It’s spring again. We haven’t seen people in awhile. And there is scary bathing suits/diet advertising on every screen. How do we make peace with our changing bodies? Here’s Cate with some wise words from a couple of summers ago.
Month: March 2021
Advice from a bearded dragon
In case you missed her on Instagram or Twitter, here’s Lizzy.
My son Gavin was keen to show me how to make memes so these are actually his handiwork.
Enjoy!
Lizzy with various pieces of advice: “Lizzy says remember to rest and recuperate,” “Believe in yourself like Lizzy believes in the possibility of daily crickets,” “Lizzy says the outside world is worth interacting with,” and “Lizzy says respect your boundaries.”
Another pandemic shutdown for fitness studios and gyms: how do we help?
In Toronto, we’ve been in some version of near full lockdown since November. The rules keep changing by increments (a satirical article the other day was titled “Ontario reclassifies ‘grey zone’ to “IDK You Fucking Figure it Out” zone). But one thing is clear: gyms and fitness studios have been closed since October. We’ve all been adapting — zwift, running, virtual classes with our superhero team — but small businesses are really struggling. Outdoor fitness classes MAY start to be allowed this weekend but it’s still March in Canada. So the strain goes on.
I personally really believe in the incredible significance of local studios — my local spinning studio and my local Y are super inclusive. My spin studio and yoga studio have contributed to local projects and provided prizes for countless fundraisers in a way you’d never see from the likes of Peloton or other “big box” fitness options. And I’ve made actual real life friends — and a much bigger array of “hey great to see you!” neighbours — from my local fitness. I really worry about them.
Back in October, I wrote a post about how to help out our local fitness spots during the lockdown. I’ve been doing virtual classes with my local yoga studio and contributing to the virtual library with my spin studio since. I’m still worried. I’m reblogging the post because there are tons of good ideas. Show your local studio a little love in this final stretch (we hope!) of lockdown.
Trying to Avoid Medications
Warning: this post talks about food and changing eating habits on a doctor’s advice.
This is a post I never wanted to write. I love FIFI because it focuses on being healthy at any size. If there is ever talk about eating, it tends to focus on enjoying our food. A few weeks ago, my doctor advised me that I now have high blood pressure in addition to high cholesterol. She prescribed blood pressure medication, with the possibility of cholesterol medication as well if I am not able to get my numbers under control.
As much as I want to be healthy at any size, clearly I am not. Cholesterol issues and slow metabolisms run in my extended family; we joke that we struggle to metabolize lettuce. I skipped getting my blood work done last year because I didn’t want to know that the cholesterol levels were still high. However, after years of avoiding medication and failing to lower my levels without it, I am forced to admit that I risk ruining my plans to live so long that no-one will care whether I signed my organ donor card, because I will have squeezed every bit of usefulness out of my organs.
I am lucky enough to have a doctor who does not talk about weight. She focuses, instead on other factors that affect the risk of cardio-vascular disease. She has clearly been reading articles like this, on the impact of physical activity on the association of overweight and obesity with cardiovascular disease. Spoiler alert: In this population-based study of adults aged ≥55 years, overweight and obese participants with high levels of physical activity were not at increased risk of CVD compared with their normal weight counterparts.
However, we did talk about maintaining my current activities, and ensuring I get lots of fish but less sodium, less alcohol, and fewer carbohydrate-heavy refined foods. My January experiment with vegetarian foods was a good start and she encouraged me to keep going with that, and think about keto principles (but definitely no elimination of food groups). Since I am at a higher risk for bowel cancer, this approach works well to help me maintain a high fibre intake and minimize refined foods.
She also suggested I look at a very gentle form of intermittent fasting. Basically, it boils down to the old adage “Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dine like a pauper”. Have my last meal earlier in the day, and no snacking before bed. Try to give my body at least 12 hours without food so that it has a chance to burn fuel reserves, which should help reset my metabolism over time (despite my malfunctioning thyroid).
