloves and protect my baby hands. So I went to Sports Authority today after classes and got these cool gloves.

Which is what I really wanted to talk about in this post before I got off on a Berber tangent. I was in Sports Authority, this huge mega sports store, and I swear, every person in there was either scrawny or overweight. It was almost funny. There was this guy with a huge beer belly checking out the protein powders. And a dude with little stick arms testing out the dumbbells.

This is ironic and funny of course but I also find it very uplifting. No matter what kind of shape people are in, there is something inside of them that inspires them to change. Companies take advantage of this self-improvement instinct by selling absolute beginners top-of-the-line stuff, but that's beside the point. What I've learned over and over in this project is that people want to be better. They want to take care of their bodies, they want to be the person on the outside that they know they have inside. And that's a beautiful thing.

But there is a risk that all that excitement that leads you to buy some weights or an exercise machine will fade away as soon as you find that buying stuff is the easy part, it's the actual work that feels like, well, work. And then you have a house full of exercise crap that you slowly grow to despise so much you end up throwing it out.

So, my advice to everyone is, if you want to take up a new sport or exercise routine, start off with the cheapest most beat up equipment you can find. This will tell you truly whether you enjoy the hobby for itself or if it was just a passing fling. And you get two bonuses.

One, your house isn't full of junk from failed fitness projects,

and Two, if you do decide to pursue the exercise, you'll know what you actually need because you've already been doing it. So today for example, I knew just what i wanted out of the gloves, where I needed the padding, how tight they should feel, etc... Who knows what I would've bought if I had rolled up in there on my first day of the PCP?

Time and time again I have seen beginner yoga students come to class with 80$ Lululemon mats and $150 yoga clothing ensembles. And you know what? They usually give it up after a few weeks. And you know another thing? Invariably, the people who most stick with it are the ones who come in an old beat up pair of shorts and a t-shirt, with a thin exercise mat they won in a contest a few years ago.

So don't buy any more stuff, until you can say exactly why you need it and for what purpose. Anything else is just throwing money at your idea of yourself as a better person, rather than actually doing it.

Day 114, Immense Satisfaction

The thing about The Peak Condition Project is that when you're up you're up. I felt strong as an ox today, and just as endurant. Taught 4 yoga classes, did my box splits, and after all that went to the gym with Chen to do hanging sit-ups using that gym's parallel bars.

I call them hanging sit-ups, I don't know what else to call them. Basically you hang from a bar and lift your feet over your head. Or you turn your body to the side and lift the knees up to your face like a side crunch. Or you can do reverse hanging sit-ups with your feet locked in the bar and crunching up your entire upper body. (I showed this in my Day 65 post using Drunken Master... by the way the gym said we had to stop doing those because it looks like you're going to break your neck and I guess it freaked them out too much)

Today the challenge was not only to lift the legs, but then perform a full kick with the legs straight out. This is so freakin hard to explain, I wish I had had my camera.

Anyway, imagine this guy but not jumping, just hanging from two parallel bars, but doing the same motion. Using his core to execute the action rather than a leg assisted jump:

So me and Chen were trading back and forth doing these air kicks 5 feet off the ground. A few guys in the gym were looking at us, and after we finished our sets they were like, "what the hell is that?" And I told them they're kung fu sit-ups. So of course they want to try them out.

These guys were pretty fit, they looked in shape to me at least. So guy one gets up there and he gets one air-kick out, and.... he's totally spent. His friend is laughing at him so he tells his friend to show him how it's done. The friend can't even do one.

As you know this whole project I've been looking up to Bruce Lee, which is incredible motivation because he was such a great guy and in such peak condition, but it's also a bummer because I will never ever be anywhere near him truly.

But today for the first time I looked down the ladder at some people a few rungs below my condition, and realized how far I've come. The thing about the PCP is it's a pretty solitary pursuit, outside of the blogs. You wake up, stick to your diet, and do your exercises. There's nobody watching you, nobody egging you on. It's you and your resistance bands, working quietly away for all those weeks.

But all those crunches and V-sits were apparent tonight when we were busting out those hanging sit-ups. Perhaps it's because the air-kick is such an exuberant exercise, but I felt huge gratification from having that level of control over my body. And then when the other guys couldn't even do two I felt another jolt of immense satisfaction.

I want to make clear it wasn't like, "Man, you two guys are weak, and I'm a total badass" If they worked hard they'd be doing those moves in no time, and if I stopped working out I wouldn't be able to do them after just a few weeks.

It was just another happy and unexpected milestone on this path.

Day 113, Obesity

I like the online magazine Slate and usually cruise over there once a day to see if they've got any interesting articles running. Well tonight this is what I saw. (Click the pic to go to the story)

With all the good things I've heard about WALL-E I was surprised by the headline, (which was of course the point) and as obesity and the environment are two things which really interest me, I dove right into the article even though I haven't seen the movie.

The logic of the article really baffles me. The author, Daniel Engber, who is usually pretty lucid, gets into his argument like this.

"Wall-E is an innovative and visually stunning film, but the "satire" it draws is simple-minded. It plays off the easy analogy between obesity and ecological catastrophe, pushing the notion that Western culture has sickened both our bodies and our planet with the same disease of affluence. According to this lazy logic, a fat body stands in for a distended culture: We gain weight and the Earth suffers. If only society could get off its big, fat ass and go on a diet!"

