Life Goals Health and Fitness

In the last blog we spoke about existentialism; the meaning of life and how we define many aspects of our own life. In this blog we will discuss how existentialism helps define motivation and behaviour. But first we need to understand two things; that many of our behaviours are sub-conscious and secondly that we learn many of our behaviours. Further, we can sub-consciously learn behaviours and enact these behaviours. To create an example, young girls learn that  females use makeup; girls might have to learn how and what makeup to use but rarely do young girls make a conscious decision about wearing makeup. In fact a lot of what we do each day is a matter of automatic programming and happens sub-consciously. A human operating on automatic pilot is not always a bad thing, if we had to consciously think about our every action we would not be able cope.

So how does this affect our health and fitness? Once we create a definition of ourselves that definition becomes part of our personality and it is very hard to change that definition. To use the example above, most women would find it difficult to not wear makeup; the term “difficult” needs to be explained. People will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain their definition of themselves and as some of our behaviour is subconscious we don’t even realise what we are doing. Hence some of the behaviours we use to protect our definition of ourselves appear to lag logic. The first is denial; we can simply deny the facts. So, a health example might be that we refuse to accept that we have put on a bit of weight or that we might not be as fit as we could be. As we put on weight or lose fitness incrementally denial is a tailor made excuse mechanism.

A more insidious form of defence is sublimation, where we convert a negative into a positive. So, someone who lacks confidence or needs constant attention might act out as being as quite outgoing, even outrageously so. Often people who are unfit will make jokes about themselves, they might brag about how many beers they can drink. Hence, the behaviour becomes central to our personality. Fortunately once people understand what is going on they can change their behaviour. A very successful strategy is find behaviour and attitudes which are more pleasing and adds to our lives. A realistic example is someone who is always trying to impress other people, telling other people all the extraordinary thing they have done; a much better strategy is to talk to people about what the other person has done.

At an even more detrimental level is self sabotage. People actually sabotage their own efforts to get fit and there are several reasons, but we will just go into two. People become very attached to their perceptions of themselves, they feel that if they change their whole life will collapse and that up to date their whole would have been a lie if they change. Example, someone is overweight and makes excuses for being overweight, let’s say the whole family is overweight, if that person then loses weight the excuses that they have used for so long are no longer valid. People don’t want their excuses to be shown to be false, and they don’t want to accept that for all those years they could have had a normal weight. Seems strange, but many of these processes go on at a sub-conscious level.

Stepping it up again, self sabotage is often related to “fear of failure”. Again these processes go on sub-consciously, a person is so afraid of failing that they set up excuses beforehand. People might set unrealistic goals for themselves to begin with so that when the project fails they can blame the goals rather than their efforts. People might have difficulty starting a project, they procrastinate; the procrastination is all about being worried that they will fail. Fear of failure is a difficult thing to combat on your own and you might need some help. In all the above situation the goal is to preserve the status quo. Life goals that would drive us forward and improve our life have been sublimated with barriers.

Of course people should not talk themselves into a psychological condition that they do not have. Often people eat ice cream when they are trying to lose weight, because ice cream tastes nice.

However the start to deal with all these problems is action. Set small, even trivial goals, but keep lifting the bar. Breaking tasks into time intervals helps some people. So instead of setting a goal of running 5 kms, set a goal of running for a minute walking for two minutes, and then increase this to running for one minute, fifteen seconds etc. I know this blog is headed life goals but the first thing is action. Once you are moving then we can talk about life goals and that is what we will be doing in the next blog.

Life, Health and Fitness

Recently I was training a young chap and I asked him why he wanted to get fit and he answered “I want to look good for the chicks”. He was expressing an existential motivation. Existentialism deals with the meaning of life. Woody Allen once quipped “I took a test in existentialism. I left all the answers blank and still got 100%”. I have to admit that existentialism is a bit like that. So how does an obtuse form of philosophy have anything to do with health and fitness?

