Whole Foods Diet Experiment

To heal my gall bladder and prevent surgery, I just switched from a very healthy no-meat diet to an even-healthier no-meat diet without fish, eggs, dairy products, fried foods, or processed foods. Oh yes, and also no caffeine or alcohol.

I am avoiding all the things that were triggering attacks (Chinese food, iced tea, eggs, tuna, salmon) and while I’m at it, avoiding the things I’m allergic to (dairy products) since some experts suggest gall bladder attacks are mostly a result of allergic reactions.

While this may appear to be a terribly “restrictive” diet, it doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems quite rational - like the way I was meant to eat.

After about 10 days I feel much less hungry - surprisingly. I would have thought a vegan diet would make me more hungry.

I wonder if I was chronically hungry in the past because I was hungry for the nutrients I was not receiving.

Eating used to be almost annoying; I’d eat simply to make my hunger go away. Now I’m eating to give my body what it needs, and am surprised to notice that food tastes better, more satisfying. I seem to be waking up to the deliciousness of simple things: apples, Clementines, even broccoli.

I’m not sure if this will heal my gall bladder but it’s an interesting experiment!

Also I have no cravings (so far) for anything except what I’m thinking of as whole foods.

A colleague told me that there are many things people ingest that “the body does not recognize as food.” That rang true.

I’m determined to only put things in my mouth that my body will not only recognize as food, but welcome.

I’d be interested in others’ experiences, experiments, or responses.

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation MNelson@aahperd.org

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Returning Home: Playing Basketball at 51

“Take a camera,” suggested a friend. But I wasn’t attending as a spectator. My goal was to PLAY.

Ever since I heard about the senior women’s basketball league in my area, I was intrigued, enticed, and drawn to return to this place — the basketball court - that had been my home as a child and young adult.

I knew people over 50 competed in softball, golf, and dozens of other sports in the Senior Games. Friends rave about this experience, and my own mother has competed in swimming meets there, winning medals in the 75-79 age group.

But basketball? Who knew that women between the ages of 50 and 85 can still play HOOPS?

Having turned 50 myself not long ago - and having retired from college, professional, then recreational basketball in 1981 - I was fascinated to learn that women my age, and MUCH older, are still playing.

My own retirement had been forced by chondromalacia (softening of the cartilege) in both knees - and it had not occurred to me that other hoopsters my age had escaped a similar fate. Though I successfully grieved my disability and shifted my attention to swimming — SUPERB — and golf — GREAT — basketball is simply THE BEST.

So when Helen White, coordinator of the NOVA United teams, invited me to “coach or give a pep talk or something,” I said, “What I’d really like to do is play.”

I then explained my knee situation - I cannot even go downstairs without limping; picture O.J. Simpson, of all people, as he painfully descended the staircase after his latest arrest - but somehow I just had to try.

When I pulled up to the recreation center, the first person I saw, as she unfolded her long body from her car, was a five-ten sixty-two-year-old with white hair.

“This must be the right place,” I thought. My peeps!

For the next three hours, about thirty women (up to age 72 on this particular evening) ran, rebounded, set screens, executed give-and-go’s, shot, high-fived, got knocked down, got back up, and kept moving, moving, moving.

And it WAS moving - to see the delight on their faces. I’ve met so many women over the years - easily hundreds - who have told me that they didn’t get a chance to play sports when they were young. Those women were angry about that, and sad.

No longer. Some of the women were from that three-dribble generation, when players were limited to one half of the court. Others had no athletic background at all. “Sports were not for girls,” said 71-year-old Jeannie, a children’s book author. “We were supposed to do embroidery.”

But the times, they are a changin’. “When we looked around for a gym, they didn’t know what to make of us,” reports Bonnie, a-62 year-old who plays on the 50-54 team and coaches the 60-64 team. “Rec centers are used to seniors playing bingo, but not seniors playing basketball.”

“I teach senior fitness at a local community college,” another player told me. “It used to be chair exercises. Increasingly, they want sport skills.”

The other early-arrivers welcomed me warmly and tossed me a basketball while they stretched. A standard women’s ball, it was smaller than the traditional (now men’s) ball I’d usually played with, and lighter - much easier to handle, lift, shoot.