How is it lazy logic to see that overzealous consumerism is the cause of both the obesity rate and our current ecological situation? And his facetious sentence, "If only society could get off its big, fat ass and go on a diet!" makes perfect sense to me. A diet from fatty useless food, from fossil fuels, from overworking just to make more money to buy more crap, I'd say a diet is just what the West needs. Engber goes on:

"But the metaphor only works if you believe familiar myths about the overweight: They're weak-willed, indolent, and stupid. Sure enough, that's how Pixar depicts the future of humanity. The people in Wall-E drink "cupcakes-in-a-cup," they never exercise, and if they happen to fall off their hovering chairs, they thrash around like babies until a robot helps them up. They watch TV all day long and can barely read.

It ought to go without saying that this stereotype of the "obese lifestyle" is simply false. How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA. (Your height is similarly heritable.) That is to say, it may not matter that much whether you eat salads or drink "cupcakes-in-a-cup," whether you bike everywhere or fly around in a Barcalounger. If you have a propensity to become obese, there's only so much that can be done about it."

This really confused me. DNA is part of the picture, but it's not the main part. There is a difference between eating salad (why is it always salad? The fittest people I know never eat salads, they eat vegetables) and eating a cupcake. There is a difference between biking everywhere and sitting in a chair all day. The difference is staring you in the face every time you go to an international airport concourse in the US. The Americans are fat, and the foreigners are not. Sorry to put it so baldly, but I've seen this with my own eyes for years now, and I've been on both sides of it.

I object to the idea that being obese is a disease that we can't prevent. Now this is where someone is thinking "easy for you to say, you're not one of those people with the fat gene." But I AM! I've always been a little heavy, and if I don't exercise and don't eat well I get fat within just a few days. I blimp out. It's in my family, it's in my genes. The author is seeming to say that if you are unlucky enough to naturally tend towards fat, you might as well have "cupcake in a cup" because you're screwed either way.

This is completely backasswards. If you have the DNA for obesity, you have more responsibility than anyone else to not eat the cupcake, to stick to a low fat diet, and to freakin' exercise. If someone has diabetes we tell them they have to be more careful than most people about the GI of their foods. If someone has heart problems we teach them how to eat vigilantly to keep their arteries clean. Why shouldn't the same be applied to people like me, who get fat faster than any of the people around us?


But the article did get me thinking. Since the PCP I have probably become less tolerant of obese people than before I started. This is because I now know exactly what it takes to lose fat and gain muscle. You just need to follow a few rules consistently, and the body takes care of itself. And I don't want to hear about your thyroid problem or obesity gene. There's no way to accrue that much mass without introducing that mass into your system through large servings of fatty food. There's just no way. (Well, technically, you could convert the energy around you into mass, but that would blow up the entire planet.) These people have eaten their way into their condition, and they can eat and exercise their way right out of it. And the truth is that it's not that hard.

It's not that hard. It's not that hard to take an hour a day to exercise your most precious possession, your body. It's not that hard to stop eating junk that only makes you feel sick and depressed when you finish it. So, yes, I do think an overweight person is weak-willed, indolent, and stupid, in a fashion. Weak-willed to not be fed up enough to finally change, indolent for, well, being indolent (indolent does mean habitually lazy, after all) and stupid to not realize that they're running their one and only body into the ground.

I can say this because I used to be one of those people, and I was all those things, and it drives me nuts when people like Engber hint that you have no choice but to be fat.

You do have a choice. And the choice is not that hard to follow through with. And you can do it.

Day 112, The BMI Is Whack

A few weeks ago I played Wii Fit for the the first time. The first thing you do in the game is set up your character, by providing your height and letting the board weigh you. Then it will spit out your BMI.

(Note: This isn't my screen, it's just a screencap I got off the internet. You can tell because that rough polygon lego character looks nothing like me!)

Now, what is the BMI? You probably know it stands for Body Mass Index. Ooh that sounds so scientific, it must be good right? Your Body Mass Index is the following equation.


That equation gives you a number somewhere between 13 and 60. This number puts you in a field that's classified as "underweight," "healthy weight," "overweight" or "obese."

So where exactly did this BMI system come from? Surely some fitness and health experts got together and figured it all out right? Wrong-O! The BMI was invented by a Belgian mathematician named Adolphe Quetelet in the mid 1800's as part of his plan to take all kinds of social phenomena and quantify them into numbers so that he could break us pesky, unpredictable humans into easily processed equations. Actually he was just trying to measure Belgians. From the 19th century.

So, I found out my BMI... and guess what? I'm on the borderline of being "overweight." Yep. Me. The guy wearing shorts from the boy's department. So the damn game is like scolding me and telling me I need to watch it or I could slip into the red zone. It really pissed me off. The BMI also has no way of figuring out your cardiovascular health, so a marathon runner will get the same score as a couch potato if their weights and heights happen to be equal.

Why did this happen? Because the stupid BMI can't tell the difference between weight from muscle and weight from fat. So for someone like me, with minimal body fat and a lot of muscle, it thinks I must be on the heavy side. This glitch basically bars me from playing Wii Fit, because the exercise plan they give me is designed for the fat guy I'm impersonating.

So, don't pay any attention to the BMI. Or any numerical evaluation or your health. Instead, go back to the simple things that we don't need a calculator for. For example:

How do your trousers fit?

How do you look in the mirror?

Can you touch your toes?

Do you get winded going up stairs?

Can you do the things you want to do without feeling crappy?

These are much better questions that "what's your height divided by your weight?" Give me a break. It should stand for the Body Mass Inanity.