Thursday at 5 p.m., 30 minutes before I had to be back home for my sitter. I was heading in the back door to bury my nose in the computer for a few clandestine moments of research and writing before my son discovered my presence, but as my foot hit the last stair leading to the back door, something in my deepest, aching heart-of-hearts called out for me to stop.
Half an hour stretched out before me, so instead of going inside, I turned and sat on the step directly under my feet. The sun had dipped behind the edge of the neighboring house, still bright, but not overbearing. The leaves were back in their full glory after a brief but real winter, gracing me with verdant shelter. I imagined I would find silence there, but instead I was met with a cacophony of bird sounds: steady banter, chatter overhead.
I don’t really like birds. They scare the living hell of out me when they get too close. Their sharp beaks and primordial legs are just fine kept at a distance. But in this moment, on this day, I listened. And they spoke. And I wondered what they were talking about.
Their conversations persisted urgently, rhythmically, and I was uncharacteristically transfixed. What were they talking about? What was so important up there? Were they scouting locations for nests? Looking for love? Grieving the loss of an egg that never hatched?
As I sat, listening to them, I had a creeping sense of exactly how far removed I have become from the natural world, the hushed and thundering world that exists beyond the boundaries of my insulated home and numerous devices.
I’m a city person, always have been. I love it all: sidewalks and people, morning showers and soft sheets. I don’t long to lay my head down in a sleeping bag on hard dirt at night, but there is something increasingly missing in the drumbeat of “when” and “how” and “how-much” that populates my city-dwelling days.
I dragged myself away from the birdsongs that evening and wandered back inside, thinking I still had time to “accomplish something.” But time had flown away. I was due upstairs, but my head was still in the trees. What were they talking about?
The next night, in dead-stopped gridlock in the heart of downtown, I was confronted with the stark truth that my gentle, midsized city was rapidly evolving into a full-throated metropolis — which both thrilled me and broke my heart. I gazed at the sea of brake lights and realized that if that’s how it’s going to be, I need a counterbalance to the pull of urban life. I need birdsongs and clouds and leaves on trees, and if I don’t take the time to see and know those things, I will lose something of enormous value — and my son will, too.
Another email, another hour spent staring at a blank screen in search of ideas, is not only fruitless, it’s heartless. It’s a vortex of pixels. Don’t get me wrong. I adore my screen time. I love connecting with friends old and new, and I value this maddening laptop that enables me to purge my thoughts. I fill it up with all kinds of inventive things when I have something to fill it with, but when I look to it, or to my phone, for inspiration, they leave me cross-eyed and lifeless. The birdsongs, on the other hand, are very much alive, full of intrigue.
I’ve hugged a few trees in my day and will definitely be hugging a few more in the years to come. In fact, the bigger the city gets, the more trees I plan to embrace, sap and all.
Bring on the chaos of a city in flux. Come what may, I’ve got birds in my backyard, and trees and leaves overhead, ready and willing to give me shelter from the steady hum of Wi-Fi forever worming its way through my skull.
And to discover what the birds are talking about, I’ll turn to the experts. My 4-year-old and his trusty pit bull will most definitely have a theory or two on that.
As anybody who reads this blog knows, I am not a fan of The Biggest Loser. It is what it is... entertainment. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of living with excess weight, losing it, or keeping it off. So when three different people emailed me yesterday asking my opinion of the latest study that came out about the contestants of the 2009 season regaining much of the weight they lost, some gaining even more, I was far from shocked.
It's obvious that many of them would have regained the weight, but I think it's important to address some of the issues mentioned in the New York Times article about what happened to their metabolisms and what those changes mean for long term weight loss. The conclusions are not as dire as they might seem.
1. Massive, rapid weight loss is unrealistic and unsustainable. Dur. That has been common wisdom for a long time. Under the bizarre and extreme circumstances that they lost the weight, we should not be surprised that they gained it back.
2. Health-wise, weight loss of 5-10% of body weight is enormously beneficial for anyone who is overweight or obese. In other words, a 250 pound woman who loses 15 -25 pounds can expect to feel better and have better health outcomes. Period. It's about how we feel, not about how we think we look. Big can be beautiful, but if we don't feel so good, small increments of weight loss are worth the effort and much more easily maintained.
3. Changes in diet and physical activity should be sustainable. If you can't imagine doing it for the rest of your life, don't bother. Move and stand whenever and however you can. Become a hummingbird. Flutter about constantly and you will boost your metabolism. Physical activity is good for you regardless of weight loss.
4. Make muscle maintenance part of your fitness routine. Muscle burns more than fat and keeps your metabolism up. You only need a few minutes a day of strengthening exercises to make this happen. See my new series of 5-minute workout videos or sign up for the newsletter to get a new one in your mailbox every two weeks.
5. The article talks a lot about hunger. The hormone, leptin, does drop in people who have carried and lost a bunch of extra weight, but hunger can be remedied by eating a ton of high fiber, high water content foods... fruits and vegetables... and lean protein. You don't have to be hungry. You just have to find foods that you like, that fill you up and don't pack on the pounds, and eat a bunch of them before the hunger hits.
We should not be trying to glean any wisdom from The Biggest Loser, except that it doesn't work. Though this is an interesting scientific study of biology and extreme weight loss, what happened to most of them will never happen to any of us. Metabolism naturally drops when body weight drops, but with slow, steady weight loss, the calories we burn will remain in line with our body size. When you are smaller, you need to eat fewer calories. It's an unfortunate fact, but that's the reality. Not a problem if the changes have come naturally, sustainably aligned with the reality of our lives.
If we assault our bodies by starving them and beating them down with 8 hours of pounding exercise every day, we will mess them up. That's all. No big surprise.