(Karen Logan, with whom I played in the WBL, actually invented this smaller ball and we did use it in that first women’s pro league.)

For a while I was alone with the hoop. As in a dream, everything I shot went in. From the right, from the left, from the corner, from the free throw line: Swish. Swish. Swish. Swish.

Shooting a basketball through a hoop, and seeing it - no, FEELING it - swish through the net is one of the most satisfying physical activites, in my experience. Being back on the court felt so natural, so right, and so downright ecstatic, I’m sure that if someone else had brought a camera, they would have caught me BEAMING.

When it came time to scrimmage three on three, reality hit. I could not jump for a rebound, race after a loose ball, or even drive to the basket and extend upward, leaping off one leg (a basic layup). My knees are just plain too sore for such maneuvers.

Still, I could pass. I could shoot. I could play defense, in a gimpy kind of way. And since we played half-court, I was able to keep up enough to enjoy a few key assists, a few blocked shots, and a few more of those smooth swishes.

Peggy is a former history teacher who now works for the Department of Justice. Carol played college basketball at Indiana with Tara Vanderveer, Stanford University women’s coach. Sue played at the University of Pennsylvania. Gwen, a software engineer, is “just a rec league player” who recruited another player she met in her church league. Mothers and grandmothers, business owners and assistant bookkeepers and government employees, they have an easy camaraderie, joking with each other and encouraging each other: “Good shot!”

“We’re changing the face of aging, and changing the perception of aging,” said Bonnie.

We all chatted for a while afterward, and I cautioned them to take care of their bodies, especially their knees.

“Will you be back?” asked 60+ player named Hope.

I smiled at these happy, sweaty women. They’re having the time of their lives.

“YES,” I said.

(Want to play? Contact Helen White: hmwhite3004@comcast.net)

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation MNelson@aahperd.org

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Regular Old Athletes

A 78-year-old friend of mine climbed Mt. Fuji last week. A lifelong Japan-ophile whose powder room has a Japanese sign on the door that translates, literally, “Honorable Hand-Washing Place,” she has lived in Japan, and speaks Japanese, but this was the first time she had climbed the “mythic, mystic” mountain, as she put it.

“I don’t even know why it was important to me to do it, but it was,” she said after the successful 18-hour round-trip hike. “Probably something about getting older, and seeing friends sometimes be so feeble, living in assisted living homes.

“One friend said, ‘Why in the world would you want to do something like that?’ But I do feel different now. I feel changed.”

The Japanese talk about how shy “Fuji-san” is, always skirted by clouds. The mountain appears suddenly and mysteriously, almost magically, on very clear days. “When we were living in Tokyo, we used to joke about the Japanese having the mountain on wheels, because it was always showing up in unexpected places,” says my friend, who prefers to remain anonymous.

“I enjoyed reading about routes, and buying hiking boots, and entering into whole ethos. It was fun, until I got to the base of the mountain and looked up and thought, Oh my, what have I done!”

Six hundred thousand people climb the mountain every summer - “so it can’t be that difficult,” says my friend, who ran her first 10K in her early sixties and raised five children, including a mountain climber.

“When you start out, it’s not that steep. It just takes persitance and tenacity and endurance.”

This friend is the founding member of my reading group, which has been meeting monthly for fifteen years. Last night we discussed The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald, while my friend and her husband served us a dinner on china plates called, thematically enough, “Blue Rose.”

For dessert we enjoyed a homemade Mt. Fuji ice cream sculpture made of Rocky Road ice cream, complete with tufts of whipped cream snow.

On her way up Mt. Fuji, my friend learned that last year, a 100-year-old man made the journey. So she doesn’t feel particularly remarkable.

“The last 200 meters were tough, and downhill was tough too, because my quads were like rubber,” she recalls.

But she took it all - even the falling - in stride. “Every time I fell, the guide would say, “Good time for a rest,” she relates, laughing.

What’s extraordinary about this story is that it’s not extraordinary any more. Every month, AARP: The Magazine receives story pitches about older (or downright old) athletes who have achieved things someone considers remarkable. The editors turn them down, explaining that impressive athletic accomplishments by older people simply aren’t unusual enough to make the news.

