Connecting The Disperate Dots

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about health -- mine, my family's, how to make us healthier and sustain that into the future.

It's a by-product of hitting that stage in life where things begin to creak and groan on your body when you've overused them.  Or even just used them a teensy bit more than usual.

Amazing how just a year or two can make a humongous difference in how well you do or do not snap back after exertion, isn't it?

But it also stems from watching parents and other elderly folks in our lives go through a lot of difficulties that are, frankly, rather self-inflicted due to poor diet, lack of exercise, and outright neglect, even in the face of a specific diagnosis and a mapped out set of changes needed to combat whatever health challenge has cropped up.

The fact that I recognize some of my own poor behaviors and resistant idiocies in the behavior of others is disconcerting enough.

But if I know better?  If I have the intellectual understanding of exactly what I am doing to myself long-term by eating badly or not getting nearly enough exercise or whatever else I may need to do that I am decidedly not doing nearly often enough?

That's just suicide by time, isn't it?


Watching people that I know and love go through this with other members of their family (and, in some cases, our family), is tough enough.

Knowing that if I continue down this path, The Peanut will be doing the same with me in far too short a timeframe?  That's utterly unacceptable, and not a legacy I want to leave her in any way.

Beyond that, though, I deserve better.

I want to wake up with energy instead of feeling drained and exhausted from the moment my feet hit the floor and I waddle into the bathroom all the way to bedtime.  Which is how most days feel lately, a sign that real change is desperately needed if I ever saw one.

In the far too distant past, morning would mean bounding from bed with energy and excitement to start the day afresh.  Thanks to lupus and years of physical neglect, now it means that I creak and practically crawl my way to consciousness while I wait for my meds to kick in and allow my frozen joints to move with a little more ease.

Are there ways that I can adjust this through better diet and exercise?  I want to find out.  Because the thought of living in this way, and increasingly watching myself get worse and worse as time marches inexorably forward, is not something I will do quietly.  I refuse to just accept this as inevitable.

So I am embarking on a personal quest:  better health, more happiness, and a lot more insight into who I am and what I really want from my own life.

Michael Pollanfamously threw out a rule of thumb on nutrition that I'm going to begin to apply to my little family in earnest:  "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."

In an interview with the NYTimes, Pollan talked about an ongoing conversation he's had with Marion Nestle that I found both intriguing and personally enlightening:

I was trying to simplify everything I learned as radically as possible. I thought that was a compromise. I really wanted to say just “Eat food,” but I realized that wasn’t enough. You had to sort of take a position on meat and vegetables, and you had to address the whole issue of quantity. I’ve learned that from Marion Nestle (the New York University nutrition professor and author), that in the end, so much of the discussion about nutrition is a way to avoid talking about how much people are eating. People would rather talk about anything else than quantity. Eat food was the main message, but I realized I needed to qualify it. I was hoping for two words. I compromised at seven.


The adverb “mostly” has been the most controversial. It makes everybody unhappy. The meat people are really upset I’m taking a swipe at meat eating, and the vegetarians are saying, “What’s with the ‘mostly?’ Why not go all the way?” You can’t please everyone. In a way that little word is the most important. It’s not all or nothing. Mostly. It’s about degree. But in the whole food discussion, I’ve learned the most from that, that little “ly” and people’s reaction to it.

Back when I was blogging at FDL, I hosted a book salon with Marion -- about her book What to Eat-- that was fantastic in so many ways, but mostly because she is so open to basics and to intricate details about dietary concerns.  The folks who participated loved it.  I loved it.

Why is it so hard for me, then, to personally apply the knowledge I've gleaned from -- quite literally -- years of reading on nutrition and health?

It shouldn't be.  But I'm tying myself in knots trying to get it perfect.

What I am doing is allowing "the perfect" to be the enemy of the "good enough to make progress," which inevitably means that no real progress gets made at all in the long run.  Short term bursts don't last, and I end up right back at square one because I cannot sustain perfection.

So I'm going to step out of my own way on this.  And we'll see how it goes.

"Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."  Good advice, I think.  Now to put it into practice and maybe get a walk in today, too...

PS -- Marion Nestle has a fantastic blog on food, politics, and how their intersection impacts us all.  Well worth a read.

(Photo via Big Max Power.  Love how the visual balance feels on this -- just lovely.)