Existentialism is all about the individual and the choices the individual makes in trying to construct a life. An existential philosopher would use terms like “confusion”, “searching” or “life definition”. So we humans are all confused until we define our own life. Existentialism cannot apply to a creature like a fish; a fish swims around the ocean eating, until it is ultimately eaten by a bigger fish, it does not consider its role in life it is simply programmed to react. Now existentialism might be a bit fancy when trying to explain health and fitness. But not to worry, the point being that when we are talking about health and fitness we need to consider our whole life. What choices or non-choices have we made in regard to our health and how do these choices affect our life?

We define many aspects of our lives. You might define yourself as someone who can cook, for instance. Once you define an aspect of our lives you put considerable effort into building and protecting that aspect. So in the example of cooking, you might purchase cook books, try different recipes and actually build your cooking ability. The reverse is also true, if you define a negative aspect of your live you will protect that definition of yourself, it is almost like you don’t want to let go of an excuse. So the classic example is someone who defines themselves as not being fit. So these people will join a gym, take on a personal trainer and their fitness level will increase, no surprise there, what happens next is surprising. Once people who have clear definition of themselves as being unfit start to get fit they will sabotage their health and fitness routines. They will go to great lengths, subconsciously, to protect their definition of themselves. How we define ourselves is very powerful.
By taking the time to think about our life and what we want out of life we can be much more determined and deliberate in the choices we make; we can be more motivated. The young lad at the start of this story had very strong motivations to get fit. However this benefit is in the distance. Like so many aspects of being fit and healthy the benefits are in the future and therefore cannot be fully appreciated by the unfit. So you might have been told that you will feel so much better when you are fit, which is true and for some people this might be motivating. However for some people the exertion and pain of training might be too much and they never get to appreciate the feelings of being fit, hence motivation is lost. The aim of existential is to define motivation in terms of larger life goals.

Now this is not to say there are not limits on what we can achieve, someone with degenerative knee issues should not be trying to run marathons. So how to stay motivated? There are two basic strategies. We need to understand how we define ourselves and how these definitions affect our behaviour. The existential theory of behaviour will be explored in the next few blogs.

Limits of Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology is a school of psychology that relates human traits and behaviour to how humans evolved on the plains of Africa over hundreds of thousands of years; it is based around reproduction and the propagation of useful genes. The term “survival of the fittest” only applies to the point where individuals need to be fit and healthy to reproduce. In fact reproduction is the most detrimental and risky thing any one individual can undertake. For males it means competing with other males, it might involve travelling long distances alone all of which could, and often did, result in death. For females, could you image giving birth without any medical assistance in the bush, and that is before taking into account the risk of being less mobile for several months whilst pregnant with predators all around. Evolutionary psychology does explain quite nicely many behaviours and traits that are so very detrimental to health and fitness in modern humans. It explains why we love to eat fat and sugar, why young men are so reckless and are over represented in road fatalities for instance.

Of course evolutionary psychology does not explain all human behaviour. In response to the many comments about my earlier blogs on how evolutionary survival strategies determined different roles for males and females, I can say categorically  that ten thousand years ago humans did not wear clothes and so evolutionary psychology has nothing to say on who does the ironing. Who does the bulk of domestic chores is purely a determination of culture. The military, which is very male dominated, seems very keen on clean well ironed uniforms and neatly made beds, which proves men can complete these tasks just as well as women.

Also, some groups have tried to link evolution to race. From an evolutionary psychology perspective there is no such thing as race. Often this will be met with statements link ‘but I can see obvious differences between races’. Ok, let’s consider an example; a clansman from central Africa is very tall, dark skinned and has frizzy hair whilst a Japanese person is short, paled skin and has straight hair. Whilst it is true that if you consider people across vast distances you will see differences, what this argument does not take into account is the myriad of variations in people as you travel between Africa and Japan, say. As we move north from Africa we begin to see skin colour lightening with a decrease in the intensity of sun light. The further north we go the quicker this change occurs, due to the increasing angle of the sun. It is impossible to pick a point where people change skin colour from dark to light. Height is also interesting; it is the perfect example of an interaction between genes and environment. At the end of WWll the average height of Japanese males was estimated at 160 cm, today the average is 171 cm. A combination of better diet, better medical care and a preference for height in a partner have all contributed to making people much taller very quickly. So the difference in height between the African clansman and a Japanese person is better accounted for by culture and diet interacting with genes than by a declaration of race.