Which is not to say they’re not important - to the people themselves. “I don’t like to toot my own horn, but I do find myself telling people, ‘We just came back from Japan, and I climbed Mt. Fuji!” says my friend.

“I don’t think I’ll do it again,” she continues. “The Japanese have a saying: “Every Japanese wants to climb Mt Fuji once, but only a fool wants to climb it twice.”

No need. Sounds like once was just right.

Now, as for you, Dear Reader: What’s YOUR Mt. Fuji?

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation MNelson@aahperd.org

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Mastery through Physical Freedom

Have you been watching From the Top? What a show! Sometimes I don’t know why anyone watches anything except PBS. (Well, I can see switching stations for “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under,” but they’re both swimming with the fishes now.)

I’m still thinking about a show I watched about two weeks ago featuring Peng Peng, the teenage piano prodigy from China, and other kids, one as young as ten, performing in Carnegie Hall. (See photo of Alice Burla, the youngest student at Juilliard, below.)

Christopher O’Riley, the pianist/host who graciously introduces and interviews these child prodigies and knows just when to step off camera and let them shine (most of the time,) asked Peng how he had managed to create such VOLUME while playing Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Presto from Six Moments Musicaux, Op.16.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Peng. “You just relax the arms. The only thing that stays stiff is the fingers. The arms and shoulders are totally relaxed. That way, you have the FREEDOM to play really loudly.”

He then demonstrated the difference between banging on the keys, using force generated by the whole arms and hands — fruitlessly trying to coax big sound out of the instrument — versus letting the arms be free and relaxed, which resulted in some loudly glorious chords.

I paraphrased that quote from memory, but he definitely used the word freedom. And you could see that freedom in his arms.

Inspired, I tried letting my arms be “free” the next day while playing golf. It didn’t improve my score any (that’s impossible - I’m stuck at 90 forever) but it sure made swinging the club more fun.

Recreational tennis players oughta experiment with this principle. And all of us who sit at computer keyboards.

I’m sure professional athletes understand it, though they might not articulate it as clearly as Peng. It’s intrinsic to shooting a basketball — the arms must be free; only the fingers are stiff — but most of us try to muscle our way through sports, and even through fitness activities such as Pilates and yoga.

Martial artisists “get it” too. Their bodies are flexible. flowing. Free.

What are others’ experiences, I wonder, of physical freedom that results in satisfying or even beautiful results?

 

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation MNelson@aahperd.org

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Food Choices: Not as Easy as Pie

“Just make healthy food choices,” diet gurus say. As if choosing to be well nourished and svelte were simple.

Brian Wansink, a Cornell professor and founder of Consumer Camp, studies food choices in Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab. An article in this month’s Stanford Magazine (”Mind Over Platter”) desribes some of his fascinating (and helpful) findings:

1) We eat more M&M’s when they’re sorted by color.

2) We eat more nuts or candies from a jar when we can see through the jar than when it’s opaque.

3) We eat more popcorn if given a huge bucket than we do if given a medium-sized bucket. Same goes for plates.

4) We value food more when it comes with pleasant surprise, even a simple thing like a plastic toy. (Parents filling school lunchboxes, take note. Also anyone planning a dinner party. Airline dieticians - ignore this! We’d really rather have edible food!)

5) We prefer food with exotic, descriptive names - such as Bavarian Dark Forest Chocolate Cake - as opposed to chocolate cake. Same goes for Starbucks’ “grande chai soy latte” and infinite other variations on that theme.

The “takeaway” lesson? We’re not as “in control” as we might think we are. Our choices and perceptions are greatly influenced by the subconscious, which has its own ideas about what it likes and wants. Therefore, pay attention not only to food, but to how it’s prepared and served and described. And if you prefer not to eat a lot of popcorn, never buy the big bucket.

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation MNelson@aahperd.org

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Leg Lifts in the Hospital (Mom, Continued)

Yesterday morning Mom, last seen Sprinting Up the Staircase at 83, had to return to the hospital for more major surgery, again involving general anesthesia.

It’s not about her knee this time - that’s working fine - but nor is it the kind she wants her daughter blabbing about on the Bodies in Motion blog.

