The Joy of Movement and Eating Well
Healthy Eating needn’t be a Sacrifice, and Exercise doesn’t have to be a Chore
Ikaria
I recently visited the Greek island of Ikaria near the coast of Turkey. Ikaria is one of the five places in the world designated as a “Blue Zone.” These are places where there are an extraordinary number of long-lived, healthy people per population compared to the rest of the world. The Blue Zone areas share some features in common. The people there eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and little or no red meat. They also share a strong sense of community. And in various ways, they get regular exercise. On the steep mountainsides of Ikaria, islanders have traditionally walked the footpaths between villages.
Ikaria is a relatively poor, rocky, isolated island. However, the locals manage to grow a wide variety of organic fruits and vegetables. There are no fast food outlets or chain franchises. Eating on the island, whether at a taverna or from a grocery store, is about real food.
I was converted to the Mediterranean diet when I visited Greece for the first time in 1976 at age 25. Not only did I find the fresh salads there delicious, but the food felt good inside me and made me feel good. It gave me energy and vitality. I gave up eating land creatures for good shortly after returning home. Within a week, the chronic indigestion that had plagued me for years vanished and has never returned. Eventually, I gave up other kinds of foods, for instance, anything that was deep-fried. The brain fog and stomach bloat after french fries were not worth the short-term gratification.
Eat Better
An oncologist recently wrote an article in the Washington Post that urged people to eat better to prevent cancer. But he admitted that he didn’t like to eat various fruits and veggies together and consequently ate only one vegetable or fruit with lunch and dinner. So here is a guy urging people to change their habits when he can’t do it himself. I don’t believe it’s so hard. Some research shows that if someone eats something they don’t like for about ten days in a row, they will probably like it. Since I enjoy any kind of healthy food, I couldn’t experiment on myself to validate this. But my wife, Helen, who hated bananas, after a bit of urging, stepped up to volunteer in the name of science. She forced herself to eat bananas ten days in a row. The result was surprising. After that, I (who did the shopping) had trouble keeping bananas in stock. She began to take two to the office with her every day.
You are your habits
Some bad habits are hard to quit. The first time I quit smoking, I dreamt about smoking every night for a year. Now that I have stopped for some thirty years, the smoking dream has become infrequent, but it still comes.
I feel now as if I had been under some kind of demonic possession during those years that I smoked. Smoking is so crazy. I knew that lung cancer was a horrible way to die, yet I kept on smoking. Why? I don’t know the answer. But somewhere, I think I took a deep dive into self-reflection, which brought on something akin to an exorcism. Watching the behavior of other addicts and what they would do for a butt began to disgust me. When smoking became stigmatized and banned in restaurants and pubs, it helped liberate millions of addicts.
If bad eating was not so socially acceptable, would it help free some people of unhealthy eating habits?
Why is offering candy to a child socially acceptable? That was a tough one for me as a father. People kept doing it to my daughter without asking if it was okay. I tried to keep her away from junk food within reason. At age 34, she has had one tiny cavity.
On a bus ride in Nepal once, a trekker showed me a large bag of candy he had brought to give to children in remote villages. I told him that these children would have no access to a dentist and his candies were going to cause a great deal of suffering. He was pretty pissed with me that I had rained on his parade. He told me he was not going to change his plans. He had paid for these candies and would give them away. I supposed that he was looking forward to the gleeful smiles of the children and could put the consequences out of his mind. Is that what people also do when they engage in self-harm with unhealthy food? On subsequent trips to the Himalayas, I took a bag of toothbrushes to give to children. The children and the parents were all pleased.
Changing eating habits must be easier than quitting a drug addiction like nicotine. There are so many foods that are a positive experience. So many delicious things are quick to prepare and good for you, so why would you eat the bad ones? I’ll admit all my eating and exercise habits didn’t change at all at once. I am now some 50 pounds lighter than at my peak weight. I was a fat kid. Now, in my seventies, I have an athlete’s body. I believe that I gradually awoke to mindful action regarding eating and moving.
Perhaps some people have just given up on their bodies. Don’t. I lived with years of debilitating lower back pain while spending thousands of dollars on chiropractors and physiotherapists to no avail. Then, I discovered a series of exercises that strengthened my back and changed my life. Never give up on yourself.
I have never been to a drive-thru. The whole idea appalls me — to order unhealthy food and then to be so slothful as to not even get out of the car seat to go and pick it up. There is an antisocial aspect to drive-thrus. People in our society are dying of loneliness, yet they want to cocoon themselves in their vehicles. The drive-thru culture combined with online shopping can lead to unhealthy societal habits. Meeting each other in the marketplace, the Agora, is one of the binding features of civilization.