Since I often work late and have developed really bad habits about eating dinner as late as 9 or 10 pm, I decided this was worth investigating. I did a bit of reading on the subject and decided I like the description “circadian rhythm eating” much better. There is some decent science to support the concept, see here. Tracy had a different take on intermittent fasting earlier this week, but where she focused on the fact that intermittent fasting is no better than any other diet, I focused on the ways to use the information for better health, listed at the end of the Harvard blog post: eat a sensible, mostly plant-based diet; be active through the day; limit the hours of the day when you eat; and avoid snacking or eating at nighttime.
Since my appointment, I have continued my regular fitness activities and avoided eating after 6 pm whenever possible. I have been tracking my meals with an app that shows nutrients so I know how I’m doing on the fibre, and sodium. I love to cook, and have already tried several new veggie-filled recipes. I invested in a heart rate monitor and use it daily. My blood pressure is now consistently in the normal range. And I take my medication. As much as I resent the fact that I need it, it works.
Diane Harper is a public servant in Ottawa.
A Peek Inside the Balance 365 Facebook Group
Feature photo credit: Jiang Xulei via Unsplash
It’s been 4 months since I joined Balance 365 (B365), and I am finding the private Facebook group to be a valuable resource. When I started, I was looking for community but skeptical that it would be much of a learning environment for me. After all, my background is in science and I’ve nerdy about fitness and nutrition a long time, and I’m a health and science teacher by profession. I’m also a regular at my therapist’s office, so I’m no stranger to self-reflection. And yet, there’s something wonderful about the shared values and goals of the women in B365. It is a rare place where women celebrate each other without judgement or implicit competition. And I’m learning about myself and my habits, too.
The group affirms each woman finding their own path and supports body autonomy–the solutions for you may not be the solutions for me. What feels good and healthy for one person may not for another. These values are reinforced with little sayings and mantras–”keep you eyes on your own plate,” (focus on your own choices, not on other people’s), “take the cherry with the pit,” (find what you can learn from a bad decision and move on), and “be a Grown Ass Woman (GAW),” (mother yourself with healthy boundaries and with compassion).
Every day, one of the coaches posts a recurring post for that day of the week. Women post in the comments and sometimes you get a little love, or women comment and commiserate, or maybe a coach asks you questions and prods you to think about something in a new way. (Getting the women to advise each other is a great teacher trick, by the way. Every teacher knows that you learn the most when you have to teach others.) In addition to these daily, official posts, members can post their own questions and experiences. They share what’s working for them, ask for help if they’re feeling stuck, and celebrate NSV (Non-scale Victories).
I’ve posted a handful of times. I like to share the occasional recipe. I often participate in the daily recurring posts. A few weeks ago I got outside my comfort zone and posted a video of myself doing squats. I wanted to experience the discomfort of being seen and face my chronic expectation that I am being judged and found less-than-worthy. I have a deep well of perfectionism, and I know that to really find a healthy balance in my habits, I need to reduce the power of being motivated by my fear of how others might perceive me. It’s been really powerful to just get used to knowing folks have seen me doing those lifts, knowing that they were flawed (my right hip slides around and my form can get wobbly). And as a result of the conversations in the thread that followed, I’ve come to be ok with the fact that I’m working on all of it.
In this environment, which habits you are working on, what goals you set, and to what degree you are focused on the work is entirely up to you. Another B365 mantra, “good, better, best” encourages folks to find the solutions that work best for them in the moment, not to just seek out whatever seems optimal on paper. At first, this do-it-at-your-own-pace aspect of B365 can seem daunting. There are always some posts from newer members asking where they should start and how they should decide what to do next. However, I think a real benefit of this structure is that it really forces participants to figure out what THEY believe they can follow through on successfully, and holds them accountable TO THEMSELVES. None of us are watching them to see if they’re keeping in step with some arbitrary timeline.
For folks who benefit from more structure and guidance, I assume that joining group coaching helps with that. However, even when they’re enrolled in coaching, you see women post about goal-setting questions and to what degree they want to actively participate in coaching calls. At the end of the day, it’s their job to figure out for themselves what they need and what they are willing to commit to.
