One Red Hot Country Mama!

Like most people, I am always trying to increase my energy levels in order to do all the stuff that I want to do. My old approach was caffeine – if I pour a lot of coffee/tea on the problem, I will feel alert, energetic and will be able finish it all.

But in the past year or so, I have changed my approach. I’ve realized that instead of trying to ignore my natural energy lows and simply add stimulants, I have been working on calming myself as much as possible leading nonintuitively to MORE energy, not less.

So – I am doing things like yoga, meditation and even acupuncture. I also (painfully) ended my relationship with caffeine earlier this year. For acupuncture, the only analogy I can make to the feeling is that relaxing feeling that comes over me when I have a drink after a very hard day (without the hangover part of course). As a result of all of this, I am much more energetic, with the added benefit of being much better able to handle the stress around owning my own business.

I was speaking to a young client about this a few weeks ago. In her early-to-mid-twenties, this woman is still learning the ropes. I remember how I was in her position – working very hard, but also high strung and stressed out. Conversely, this woman is quite calm and easy-going. I find this approach quite inspiring – and I told her so!

I think as a society we keep turning to expensive super-drugs to resolve both physical and psychological diseases, but I believe that simply handling and reducing stress would resolve it much more effectively. We generously donate to million-dollar breast-cancer campaigns or campaigns for heart and stroke… but really stress is a big contributor to both diseases.

Unlike in the pharmaceutical industry, there CEO watching the market or no network of Marketing Managers and Account Reps who have bonuses riding on how many yoga or acupuncture sessions are sold. So – a mass-effort towards stress-reduction will be a grass-roots initiative… by people who can see that stress doesn’t give you life-energy, it takes it away.

I picked up a Runner’s World magazine at lunch the other day and read an article about Chris Bergland, an athlete who has won three iron man competitions and has the Guinness World Record for the most distance covered on a treadmill in 24 hours (153.76 miles).

His dad was an MD and one-time chief of Neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He specialized in the effects of pain and pleasure. The article says the following about Bergland:

We all have these neurochemicals flowing through us. What separates Bergland is that he’s developed ways to tap into them and use them on demand. He’s able to do this because of neuroplasticity, which refers to the brain’s ability to change its structure and function by expanding or strengthening certain neural circuits while shrinking or weakening others. "Neurotransmitters released during exercise can contribute to neuroplasticity," says neuroscientist Ronald Duman, Ph.D., a professor at Yale University’s School of Medicine. "Neuroplasticity within the brain’s motivation and reward pathways may play a role in the perception of experiences, including exercise."

Bergland’s translation: Positive thinking builds positive neural pathways. The more you think optimistically about something, the more apt your brain is to choose that path. "A neural pathway is like a trail in the woods," he says. "The more hikers take it, the more worn it gets, and the more likely it’ll be taken in the future. You can reshape your brain to think and behave like a better athlete.

It makes you think about which paths you are wearing down… hey? Or not wearing down for that matter…

Had an excellent lunch with my friend today at Live Organic Food Bar. The food was incredible – it was hard to believe that there was none of the "good stuff" (meaning cheese and meat) was in it. For example, there was a cannelloni dish made with nuts that tasted creamy (?!) and Thai spring rolls that were full of unusual raw ingredients that were absolutely amazing! My friend had the vegetable juice called "liquid plumber" (I don’t want to know…) and I had a berry smoothie. Everything we ate was delicious with no bad aftertaste literally… or the figurative bad aftertaste of diet-straying guilt.

I really enjoy these healthy places and I love the trend of regular eateries getting healthier. It has changed the whole ritual of eating out:

• Traditional Restaurant: I eat larger portions than usual; I eat more courses than usual; great looking, thin waiters and waitresses who probably don’t eat a lot of the food at their own restaurant serve me; I go out feeling puffy, guilty, wishing to look more like the slim waitress… but knowing that it wasn’t a good start, eating all of those large portions and courses.
• Health Restaurant: I eat healthier than usual; I eat more courses, but it doesn’t matter because each course has more nutrients and not a lot of calories; great looking wait staff serve me who eat everything on the menu; I go out feeling great and nourished with no guilt.

The raw food diet is one of the most difficult to manage (other than Michal Rae‘s diet of course), since imagine, not only are you forgoing meat and dairy, but you can’t even cook! My friend and I spoke to the owner, who is pregnant, on the way out. She explained that to her raw foods is more of a cuisine than a full-time lifestyle. This makes a lot of sense to me. Of course I still like the traditional restaurants since hey – the bad guilt aftertaste has its own property of deliciousness (like the cheesecake I indulged in last night foe example). But… I definitely want to go to more restaurants like Live… hopefully more will spring up.

My friend and I were eating at Fresh last night on Yonge and Spadina and then walked over to the Starbucks in Yorkville. I brought along my MacLean’s Magazine to read on the subway and I showed her the cover story featuring Michael Rae (Rogers Media has opted not to put all of their content on line so I am linking to a search.) We stretched the magazine across the chairs and read the article avidly.

The story? Michael, who is six feet tall and weighs 115 lbs, is trying to live to 110 by reducing his calorie intake dramatically. He follows a strict regimen called the Calorie Restriction (CR) diet – he has been following it for almost nine years. He says that the more you reduce your calories, the more you increase your lifespan. For example, if you reduce your calories by 10%, you will get a 10% increase in average maximum lifespan. According to the article, studies spanning 70 years have shown that rats, mice, fish, yeast and rhesus monkeys have shown up to a 50% increase in life-spans from dramatic reductions in calories. So why not try it on humans?

My friend and I looked at the gaunt pictures of Michael – he looks like an anorexic person. She used to be in Social Work and thinks that he has a condition similar to anorexia, where instead of obsessing about being beautiful, he is obsessing over not dying. He is letting a fear dictate what he does with large amount of his hours on earth. I wondered… if you are living such a restrictive life, are you truly living life to the fullest? If you spend all of your life delaying the immediate gratification of food – are you really living? What happened to being in the moment?

Another article about increasing life-span was posted on the New York Times earlier this week called The Surprising Secret to a Long Life: Stay in School. They found that staying in school for a longer period of time increases your lifespan. One economist concluded that going to school for one more year could increase your life-span by one-and-a-half years. James Smith, a health economist at RAND says that the education piece teaches you to delay gratification:

“Most of adherence is unpleasant,” Dr. Smith says. “You have to be willing to do something that is not pleasant now and you have to stay with it and think about the future.”

He deplores the dictums to live in the moment or to live for today. That advice, Dr. Smith says, is “the worst thing for your health.”

Wow. Like Michael, James seems to think that longevity is all about not being happy today. What about the geeky folks who like getting educated? What about the people who enroll in endless degrees to avoid the real world? Is it still delaying gratification in that case? Fortunately, according to the article other important factors to a long life are: wealth, health and nutrition in early life and a strong social network. Some of those actually seem enjoyable. To me there is definitely a balance between being as healthy as possible and living a happy life in the moment.

If there is such a thing as "winning" in life, I don’t think that it is scored by living to 110 compared to 86.