It’s not just about You
You share your body with some one trillion critters. They are called your microbiome. They live in a symbiotic relationship with you. You feed them; they nourish you. You can’t live without them. You can’t be healthy if you don’t feed them. Since many that are essential to your health live in the lower part of your gut, they starve if you don’t slow down your digestion by eating fiber. If you eat sugary or ultra-processed foods or drink pop or juice, the sugar goes to your liver, and unless you are performing some sustained endurance sport, it gets stored as fat. Meanwhile, your microbiome goes hungry. Those critters down there are essential for releasing the micronutrients that keep you healthy. That presumes that you even eat foods that contain micronutrients.
Although there is a place for supplements, the health food store industry may have inadvertently done more harm than good by leading many people to believe supplements can be a substitute for eating healthily. Supplements cannot replace food. There has been enough research to validate that. Real food contains a complex array of micronutrients that work synergistically with vitamins and minerals in a way we don’t fully understand. It’s a process that you can’t get out of a bottle.
I love to eat. I will not reveal how many meals and snacks I have in a day. It will likely shock you. I am lucky to live in the mountains, where a great outdoor gym is at my doorstep, so I burn a lot of calories daily. At age 74, I’m still an active rock climber (indoor and out), hiker, and ski mountaineer. I also do regular High-Intensity Interval Training (HIT) and Helen and I both work out at home with weights. Importantly, I eat a lot of raw food, which I enjoy. You can eat bowls of mixed veggies and fruits as big as your head and not get fat. I’m not talking about a salad poured over with a commercial dressing. I usually use just a little extra virgin olive oil, a few drops of balsamic vinegar, some herbs, and a bit of feta. Sometimes, I add a spoonful of hummus. We almost always include an avocado or half of one if it is large. If you buy them unripe, the trick with avocados is to leave them out until they ripen and then move them to the fridge, where the ripening process will almost stop. When your fridge supply is low, shop for more unripe ones.
Helen and I can put a healthy, tasty meal together in under twenty minutes. Since I suffered for years with a painful back condition (until I found the right therapy), twenty minutes was the maximum I could spend standing on my feet in the kitchen.
I eat about ten different fruits and veggies every day. In the morning, I’ll have a couple of kinds of berries (fresh or frozen, depending on the season) with Greek yogurt and some banana. In the evening, the salad contains peppers, tomatoes, cucumber, olives, avocado, and various greens. We often have lightly steamed broccoli as an ingredient in a bean-based pasta dish or an omelet. Helen and I will frequently munch on a raw carrot while preparing dinner. We sometimes have seafood as well, barbecued or stir-fried with veggies, all wild-caught, never farmed.
Rice and Quinoa we make in quantity in the cooker and then store in batches in the freezer for convenience. We keep it simple. I’m sure some gourmet cooking can be healthy too, but neither of us has the time temperament for that. It doesn’t take a lot of time to prepare healthy food.
We never waste food that enters our kitchen. Even if you are a vegetarian, be mindful that with every meal, something has died to give you life. Honor your food.
The Paleo Myth
It’s only relatively recently in history that many humans have had access to a variety of fruits and vegetables year-round. Greenhouse technology and flash freezing have helped. Food does not lose nutrition by being frozen.
There is a conjecture that our hunter-gatherer ancestors, for tens of thousands of years, had a diet heavy on meat, without legumes or grains, so that would be the most natural and healthiest diet for us. Archeological evidence contradicts at least part of this. It has been discovered that even Neanderthals were preparing lentils and harvesting wild grasses 60,000 years ago. Although some Neanderthals hunted large mammals, as did our sapiens ancestors, others were mostly pescatarian or even vegetarian. The truth is humans can survive on a wide variety of diets. The question is: what is optimum for a healthy, long life? A heavy meat diet may have been conducive to living long enough to pass on genes, but does that mean it is the best for us?
In 1991, a couple of hikers came across a body thawing out of the ice on a high mountain ridge on the Austrian/Italian border. The body turned out to be that of a man who lived 5,300 years ago. He has since been dubbed the Iceman as well as Otzi after the region where he was found. This discovery was a huge boon to the knowledge of Europe’s late Stone Age/early Copper Age. The mummified body was in remarkably good shape. His stomach contents, DNA, and overall health could be analyzed. The man was determined to be in his mid-forties when he died. The investigation showed that he had a high-meat, high-fat, and high-carb diet. He had several health problems, one of which was hardening of the arteries, which although it can have contributing heredity factors, is associated with lifestyle, particularly diet. Although one body does not a conclusion make, it fits with all the modern evidence that heavy eating of red meat, does not lead to optimum health.
Ultra Processed Food
There has been so much written in the media lately on the subject of Ultra-Processed Food that unless the reader has been living under a log, there would not be much benefit to me adding to it here. All I will say is — just don’t. Remember your microbiome.