The only habit changes that will work for someone and last for the long term are the changes that are rooted in the realities of each person’s life, their values and beliefs, and that reaffirm what they want for themselves in the present and in the future. That is the work that women are doing in the B365 Facebook group. Figuring out what fits, why it matters to them, and what they can do consistently. It’s pretty cool to watch and be a part of. I’m happy that I joined.
Marjorie Hundtoft is a middle school science and health teacher. She can be found sharing her favorite protein-filled snack foods, picking up heavy things and putting them down again in Portland, Oregon. You can now read her at Progressive-Strength.com .
Photo credit: Guille Alvarez via Unsplash
(Updated) Plus sized endurance athletes, we exist! (#Reblog #BlogLove)
I’ve updated this list once. Happy to update again. Who are your favourite plus sized women athletes?
First time riding the Millennium Trail
Saturday was the first day of spring. And unlike those Canadian March weekends where it starts snowing again, this first day of spring actually felt like the first day of spring. It was warm, above 10 degrees and brilliantly sunny. Sarah and I got out the gravel bikes and took them to her family farm in Prince Edward County for a couple of days of riding. Also, hot tubbing. Also, leisurely breakfasts.
Look at this breakfast!
We decided to explore the Millennium Trail: “The Millennium Trail is a 40+-km multi-use trail perfect for hiking, biking or even horseback riding. Stretching from Carrying Place to Picton, backing onto farmers’ fields and vineyards, it’s a great way to experience the tranquility of The County.”
Day 1 we pedaled from Picton to Bloomfield for coffee (usually it’s for ice cream but Slickers is still closed for the season.) Total distance about 20 km. There were still some snowy bits on the trail but lots of people were out enjoying the sunshine.
Bikes outside Bloomfield Public House Market 
Bike trail, with bonus mud and snow!
Best of the ride? While riding my mother texted the family chat to say that she has a Thursday appointment to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2. Yay!
On Day 2 we rode from Wellington to Lake Consecon, through some beautiful wetlands on a brand new section of trail. Total distance about 30 km. From the website, “For summer 2020, the trail has been fully refurbished, including a section that glides past Slab Creek wetlands, a small jaunt from Stanner’s Vineyards, which is arguably the most beautiful part of the path: teeming with chirping birds of every flock and feather, toads and turtles, an occasional snake, and yes, even, beavers. It’s home to four herons nests and a vibrant, yet peaceful part of the trail.”
Look swans!
There was some ATV traffic on that section but everyone was patient and polite. I would definitely recommend this as a family friendly bike ride. It’s clearly marked where the path crosses roads and given that parts of the trail were rail line, there’s no significant elevation. Also there are frequent km marker signs on the trail so kids will know they’re making progress.
On this gorgeous weekend we met joggers, dog walkers, and other cyclists. So much sun and so many smiles. Everyone seemed so happy to be outside.
Even Cheddar knows spring is in the air. Look at that face!
A small victory in a large battle: NCAA women’s basketball tiny weight room gets bigger
These days, news travels fast and turns on a dime. Here’s an important and fast-developing story of discriminatory treatment of women athletes, from yesterday to today:
The NCAA March Madness 2021 college basketball tournament is happening this year, inside bubbles in Indianapolis (for the men) and San Antonio (for the women). They are being housed and fed, and are training in facilities set up for them. The men’s and women’s training facilities are separate. But boy are they not equal. Check out this twitter comparison pic of their weight training facilities:
Some twitter users were skeptical that this was true, while others chalked it up to their beliefs that men’s teams made money, performed better and were more popular, so it didn’t matter that the women had less to work with than most of us have in our homes.
In service of settling any peripheral disputes, here are some stills from the Tiktok video feed of Sedona Prince, Oregon Ducks team member on the scene.
Of course this really made the NCAA’s face red. However, they rallied and offered this explanation:
An NCAA spokesperson told The Washington Post that officials initially thought there was not enough square footage for a weight training facilities at the convention center playing host to the women’s tournament. They later found the space, the spokesperson said.
Yeah, that’s not true. How do I know this? Because of Sedona Prince, who on Friday (the same day this story was reported) posted this picture on TikTok:
So either the NCAA people were lying or they hadn’t bothered to check whether what they were saying was true.
