Our repackaged lives

Our repackaged lives

Every so often a person gets a moment of clarity. I have had another moment of clarity with respect to diet, exercise, and our daily lives now that I am actively trying to reduce my weight and improve my fitness. I have seen many people on MFP talk about that much of our food is simply repackaged nutrients. It is in this light that I realized it isn’t just food that is repackaged, it is our lives. This isn’t a judgment or even a recommendation to change, just an observation of my life and the lives of the people around me and is a little over the top in places.

We have become great at multi-tasking, especially in the U.S., in everything except diet and exercise. For our food we buy items for one specific need. Need to have a protein shake to get the protein and then end up needing a fiber supplement to keep us regular due to the lack of bulk. Replace entire meals with a simple drink. Imagine how much simpler grocery shopping and eating would be if we instead simply ate a set of food that at the end of the day gave us all the different nutrients we needed. Our bodies would thank us because they need all of the food, even the insoluble bits and not just boiled down nutrients in pill or drink form. Now I know many if not most people on MFP already know this, live it, and suggest to others that they do the same. However, the repackaging doesn’t just apply to food.

How many of you have rushed to get on your riding mower to quickly get the lawn mowed or worse yet pay someone else to do it so you had time to go on your run/walk/bike to get your exercise? You could have done both by simply using a push or even self-propelled mower. How about grabbing fast food either on the way to the gym or coming back from it because you didn’t have time to make a healthy meal and exercise? If you were exercising for weight loss you could have achieved the same calorie deficit by cooking a healthy low calorie meal at home and been able to spend more time with family and friends. Need to do strength training? How about moving those boxes to the basement that have been sitting there since Christmas? You get both strength training and a stair master workout. We have repackaged our exercise into a single activity that is separate and apart from our daily lives and then we find we have no time for it or we have to give up something else to accommodate it.

How many of you skip doing cooking and cleaning around the house or keep putting off a major project like cleaning out the garage or basement because you don’t have time due to watching your weight and trying to increase your activity? Those chores aren’t in the way of increased activity, they are the increased activity. Sure normal chores are not going to get you to the level of fitness to run a marathon or climb Mt. Everest but if your true goal is to simply maintain a healthy weight and reduce your chance of a heart attack or stroke then it is probably enough.

For general fitness, exercise is exercise regardless of form. If a person is specifically training to compete in an event then specific exercise is required but is that person competing in the event just because they need to improve their fitness? There are great programs like C25K, 100 push-ups, and 200 sit-ups but do we really need to get that specific to improve our fitness? And what would we do with such fitness after we have achieved it other than spend hours a week maintaining it? Personally I have been rather unfit for the last 10 years because I haven’t needed to be fit to go about my daily activities. Right now I have a specific activity planned for this summer for which I need to be fit but when that ends I am going to have to find something else or I will likely lose my fitness drive simply because I won’t need it to live my daily life. “Use it or lose it”, or more specifically “Need it or lose it”.

If your house is anything like mine, there are about 50 things that need to be done. They don’t get done because I don’t have the time or they take too much effort but I still manage to find the time to exercise as if that isn’t time or effort. My grandparents and great-grandparents lived to an old age, were a healthy weight, and generally in good health. They weren’t out running miles every day, biking, or using an elliptical machine. They were simply living their lives and that was enough on both the diet and exercise fronts. Yes the men had jobs that were a bit more manual labor than we do today but most of the women stayed home and through their daily chores were able to keep sufficiently fit without the need to repackage it. Most consider life in the past “harder” but maybe if we made our lives a little harder they would also be less hectic and stressful. Time saving devices like microwave ovens don’t really save time. “Our microwave oven will save you 30 minutes cooking so you have time to go to the gym which you wouldn’t need to do if you didn’t eat the stuff you cook with a microwave!”

Times have changed and it is definitely more difficult to adjust our daily lives to give us sufficient diet and exercise without making it a separate activity. The whole foods that were all that was available 50 years ago have gotten more expensive as they have given way to cheaper mass-produced repackaged nutrients. Walking to the store is a whole lot farther as corner grocery stores have been replaced by mega supermarkets and much more dangerous since there are few sidewalks and the roads are all 50+ mph speed limits. But if we could make just a few changes here and there to combine exercise with productive work like mowing the lawn, creating and tending a garden, cleaning up the house, build that retaining wall you’ve always wanted, or going hiking/camping with family and friends then we might be able to maintain our fitness and also find a few extra hours in the week that seem to have gotten lost.