One final word on evolutionary psychology, there are some things that evolution explains very well. From a bio-mechanics point of view walking on four legs is much easier on a body than walking on two legs. Humans pay a big price for walking on two legs, our backs are more prone to stress, human knees carry twice the weight of a creature on all fours and our shoulders have become so flimsily that they dislocate easily. But of course the gains of walking on two legs were huge, for instance we developed very flexible hands. Most primates can stand on two feet and have extremely strong bodies, they can hang form a single hand or foot for hours, but they cannot stand for very long. That is because to stand you need very well developed gluteus maximus muscle (a strong bottom) and core muscles to support the back. It took countless generations, thousands of years, for human to develop the ability to stand. It only took a few decades for humans to send all day sitting down, hence all the back and knee problems in modern society. So evolutionary psychology can be very useful but we need to careful to use a scientifically supportive approach.

Gender Issues for Men: Stress

In a previous blog we spoke about two different theories of gender; social learning theory and evolutionary theory. The so-called nature or nurture argument. However the current thinking is of a Gene-Environment (G-E) interaction; gender, behaviour or personality is not all nature or all nurture but an interaction of genes and the environment. The G-E interaction also solves one problem of evolution theory. In Darwin’s original theory of evolution the time required for species to evolve seemed a bit long; it was clear that species could evolve very quickly.

In social learning theory males and females learn their role in society, boys play rugby and girls play the more gentile game of netball. Hence boys learn not only the rules of rugby but how to be rough and tumble blokes. Girls learn how to be sporty but gentile. It would be considered unseemly to see a couple of girls punching it out on the netball court. The G-E interaction sees learning differently. Learning changes us biologically; some environmental interactions actually turn genes on and off. Humans all have thousands of genes many which do not seem to do anything at al. The latest gene research suggests that many of these genes are lying in reserve and are turned on (or off) under certain situations. As an example a group of genes has been identified which appeared to how no function, except if the owner of those genes smoke, in that case there is almost a 90% chance of contracting lung cancer ever with light smoking. So in the traditional Darwin theory of evolution, Zebras are chased by lions so the fastest Zebras escape and each generation of Zebras gets a little bit faster. The G-E interaction perspective says that if Zebras are chased by predators, run fast genes are turned on and the very next generation of Zebras have run fast genes that are turned on at birth with allows for the develop of a Zebra much faster than the parents.

So the question is, if Zebras can faster why don’t they just run faster? Because running fast has its own problems; bones have to be lighter which can break more easily, the metabolic rate has to be higher which means more food, etc. The other question is how does this apply to men’s health? Humans also have genes that turn on and off due to environmental conditions and stress has been identified as such an environmental condition. Again as one example, a gene called MOA has been identified with higher levels of aggression and interestingly occurring in males but not in females. Further not all males have this gene; boys who have this gene and are brought up in supportive non stressful environments do not seem to have any problems with aggression. However boys with the gene who are raised in families where there is domestic violence, marital stress or in communities riven by conflict have higher levels of aggression and criminal convictions. So cast your mind back 10,000 years to the plains of Africa where troops of humans are wandering around the bush. Females, the most valuable members of the troop, are huddled in the centre of the territory and expendable males patrol the edges of the territory. In times of scarcity the interaction between human troops and even troops of other animals such as baboons will be much more violent as each troop is either trying to defend their territory and resources or to steal resources from other troops. Of course fighting with other troops is not always beneficial, especially when simple trade began. Also aggressive males need stronger upper bodies, requiring more food and diverting internal resources away from more useful muscles such as legs. So a gene like MOA makes perfect evolutionary sense, allowing human males to evolve from being highly aggressive to more co-operative and visa versa quite quickly.