After a large outcry, mainly from women professional and college athletes and coaches, the NCAA apparently found some gym and weights set ups for the women’s teams. Sedona shows it to you live:
Turns out, lack of standard weight training facilities wasn’t the only way the NCAA treated women’s basketball teams less well than the men’s teams.
Geno Auriemma, coach of the Connecticut women’s team, told reporters at a news conference Friday that his team was receiving different daily coronavirus tests than men’s teams. The rapid antigen tests given to women are faster than PCR tests given to men but “have a higher chance of missing an active infection,” according to the Food and Drug Administration.
The NCAA is using a cheaper and less accurate COVID test for the women than it is for the men. Again, the NCAA responded:
In a statement, the NCAA said that its medical advisory group had determined that both tests were “were equally effective models for basketball championships”…
Hmmm. Here’s a question: if they’re equally effective, then why use one test for the men and another for the women? And if it’s an issue of supply, why didn’t you plan for that at the women’s location as well as you did for the men’s location?
Again, please refer to my earlier comment about the NCAA either lying or not caring whether what they say is true.
Other documented differences between how the men’s and women’s teams are treated includes the food served (Sedona documented an especially unfortunately Salisbury Steak event here), and skimpier swag bags for the women. Seriously, NCAA? You’re leaving no stone unturned in your quest to make 100% clear your lack of respect for women’s collegiate sports.
And then there are those who are listening and following the lead of the NCAA, turning its disdain for women’s teams into threats to shut down women’s sports altogether.
This tweet is revealing in that it’s a common and threatening reaction to women’s sports players, coaches and advocates’ calls for more equitable treatment, in accordance with Title IX legal requirements in the US. I’m happy to say that these threats haven’t gone answered.
Dawn Staley, a championship award-winning basketball player and coach, former Olympian and current Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer, said this (I’m including the whole statement here):
You can read a Sports Illustrated article about her statements and a letter from the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics here and here. They’re not playing about the barriers to playing that women and girl athletes face all day, every day. Hey, NCAA president Mark Emmert– you can throw some jump ropes, treadmills and weight bench sets at the problem, and say things like “we fell short” (ya think?), but you’re not getting out of it that easily.
I’m happy that Sedona Prince, her teammates, and all the women’s NCAA basketball teams now have an actual weight room for training. And yes, it would be nice for them to get buffet meals rather than prepackaged ones (the NCAA says they’re working on it). But it’s clear that the battle for respect and equity in women’s athletics is still in its early stages.
Thank you, Sedona Prince. Thank you, Dawn Staley. Thank you, players and coaches of women’s and girls’ athletics everywhere for standing up and speaking out.
But, wouldn’t it have been nice if men’s basketball coaches, players, team owners, and athletic directors spoke up and spoke loudly in support of women’s athletics now? Nets guard Kyrie Irving and Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry both posted criticism of the NCAA, and both got the same scornful, dismissive pushback. But there’s strength in numbers.
Hey male players, coaches, trainers, administrators, athletic directors– where are your voices? I can’t hear you…
Readers, if you’ve seen any recent tweets or other social media posts by male sports figures (players, coaches, business, academic, children’s leagues, anything) in support of women’s sports on the occasion of this latest discriminatory debacle, post them in the comments. It’s good to know who’s on the ball and who’s dropped it. Any other thoughts or ideas you want to share? I’m listening.
Bring on the sun! It’s spring!
I know there are disagreements about time change and daylight savings. FWIW, I’m pro daylight savings and love long evening summers and safe home from work bike commuting. I might be talked into keeping DST year round but I would hate to give it up altogether. But that’s not the song I’m here to sing today.
Instead, I want to note that the days are getting longer and we’re just now hitting the 50% daylight mark. There’s as much daylight as dark in my part of the world.
Sun rise at 7:38 am and sunset at 7:40 pm.
Even on cold days now I can feel the warmth of the sun on my skin and I’m plotting and planning days on the beach and swimming. Spring is definitely here!