Deserts
All desserts are not bad. I have Greek yogurt and berries a couple of times a day. When in Europe, I enjoy the pastries, and being from Vienna, especially the strudel. But North American commercial desert baking is shit. It’s so loaded with sugar and oil, I find it unedible for the lower sweetness taste palate I have developed.
There are rare exceptions. Earlier this year, Helen and I stopped at a native jewelry shop and café in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. There weren’t even any other buildings around. I needed a coffee to keep my attention on the road and decided to try a piece of apple pie with it. From what I could see, it didn’t look half bad, but I expected to be disappointed. It turned out to be the apple pie of my life. The apples were half baked and tart, rather than mushy and drowned in a sugary sweet syrup. It was more like a European apple strudel.
In North America, most pastries are already abominably sweet even before they are topped with a sugar glaze. Who needs that? When is more sugar too much? Then there is the North American muffin, often so laden with grease and sugar that if you drop a crumb on your lap, you get an oily stain.
Just get away from that stuff for a while, and you will not want to go back.
I don’t do soft drinks. I don’t know why anyone would. Oh wait, not true, sometimes I do keep a bottle of Coke in my car — for cleaning my windshield when it gets covered with road film. It cuts through the grease like nothing else. But one has to be careful to wash it off after application because it will eat the rubber seal around the glass. Drink it? Are you crazy?
Artificial Sweeteners
I’ve been surprised that people I know are educated, and whom I presumed read newspapers, are clueless about all the media reports that have been coming out for years about the health dangers of artificial sweeteners. Here’s one from a study cited on CNN:
“A low-calorie sweetener called xylitol used in many reduced-sugar foods and consumer products such as gum and toothpaste may be linked to nearly twice the risk of heart attacks, stroke and death in people who consume the highest levels of the sweetener, a new study found.”
Here’s another quote:
“The World Health Organization warned consumers in 2023 to avoid artificial sweeteners for weight loss, and has called for additional research on the long-term toxicity of low- and no-calorie sweeteners.”
Additionally, there has been compelling evidence for some time, based on experiments with rats and humans, that artificial sweeteners can increase appetite and lead to weight gain, the very thing they are meant to prevent.
And there is evidence that artificial sweeteners can affect the diversity of your microbiome.
Don’t be fooled. Some of these products, like Stevia, claim to be natural, but they are highly refined.
And then there is the label, “No Sugar Added.” I’ve been fooled by that one. Most of the time, although not every time, that means the product is sweetened artificially. I can tell on the first bite. To me, artificial sweeteners don’t even taste like sugar.
Exercise
I wasn’t always a jock. I gradually became more athletic as I grew older — in part to escape that black dog, depression. Good eating and exercise will help your mind as well as your body, and pay off more and more as you get older. In my mid-seventies, I can’t get up a mountain as quickly as when I was sixty, but I could still now run rings around my twenty-year-old self.
It’s about attitude. Eating healthy shouldn’t feel like sacrifice, and exercise doesn’t have to feel like work. Just even try dropping the term “workout” for a while. Aged as it is, and scarred with a multitude of injuries accrued over a lifetime of adventure, I enjoy moving my body, and I still love stretching its limits.
I once encountered a company of US GIs training in the Austrian Alps. Their officer was trying his hardest to get his guys to enjoy the mountain experience, but they would have none of it. They whined and complained about how difficult the ascent was to get to the hut. It wasn’t. They seemed like a bunch of wusses to me. Hiking can be pleasurable if you are a mountaineer, but if you are in the army, I guess it’s supposed to be work.
That doesn’t mean you don’t have to put intensity into your exercise. If you want to get stronger and faster, you do. Once intensity becomes a habit though, it can become a pleasure. But there is a balance between training and overtraining, a science which is to a great extent, age-dependent. I have just recently conceded that I can’t climb 5 days a week with thirty-year-olds anymore and still expect my body to have enough recovery time.
Finding the balance between training and recovery is important at any age, but becomes more critical as one gets older. I am still learning about that subject and planning to write about what I discover in the future.
Climbing is one of the funnest forms of exercise. Almost every city has a climbing gym now. I have a friend who took up rock climbing when he was 68. He is 85 now and still killing it. As a former climbing gym owner, I have witnessed many lives transformed in that environment.
Learn to focus on the pleasure, not the pain. I read so much stuff from people who say they hate exercise, but they force themselves to do it because it’s good for them. They pride themselves on their willpower. It’s not so much about willpower — I’m not very good at that — it’s about refocusing your attention. It’s about finding joy.
Enjoy real food.
Enjoy moving your body. Push its limits. It’s fun.
Find the bliss.
Eduard Fischer rockcraft@icloud.com