So again, how does all of this affect men’s health and fitness? Prolonged exposure to stress is unhealthy and that men seem to suffer from more stress related conditions than women. Now this might be cultural, yoga and meditation classes which are great for stress relieve are usually populated with women not men. However research is beginning to show that genetic factors allow men to better cope with stress in the short term but suffer in the longer term. Generally, exercise is considered good for stress relieve however some interesting research is questioning this. When you see men exercise in the gym, there is a good chance they are doing bench presses, bicep curls etc, all the exercises to build upper body strength. Remember upper body strength is associated with aggression and stress. Rather than being stress relieving these upper body strength gym routines might actually be turning on stress and aggression response genes, although more research is required. The bottom line is men are very susceptible to stress and should be doing specific stress reduction routines such as meditation or yoga.

Gender: Health and Fitness

The next few blogs will begin to talk about gender issues in health and fitness. However first we must define a two terms, sex and gender. Sex is our little boy bits and our little girl bits and mostly this is determined pre-birth. Gender is our role in society.

The social learning theory of gender is quite straight forward; we learn our gender, and therefore our role in society, from the community that surrounds us. Little boys are dressed in blue and are given toy hammers and toy trucks to play with and little girls are dressed in pink and are given toy tea sets. There is a classic experiment. A group of babies ranging from fifteen months to two years was recruited, 50% were boys and 50% were girls. Half the boys were dressed in blue jump suits and half in pink, similarly for the girls. So half the children were dressed in gender appropriate colour and half were not. Next a group of university students were recruited, and told that the children were being used in a study and that the students were need to mind individual children for fifteen minutes between tests. The students were placed in a room with one chair, soft carpet and different toys, all designed  to encourage the students to play with the children. There were cameras in the room and the students were told these cameras were required for O.H.S. reasons. In fact the student’s interaction with the children was the subject of the experiment. Of course the students gave the children gender appropriate toys based on the colour of the jumpsuit. Even though half the children were not dressed in gender appropriate colours the children appeared happy to play with whatever toy they were given.  However the behaviour of the students towards the children was quite different depending on the colour of the jumpsuit. Children in pink were held longer and more often. Students waited longer to attend to crying child dressed in blue and tended to use verbal reassurances before touching or holding the child dressed in blue. This experiment has been repeated many times and the results have always been similar, supporting the view that children are treated differently depending on their gender from an early age and that the distinction is quite arbitrary. Boys are expected to be more independent than girls and better able to cope.

A quite different view of gender is the evolutionary psychology perspective, which says that our gender roles are partly based on sexual differences. Now stay with this one for a while before making up your mind. As a general comment for all animals, males can never be sure that any offspring are the product of their genes, where as females can always be sure that any offspring are there’s. Also the opportunity for females to reproduce is limited; once a female is pregnant they must wait until the offspring is suckled before reproducing again. Whereas males do not have these restrains on their reproductive opportunities and males can reproduce for a longer proportion of their lives than females. So if a male wants to ensure that his genes are propagated his best strategy is to have as many mating as possible and not invest time in any offspring. For a female the strategy is completely different, a female’s best strategy is to very selective about who they chose as a mate and invest all their resources into ensuring any off spring survive, particularly female offspring.  So you might ask, thousands of years ago on the plains of Africa, who were the most valuable member of any troop of humans? Well it was females of reproductive age, then female children, then males, because only reproductive females could ensure the longevity of any one troop. Hence it makes evolutionary sense to group females together in the relative safety of the centre of the troop’s territory and have males patrol the edges of the territory for danger. If males get killed by marauding baboons so what? Also being at the extremities of the territory gives males better mating opportunities with females from other troops. A high risk of death but higher mating opportunities, for a male this is no contest. So how does this relate to gender, health and fitness? Evolutionary theory would suggest that females are geared towards longevity and looking after themselves, where as males are not.

Over the next few blogs both these theories will be related to modern day issues of health and fitness.