Fine. We won’t go into specifics.

We’ll go directly to the story: Mom’s surgery takes place three hours later than originally scheduled. So Mom and Bernie, her husband, have to wait. Mom’s already got her hospital gown on, and she’s supposed to be lying on the guerney like any other compliant patient, waiting.

Except Mom’s never been the sort to lie around.

Especially when she’s still post-op from the knee surgery, and concerned that too much lying around is going to make the knee stiff.

So, even though she’s already got an IV dripping into her arm, Mom wraps the hospital gown around her, hops off the guerney and starts doing some exercises - wheeling the IV bottle and its metal cart behind her. “Nothing fancy, just some leg lifts, toe raises, flexion and extension, that sort of thing,” she explains to me later, when we talk about it.

I bet the nurses are still talking about it too. As they walked by, they were overheard exclaiming,

“What is she doing?”

“Is that the patient?”

“Why is she kicking her leg like that?”

“She looks like a New York City Rockette.”

“I think she’s EXERCISING.”

“Isn’t she, like, 83 or something?”

“She can’t be.”

“Have you ever seen such a thing?”

“No, but I’ll bet you one thing: She’s going to recover in record speed.”

And she did.

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation MNelson@aahperd.org

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Sprinting Up the Staircase at 83

Talked with Sarah on the phone tonight. She had her knee replaced two months ago. The first doctor had said, ‘When does it hurt?” “When I’m flying from Arizona to New Zealand,” she replied. “Then don’t fly to New Zealand,” said the doctor.

She had to go to three more doctors before finding one willing to do the surgery. But now the knee is getting stiff and problematic, Sarah says. She can only bend it 125 degrees, she says, which is bothersome.

“What does it prevent you from doing?” I ask, unable to picture exactly how 125 degrees of flexion differs from 135 degrees, which she had attained shortly after surgery.

“When I’m in the pool, I can’t bend it enough to put my fin on,” she says.

Sarah’s a swimmer. She’s my best friend, and also my mother. She’s 83 years old. I laugh.

“Mom, does this flexion problem prevent you from doing anything anyone ELSE would consider a necessary daily activity?” I ask. “Oh no,” she says. “I can climb up and down stairs, and hop up and down from chairs and toilet seats. It’s just the fin thing. But it’s so annoying!”

You might wonder why a swimmer NEEDS to wear fins.

Answer: To keep up with the 40-year-olds in her lane. You might also wonder whether Sarah will read this. She stars in many of my articles and books (with a character like this, SOMEONE in the family HAD to become a writer.)

But Sarah may never get around to reading this. It’s not that she lacks computer literacy. It’s just that, when not swimming or traveling or showing off her newfound ability to sprint up and down staircases (”Watch this! Watch this!”), she’s busy uploading photos to her website. True story. Go Mom!

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation MNelson@aahperd.org

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Five Reasons to Start a Corporate Fitness Program

1) Fit workers make 27% fewer errors on tasks involving concentration and memory as opposed to unfit workers

2) When executives start an exercise program, they improve their ability to make complex decisions by 70%.

3) When DuPont instituted an employee fitness program, they had a 47% reduction in absenteeism over six years.

4) When General Motors instituted an employee fitness program, they had a 50% reduction in job-related grievances and on-the-job accidents.

5) For every $1 invested in corporate fitness programs, Coors Brewing Company received a $6.15 return on its investment.

In other words, physical fitness leads to fiscal fitness - and mental fitness as well. The moral of the story: Invest in employee exercise programs. Give people a chance to get up and move. It will pay off, in more ways than one.

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation
MNelson@aahperd.org

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Women Over Fifty Just Wanna Have Fun

I spent the weekend in Orange, Virginia, with my friend Ellen Wessel, who co-founded Moving Comfort women’s sports clothing company back in 1977, sold it to Russell Corporation, and now works at Montpelier, the home of James Madison.

The other co-founder of Moving Comfort, Elizabeth Goeke, also lives in Orange. With her partner Jay Billie, Elizabeth bought a 1910 farmhouse on 15 bucolic acres with a barn, paddocks, gardens, and woods, and they’re converting the place to a bed and breakfast, so I visit Elizabeth and Jay too, to admire their remodeling project. The Inn at Westwood Farm is opening in early September 2007, and all of us are excited about it.

