A Darker Side

I actually had a pretty rough week last week, I'm not gonna lie. It was partially the uber depressing Vancouver winter weather getting to me a little - so gloomy, dreary and wet, and worse, the almost constant darkness, but I also had another issue. It's kinda personal and maybe weird to talk about here, so I'm not gonna go into any details but it's something I've been dealing with for many, many years and is very frustrating for me, because no matter what I attempt to do, I cannot seem to remedy it. For a long time I've been of the mindset that if you don't like something about yourself or your life, fix it! If you cannot change the situation, change how you view it, how you treat it and react to it, and often the situation will change, or you will be able to change it a bit further down the road when you're ready for it, when it's meant to be changed, because you'd learned what you needed to learn from it. You have the power, the control and the ability to alter and improve your life. YOU. Not me. Not your parents/siblings/boyfriend/husband/friends. You. Believing in this simple but compelling truth has enabled me to overcome much diversity in my life. It all changed from there. Once I KNEW I was in control of my own destiny, and I acknowledged that and truly felt it in my bones, it set me free in a way. I could no longer make excuses about the past, or use it as a crutch or scapegoat for the future. I couldn't just sit on the floor and wallow in it, raging at God and the world, thinking Why Me? I could have easily ended up in a different place - a dark, angry one. Hell sometimes I wonder how I didn't.

I'm reminded of this Oprah episode I saw, eons ago, like mid-eighties maybe, where she went to a prison to interview a group of women who were incarcerated for committing horrible crimes. She sat in a room and calmly listened as they told stories of how they murdered their children. One woman systematically drowned each of her 4 children in the bathtub, and spoke in detail about how she held each one's head underwater until they stopped struggling and their was no breath left in their tiny bodies. I shudder at the thought of it. Anyway, the thing that stood out and that I will always remember is when one of the ladies looked up at Oprah and through her tears she asked "'Don't you hate us?" Oprah responded something to the effect of "'No. I don't hate you. I see that is what you have done with your pain. I do something different with mine." That was a wow moment for me. You can take your suffering and bury it deep inside you and hope that it stays hidden. Or you can expose it to the surface, raw and messy and real, forcing yourself to deal with it despite how horrible and agonizing it might be, and try to use it to help others. Pain can turn into something positive, if you let it.

For whatever reason, I'm glad the universe smacked me upside the head. Life is about choices. Every SINGLE day of your life, you are faced with choices. They may seem small and insignificant but each one molds and shapes your future. It's a culmination of all of these choices that you make, fleeting ones, ones that you don't give much thought to, like whether or not to eat a second piece of chocolate cake, or to stay on the couch instead of getting up and going to the gym, that make you YOU. No matter how inconsequential each decision appears, they are sending you down a path toward the future you. I hear it all the time from clients or friends: I can't believe I gained all this weight. I just woke up one day 20 (or 30, or 50 or even 100) lbs heavier. Life can sneak up on you like that, if you don't live in the moment. Wake up. Don't walk through your life with your eyes closed.

It's actually quite common, my incredibly discouraging and seemingly unavoidable health concern, but that doesn't really comfort me much. The worst part about it is that I feel like I do everything right in my attempt to sidestep it. I follow every single protocol and take every precaution to prevent getting it from happening again, yet it returns, over and over. This has been my experience as I said, from a very young age and in the beginning, for many years even, I just dealt with it. I avoided taking any medication at all costs and still prefer natual and herbal remedies. Maybe I'm just a bit of a Tom Cruise Cuckoo in a way - believing that diet and exercise can heal anything. Well, I don't anymore. Sometimes you need to take medication and it's a fricken wonderful thing that we live in a world where we have this option available to us, although I definitely do still believe we live in an overmedicated society. Most people use drugs as a quick fix instead of getting to the root of the problem and exhausting any and all other possible options first. The whole "Band Aid on a Broken Leg" quote I'm so fond of. Diet pills, laxatives, weight loss supplements, "miracles" in a bottle - they make me lose my mind. Utter garbage. If it was that easy, we'd all be the perfect size, no?

This time around I suffered for about a week before I gave in and filled a prescription. Throughout the week, I was in a lot of pain and discomfort, but I tried to fight it. I know that sometimes your body can and will heal itself naturally, and it has before in this situation. But this time, I just couldn't seem to boot it. I got into a bit of a funk, didn't go to the gym for a week, and sure enough, started eating junk food again. The weather was just so damn crappy and I was hurtin' and I just couldn't get up off the couch, literally. I felt so cold, sad and at the peak of the madness, I was so miserable I just curled up into a ball and cried. That was after I had given in to taking meds (but before they kicked in). I'm not totally sadistic :) My girlfriend called me and noticed something was up. "Are you crying?", she asked, sounding so shocked. Yeah. I cry. Get over it. My pretend tough guy gig was up. She lent me her ear while I whimpered and moaned about how pathetic I was, while she just listened and gave me words of encouragement, reaffirming all of the things I already new. "Oh just wait, as soon as you are better you will be back in the gym in no time and you will be better than ever". Sometimes it's really nice to hear those things. It wasn't even the gym-skipping or eating bad that bothered me, it was the fact that I just cannot conquer this issue that I have. How do you deal with health concerns that keep derailing your progress? I wish I had the magic answer. What I do is rest, pamper myself, indulge a little, and then get my nose back to the grind, as soon as I'm physically able, because one day, I won't be.