We’ve booked a 160 km bike trip on the Lake Simcoe Loop in June. We’ve made plans to help take Jeff’s boat up the Rideau canal in May. Here’s his plan for the year. We’re going on another great canoe adventure in Algonquin in July. We’re also starting to think about racing the Snipe some weeknights. We’ve been in touch about backyard personal training for spring and summer.
Yes, the pandemic is far from over. Yes, there’s a lot of hard work ahead.
But the sun is back, longer days are here, and I can’t wait to spend more time outside.
If you’re in my part of the world, emerging from a cold, dark winter, how are you feeling about the warmer, lighter days ahead?
Fine Line between “Wellness” and Dangerous Misinformation
Last week Sam shared a story about GOOP with a few of us and it made my blood boil. The latest thing that’s happening at Gwyneth’s “health” empire? She’s established a press that sells health books. I’m not sure about you, but I found this bit of news to be alarming. In the article Sam circulated, entitled, “Goop She Did It Again: The Dangerous Obsession with Intuitive Fasting,” She’s pictured holding a book about intermittent fasting called Intuitive Fasting.
Now, despite that the the pandemic sometimes makes me feel as if I’m living in a cave, I have not in fact been living in a cave. So I understand a few things. I understand, for example, that some people like intermittent fasting and there is even some research that it is effective even if “really no more effective than any other diet”(according to this article on the Harvard Medical School blog). I understand that there is cultural pressure to be thin (like Gwyneth, for example) and lose weight. The Harvard Med School blog article tried to make itself relevant by noting that there is some surprising news about intermittent fasting (besides that fasting is “hard”): timing is key to its effectiveness.
But I’m not here to talk about its effectiveness. I’m here to remind everyone of a terribly disappointing fact that there is a lot of social/cultural pressure to deny: in the long run diets are ineffective. So if intermittent (or “intuitive”) fasting as “as effective as any other diet” it’s not particularly effective at helping anyone lose weight and keep it off.
Maybe that is the more realistic message that should be out there, getting support from celebrities with influence. If you’re not familiar with GOOP, it’s a leading purveyor of products and messaging to promote the “wellness” of rich white women with money to spend on pseudo-health trends and fads that cost a lot. Gwyneth is not a medical or health expert. She’s a peddlar who profits from women’s insecurities about their bodies, about aging, about being “misunderstood” by the medical practioners. She promotes things like cleansing and detoxing and all that stuff that is based on no facts at all. (I’ve written about “clean eating” a few times, including here). And we know that “clean eating” is linked to eating disorders. See “Experts: Clean Eating Fuels Anorexia.”
I get that “different people like different things” and that people get to make their own choices. But when a woman of influence gets people to make not just stupid but literally dangerous health decisions because they want to buy an image that she is selling, I want to throw up my hands and scream at the heavens.
So when I saw that she is hawking books about “intuitive” fasting, trading on the well-researched and anti-diet approach to food called “intuitive eating” (of which I myself am a big fan), it made me feel really demoralized about the sort of information that gains traction in our world today. Wrong information. Dangerous information. Harmful information that gets presented as liberating — as the Bitch Media article says: “We should all be alarmed by Paltrow’s power to repackage deeply harmful ideas under a glossy veneer of girl-boss feminism.”
The “wellness” industry has a lot of that. I recently started reading a novel called Self-Care by Leigh Stein. It is a parody of the wellness industry and even as a parody I simply couldn’t stand reading about it. It is the only “Did Not Finish” on my goodreads bookshelf. I just could not. But even though my response to this sort of harmful bullshit is visceral, it’s not ONLY visceral. I am a philosopher and a citizen of the world. I do not think that all ideas have equal merit. And as much as I believe that for the most part we should “live and let live” and that adults get to make their own choices, I do find the choices many adults are making to be alarming because they are not just uninformed, but they have dangerous propaganda as their main driver. You can dress it up as “self-care,” put it in a fancy bottle or an elegant cover, and frame it as “taking your life back” and “doing it your way” but come ON.
It’s no different from snake oil and miracle cures. And it ought to be resisted.