Here’s what else Ellen and I are excited about: our own strength, balance, flexibility, and aerobic capacity. Maybe that sounds selfish or vain. But our bodies are not an obsession. We don’t hate our bodies, or starve them, or cover them in shame.

In fact, we celebrate them - through movement.

This morning, Ellen and I walked three miles among farms filled with scenic green roofs and serious black cows. We chatted about James Madison and retirement plans and good books we’ve read recently (March and Quarantine.) We stopped to pick up trash (Ellen’s one-woman community service project) and listen to cicadas and admire a tree frog and laugh at two “teenage” cows as they playfully trotted down a gentle hillside.

“Want to do a yoga tape?” asked Ellen when we got home.

An hour later, she asked, “Wanna do a Pilates tape?”

An hour later, after we’d contorted and stretched and lunged until we could contort and stretch and lunge no more, we rested on our purple and red “sticky mats.”

Suddenly I started laughing. It struck me as funny that, at 56 and 51, this is what Ellen and I choose to do for fun: exercise all morning. Combined, we’ve lived as athletes for about a hundred years so far, and we’ve worked for about 60 combined years in the fitness industry, so of course we know that exercise is good for us - and for other women, men, and children. Obviously.

We know that, as Moving Comfort says so brilliantly, “A fit woman is a powerful woman.”

And we dig being healthy and powerful.

But we also exercise for fun. We exercise because we feel like it. Because Ellen has a glorious neighborhood and two DVDs she wants to share. Because walking outside and doing power yoga and Pilates feel good to us - right then and also later, like now, when I’m sitting at my computer and still feeling strong and healthy and happy.

This is what Ellen and I know that many of my friends and colleagues don’t know. It’s like a secret I try to tell them but they can’t hear me, because I’m speaking another language, the language of the body. They know the “exercise is good for you” part of the message. The media (and I) have been clear about that.

It’s the “exercise is fun” part that’s so hard to convey to people who did not grow up climbing trees, who were limited to cheerleader roles in high school, who forget (though I’m certain they did know once, when they were very young) the intrinsic pleasures of effort and extension and movement through space.

When I say, “It’s fun,” they look at me with a blank stare.

The joy of movement is not something that can be communicated in words.

It’s a physical message that can only be communicated physically, as when one person takes another by the hand and says, “Let’s ______.”

“Let’s go. Let’s swim. Let’s put on our sneakers and take a long hike along a rambling country road.”

If you know what I’m talking about, know deep in your gut and your muscles and your bones that exercise is fun, then do us all a favor and spread that message to someone who does not know.

Or spread that message to someone who has forgotten - especially if that person is you.

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation
MNelson@aahperd.org

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Fat Friends: Obesity Study Hard to Swallow

The “fat friendship” story was all over the media this morning. Yikes.

The implications of this are so upsetting I’m already eating my seventh Hershey’s kiss.

(Good news: check out the “nutritional information” on the package. Serving size is nine!)

Really, though, could it be true that just having a fat friend or spouse can somehow make you fat?

So says this new research based on the famous Framingham Heart Study, which is tracking more than 12,000 people over 32 years. “Social networks play a surprisingly powerful role in determining an individual’s chances of gaining weight, transmitting an increased risk of becoming obese from wives to husbands, from brothers to brothers and from friends to friends,” reported the Washington Post.

My heart hurts just hearing this. Aren’t fat people already shunned and mocked enough? Now they have to take responsibility for everyone’s fat as well? Yikes. (And she pops Hershey’s kiss Number Eight.)

Sure sounds credible, coming from Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School, and to be published tomorrow in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Watch out,” the new study seemed to imply. “Stay away! Get too close to a dreaded Fat Person, and their fat will magically and irreversibly rub off on YOU!”

As an afterthought, at the end of the Washington Post article and also at the CNN report I saw this morning, reporters note that the opposite also seems to be true: when one person loses weight, so do their friends.