It got me thinking: the pain of having a temporary illness can be extremely debilitating, but you know what scares me even more? The thought of having a disease or sickness that might not go away, in a few days or weeks or even years; instead what if it got worse, draining your energy so much that you wouldn't be able to get up or go to the gym, even if you wanted to. I mean to choose is one thing, but imagine having that choice taken away from you? Like the way you feel after you make a stupid mistake or have a careless accident and you scream "Nooooo...noo...wait, God, if I could only back there and change that? Why wasn't I more careful?" You forget to check your blind spot and in a split second you've made a life altering move.

As we age, our bodies change so much. Aches and pains we never knew existed slowly become part of daily life. We used to roll our eyes at our parents or elders complaining about their ailments, but now maybe those same ailments are starting to become a little more familiar to us. Age creeps up on us and one day, all of a sudden there we are, either a sum of all of those poor choices we've made, or still feeling pretty good about ourselves. What if you wait until you are no longer able to make those choices? Do you want to wait until something takes away your chance to choose? Imagine the regret, the anger, the fury you will feel at yourself for not doing it when you were able. You cannot turn back time. You cannot choose to be healthy if you don't choose all along to eat the right foods and exercise regularly. Illness will choose you.

"There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And it's only reward is that it is easy."

Welcome To My New Blog! Introduction

I've been contemplating doing this for, oh I don't know, forever. What finally made me decide is the massive amount of information I've been sending out lately - to clients, friends, and family, even to complete strangers who approach me at the gym or in the grocery store. People ask me health and fitness related questions on a regular basis. Why you ask? Well, let me tell you a bit about myself, in case you don't already know.

I am currently a Personal Trainer and soon-to-be Nutrition and Wellness Specialist. I work out 5-6 days a week, do yoga and try to eat very clean. I have had a passion for all things health and fitness related for many years, but certainly not all my life. Actually, I used to live my life in the complete opposite way of how I do now. I smoked cigarettes for maybe 7 years, smoked pot and did other drugs (yes, it's true, can you believe it ?) for about the same amount of time, ate the most unhealthy junk foods and didn't exercise for about the first 20 years of my life.

Growing up, a typical diet for me was a case of pop I kept in my closet (and drank about 4-5 a day), giant bags of ketchup chips and 6 packs of donuts, the white powdery kind with the jelly filling. Sometimes that would be all I would eat in a day. I never ate breakfast. I remember my stomach growling in school every morning as a child. In grade school a typical lunch was a chocolate bar, bag of chips and a soda. Or sometimes Mary Browns (east coast version of Kentucky Fried Chicken, but much better ;)) The closest thing to vegetables I ever ate were french fries. I'm pretty sure Chef Boyardee is my uncle. I didn't play any sports in high school. I was too busy hanging out, driving around and going for "coffees" every nite with friends (I always drank Pepsi. Never liked coffee) In college I lived about 200 meters from school yet I paid $75 dollars a month for a parking permit and I drove my car everyday! I guess you could say I didn't have much of a solid foundation to start out with.



My first year of college introduced me to someone who ignited a passion in me for working out. I had a Phys Ed teacher - Louis Paul aka LP who encouraged me to lift weights and push myself hard; he was a stern man, much like a drill sergeant, and I wanted to please him. At that time I smoked cigs, copious amounts of weed and lived on ramen noodle soup (ahh college :)), but slowly I began to make changes. By the end of the year, I had quit smoking everything and started working out in the gym which was ever so conveniently located below my apartment in a shopping-center-type building. The first semester I wasn't doing so good. I barely passed. I was lazy and I didn't care. But with LP's encouragement, I worked my butt off, achieved the goals I had set for myself and I ended up getting an excellent grade in his class. I never forgot the things I learned.

Now, don't get me wrong, that certainly was not the end of all my debauchery. I continued this healthy lifestyle for about another year after that, and then gave it up, started smoking again, and eating all those terrible but tasty foods that had comforted me for years but were slowly killing my body. I was lucky, I was never overweight (good genes I guess) but I was incredibly unhealthy - I had no energy, slept 10-12 hour days and lacked any motivation to do anything about it. I was borderline anemic and vitamin deficient and if I had continued to live this way for a long time, there is no doubt that I would have a host of other health issues.

I have been exercising consistantly and eating healthy (for the most part) for about 8 years now. Why am I telling you all this? Well, there is a perfectly good reason. Did you hear the recent news story about the Personal Trainer in Australia who gained 90 lbs to better empathize with his clients? http://www.trainwithmeonline.com/63/fitness/blog/General/Fitness/Paul_James_Weight_Gain_Experiment.htmls_Weight_Gain_Experiment.html

He wanted to show people he understood what they were going through. Now, I'm not gonna gain 90lbs, (hmmm maybe 10 would be fun...nah :)) but I do want to show people that it wasn't always easy for me. I wasn't "born this way", into a family of athletes who ran marathons or health nuts who fed me organic home-made baby food. I struggled. I still struggle. Most importantly, I want to show you it's not just about the weight or the physical appearance. It's about building a better body. Getting the blood pumping for a stronger, healthier heart. Developing muscle that protect your bones as you get older. To lower cholesterol, have a normal blood pressure, and energy to play with your kids or grandkids. It's about a better quality of life. It's never too late to start. The best time to plant an oak tree was 50 years ago. The second best time is today.



I welcome your thoughts, questions, comments and I hope you come back to read my blog again.