This is the concept behind Weight Watchers, Alcoholics Anonymous, running clubs, and many other health-oriented groups. We inspire each other to achieve our goals.

Why wasn’t this the headline?

Why aren’t researchers putting half as much energy into promoting healthy behaviors as they are into exploring obesity?

We already know what prevents obesity: daily physical activity and relatively healthy food choices. You don’t have to be a nut about it. You can have some Hershey’s kisses now and then (she says, finishing off Number Nine.)

The key is to move: moderate to vigorous activity on most days.

But by all means, please please please don’t abandon your fat friends out of your own fat-o-phobia or misinterpretation of this research.

Fat friends do not cause obesity; overeating and under-exercising do.

The moral of this story is not to avoid fat people.

It’s to be a leader yourself, inspiring all of your friends and colleagues, fat, thin, and middle-sized, to follow in your footsteps, literally, and choose a path of daily physical activity.

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation
MNelson@aahperd.org

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Not-Overwhelming Disability

At my Aunt Mary’s recent memorial service, my mother, describing her sister’s “severe, paraplegic stroke,” said that “the stroke was overwhelming, but Mary was not overwhelmed by it.”

For 16 years, between the ages of 63 and 79, Mary could not use her left arm, could only limp on her left leg, and could not speak - at least, not the way most of us do.

She could say only five words: “Yes,” “No,” “And,” and “Oh Boy.”

But oh boy, did she communicate. With intonation, inflection, facial expression, and sheer willpower, Aunt Mary asked myriad questions and expressed surprise, doubt, alarm, fear, humor, amazement, pride, compassion, excitement, gratitude, and every other conceivable message.

It didn’t happen automatically, or fast. To communicate with Mary required incredible, almost saint-like patience on the part of her husband, Peter, and other family members and friends. Every conversation started with 20 questions, and expanded from there. “Are you asking about something in this room? Something that happened today? Are you hungry? Is the person you’re talking about in our family?”

In Mary’s case, the problem was not just aphasia - the inability to speak - but apraxia: the inability to indicate what one wants. So she couldn’t point to a water glass, or move her good hand the way one might if one wanted to mime drinking. She could only say her five words. And we could only guess.

Did we all get frustrated? Sure. We also gave up sometimes. When all the “yes no and oh boy’s” in the world failed to tell us what she wanted to say, we shrugged and smiled together. Mary was a good sport about that, laughing rather than crying after her sincere and focused efforts to tell us something, or ask us something, proved fruitless.

My friend Madelyn Jennings tells me that, incredibly, her brother-in-law, also a stroke survivor, has the exact same vocabulary as my aunt did. Maybe those are the core essential communications: that’s all any of us really need:

1) Yes: affirmation

2) No: Negation

3) And: Let’s continue the conversation, and

4) “Oh Boy”: The whole range of emotion.

Many people become depressed in response to such a stroke; Mary did not. Although “the stroke was overwhelming, Mary was not overwhelmed by it.”

And therein lies Mary’s legacy. She amazed us all with her positive spirit in the face of devastating loss.

All of us face the prospect of losses, changes, and disabilities, in ourselves and our loved ones, over time.

May we all rise to the occasion, as Mary did, with humor, persistence, and grace.

Yes. Yes. Oh boy.

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation
MNelson@aahperd.org

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Dads, Daughters, and Sports

Gard Skinner, founder of DaddyDaughterTime.org and a fan of We Are All Athletes, asked me,

“If you were speaking to a room full of men who, perhaps, had few sports experiences themselves growing up….

How would you–as executive director for an organization that is devoted to opening health doors for every single child– recommend they introduce their shy or cautious daughters to sports?”

It’s not so much that daughters tend to be shy or cautious. It’s that parents sometimes overlook a child’s natural athleticism if that child happens to be female. Fathers in particular might not know how to encourage and support a daughter’s interest in sports, especially if the fathers haven’t seen themselves as successful athletes.

The best time to start is early. Studies show that young boys have a ball tossed in their direction much more often than young girls do.

Dads can help girls develop strength, coordination, and appreciation for their own bodies by engaging them in myriad physical activities – playing catch, wrestling, hiking, camping, climbing hills, running, skipping, playing on monkey bars, even slapping high-five in celebration – to begin to give girls a sense that their bodies are sources of joy, wonder, and accomplishment.

Kids – especially one’s own kids – are inherently attractive, it seems to me, and fathers, with the best of intentions, often compliment girls for how attractive they are, hoping to instill a sense of positive body image that way.

However, what girls need much more is a sense of physical accomplishment, success, joy. This develops through physical activity.

Gard also asked, “How would you, in your experience, help us communicate that we are not trying to push our daughters to be “jocks,” but rather, to give them a healthy lifestyle and the benefits that go along with it?”

Gen X fathers know lots of strong, athletic women; many of them married one. But their mothers were raised in the pre-Title IX generation and had few sports opportunities. So we’re still in a transition phase, with many men not fully comprehending how important sports are for girls and women.

My own father, a physician and hospital president, “didn’t want his daughter to be a jock.” That conversation came up when I was a teenager considering colleges, and interested in their athletic as well as academic programs.

Stanford was acceptable to him; but the Stanford basketball program somehow threatened his sense of who his daughter should become. Homophobia was probably part of that; in my generation (I was born in 1956) athletic girls were often assumed to be gay.

When, after Stanford, I played professional basketball and had an opportunity to travel throughout Europe, Dad began to appreciate that sports had literally taken me far.

Later, when I took up golf (his sport) we had many happy days on the golf course together.

Just a few years ago, while playing 18 holes together, he finally proudly introduced me to a friend of his with this line, “This is my daughter. She’s an athlete.”

I almost fell out of the golf cart, I was so surprised – and happy. Sure, I’m proud of my professional accomplishments, and I’m glad Dad is too, but it meant a lot to me to have him finally affirm this other important aspect of my identity.

Probably the best way for dads to fully appreciate the positive benefits of sports experiences for their daughters is to participate themselves. That way, they’re modeling physical activity, physical fitness, and healthy competition — and reminding themselves on a daily basis how much joy we can all find in sports.

That’s key too – the “all” part. Daughters aren’t really very different from sons, despite the small publishing industry that claims the opposite. Kids are just people, and people inherently love to move.

Unfortunately, female people will hear many messages about the uber-importance of physical appearance. Fathers can go a long way toward counteracting the negative influences of these messages by showing daughters that what matters most is not what your body looks like, but how it can move, express itself, stay healthy, get strong, and accomplish great things, alone and with teammates of all kinds, including family members!
Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation
MNelson@aahperd.org

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A Whole Lot of Skinny, Unhappy, Unhealthy People

The news on the front page of the Washington Post today (”Way to Shrink, Grow Fat Is Found”) did not make me jump for joy. And I’m the kind of person who DOES jump for joy - unlike those who only jump to burn calories.

Georgetown University scientists have discovered that these three things are true of mice:

1) If you stress them out (more on stress techniques for mice later) and feed them junk food, they gain more weight than their little mouse-peers who eat junk food without being stressed out; and

2) If you inject mice with Certain Stuff (more on that later too,) they don’t gain weight, even if they’re stressed AND eating junk food.

3) Injections of that same Certain Stuff can actually shrink fat deposits by up to 50 percent in two weeks.

You see why jumping for joy comes to mind. Surely, if these results hold true for humans, this Certain Stuff is going to become bigger than Google itself.

Can you imagine the line of fat people lined up to get these shots? Now add to that line all the imaginary fat people (those who obsess over fat that isn’t really there,) and the pharmaceutical company that gets the patent on this stuff is going to get one heck of a fat payday.

Here’s the catch, though. Imagine the impact on physical activity.

How many people currently exercise for the health of it? Or, better yet, the sheer joy of it?

Most people already get zero exercise.

And from the looks on the faces of the people at my gym, the large majority who exercise at all do so because of some grim determination to avoid getting fat.

What if all these people stopped riding the stationery bicycle and doing Pilates? What if the only place they ever ran was to the doctor’s office, for their next fat-blocking shot?

Here’s what would happen: There would be a lot of skinny, unhappy, unhealthy people in the world.

We know that physical activity is essential to help prevent osteoporosis, heart disease, breast cancer, stroke, and a zillion other bad things that can happen.

We know that physical activity is an antidote to depression.

We know that people who sit around on their butts all day — even if those butts become fashionably thin — get depressed and sick.

Which is why I’m not jumping for joy.

Neither are the stressed mice, by the way. To stress them, scientists made them stand in cold water or endure the company of alpha mice. They were trying to create the mouse equivalent of chronic human stress, such as sitting in traffic - or having to endure the company of an alpha boss.

Standing in cold water does not exactly bring to mind Abu Gahraib, but for the record I do not support mouse torture techniques, and hate the thought that scientists get paid to think this stuff up.

The other thing I promised to explain is what I called Certain Stuff. It’s a substance that blocks another substance that triggers the stress-induced obesity phenomenon, apparently. Read the Washington Post story if you’re the kind of person who can understand that neuropeptidies are not a form of detergent.

All I know is that anything that gives people another excuse to avoid moving is going to be one big fat mistake.

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation
MNelson@aahperd.org

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No Child Left Inside

Willow Mariah Nelson, my five-year-old goddaughter and niece, proudly showed me recently how she can swing across the entire horizonal ladder at a local playground. During my recent visit to her Belair, California home, we also jumped on her trampoline and hiked up the hill behind her home, discovering numerous fascinating little bugs along the way. Last year, her father and I took her camping. When we gather at the New Jersey shore, we spend evenings catching (and releasing) toads.

All of these outdoor activities engage and delight Willow - thank goodness.

Fewer and fewer kids enjoy exploring their natural environment or even playing outdoors, according to an article in today’s Washington Post called “Getting Lost in the Great Outdoors.”

Studies that measure children’s time outdoors omit organized sports from the accounting - perhaps because what psychologists believe children need is not just fresh air but free play. Time to explore. Freedom to make up their own games. Permission to wander, and to wonder.

As adults, it’s easy to romanticize our own childhoods, and bemoan the fact that kids these days don’t do what we did. But as I’ve watched not only Willow but numerous other nieces, nephews, and young friends grow up over the years, this trend toward indoor-only play seems obvious - and ominous.

My brother and I used to spend summer evenings playing kick the can, “tree seek,” baseball, tetherball, and football in our yards, or neighbors’ yards. We rode bikes around the neighborhood, explored the woods near our house, built dams across the creek, caught lightning bugs in jars, and hung upside down from the swingset, pretending we were bats. Perhaps it’s because of these happy memories that he now takes Willow and her brother Tanner outdoors every chance he gets.

Yet even in the six-year span from 1997 to 2003, there was a fifty percent decline in the proportion of 9-to-12-year-olds who spent time hiking, fishing, gardening, or playing at th beach, according to one study at the University of Maryland.

In Last Child in the Woods, author Richard Louv contends that children who stay indoors suffer from “nature deficit disorder,” missing out on “the spiritual, emotional, and psychological benefits of exposure to the wonders of nature, including reduced stress and improved cognitive development, creativity, and cooperative play.”

I want such benefits - and simple enjoyment - for the children in my life. Don’t you?

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation
MNelson@aahperd.org

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Easy, Effective Diet Plan

Eat less for dinner.

That’s pretty much it. Eat a normal breakfast and lunch. Snack if you’re hungry.

Oh yeah - choose healthy foods. That’s a big caveat.

But the real trick to this diet — or maintenance plan — is to eat less for dinner. Just a little less, so you go to bed a wee big hungry.

Lying there in bed, you don’t need to do anything (usually,) so you don’t need fuel. You can let your body burn off a few calories because of the caloric deficiency you just created by eating a little less than you were hungry for.

The next morning, eat a normal breakfast. Eat a normal lunch. Oh yeah - keep choosing healthy foods. Then eat less for dinner.

The reason this works is because you’re not starving yourself. You don’t feel deprived, emotionally or physically. You just feel a wee bit hungy - which, on the way to sleep, I find to be a rather pleasant sensation, much preferable to going to bed full.

Most importantly, you wake up happy, because you’re a little thinner - and you still get to eat a regular breakfast and lunch.

Mariah Burton Nelson
American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation
MNelson@aahperd.org

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bodies, diets, fat