8/18/2012: Day 17 of 30

8/18/2012: Day 17 of 30

Morning weight: 178.0 (8/10ths of a pound gain - in spite of getting in all my exercise and eating less than 1600 calories the day before.  I chalk this up to the dinner I ate at my going away party Friday night.  It was a chef's salad at The Other Place.  I had the dressing on the side and didn't use much of it so my best guess on the calorie count was that I was fine on calories, but the salad was salty.  I am pretty disciplined about the amount of salt I eat, and while eating the salad I noticed that it was much saltier than what I normally eat.  I am very sensitive to salt and am pretty sure that the overnight gain is related to the salt in that salad.  I drank only water, by the way.  I was not even tempted to have an alcoholic beverage Friday night!)

Today's calorie count: 1568

Morning exercise: None - weekend routine, exercised in the afternoon

Evening (afternoon) exercise: 63 minute jog, about 4.9 miles.  Average HR 139, Max HR 153

---I paid more attention to how I was feeling while running than I normally do and I realized that the first 47 minutes of my jog were actually pretty pleasant.  I felt good, I didn't feel like I was torturing myself, I was enjoying being outdoors.  All in all, a decent experience.  After about 47 minutes, though, it got pretty tough.  The last 16 minutes of the jog required me pushing through the point of not wanting to do this anymore and it was a lot of work.  That's not bad, though.  I think it is safe to say that 25 weeks ago I couldn't jog five minutes without drawing on every bit of inner strength I had!  Progress, Grasshopper, Progress!!

Alcohol consumption: None

Younger Next Year pages read: 20
Notes from book: (Quotes and very near quotes in italics)- Finally, I am going to catch you up on the last 20 pages that I read!!!  Not that it is all that exciting, but a 30 day plan is a 30 day plan, and this is part of the plan, after all!!

These pages were the beginning of Part Two of the book called, "Take Charge of Your Life."  The book now moves away from talking about exercise and diet and starts to talk about the other important things we need to do in order to be Younger Next Year.

Chris gets the first chapter of this section and talks about the importance of caring.  In fact, Harry's Sixth Rule is:  Care.  Chris' words:  Care is a triple-barreled message, a Gatling gun of advice.  First, we urge you to care enough about exercise and nutrition so that you have a decent body and a good attitude going into the Next Third. (They often refer to life after 50 as the Next Third.  Personally, I refer to it as the Second Half, but each to his own!)  But that's only part of it, and not necessarily the most important part.  With exercise, you have given yourself a great set of wheels. But that doesn't amount to much unless you go out on the road.  The rest of the book is about life on the road.  Once you've taken charge of your body, you have to think about taking charge of your life.

It is important as we move into and through the second halves of our lives not to become withdrawn and not to turn into home-bodies, but to continue to reach out and care about others.  Connect and Commit is Harry's Seventh Rule.  It means rededicating yourself to family, friends, and companions.  Join groups, get involved in your community, whether it is work or play.  There is a tendency to do less of this as we age, and that is a huge mistake.  Humans are built to be involved with and to care for one another, and that does not change one bit as we age.  The book claims that being involved, connected, and caring about others is essential to healthy living.  In fact, it goes as far as to say, If we don't exercise our social skills - if we let ourselves become cut off and increasingly solitary as we age - we will become ill and die.  I've read many references to studies not included in this book that say exactly the same thing.  There is also the importance of going beyond caring for those in your circle and community, and caring for the greater good.  Harry and Chris believe that we were built to aspire to things beyond the interests of ourselves or our immediate pack...to "care" in the exalted sense about larger than human goals.  There is at least a possibility that this "higher caring" is what being a human is all about.  They then go on to say that this "higher caring" is a very personal thing and a serious discussion of "higher caring" is beyond the scope of the book.  But they do say that finding the selflessness within you - getting that one right for you - may trump everything else.  Caring at every level is one of the most important things you can do in the Next Third of your life.

Getting practical, Chris then recommends keeping a journal (how about a blog?).  He suggests that if you are going to have a life that you and others care about, it must be an examined life, and that means writing it down.  He recommends that three things go in the journal every day:  1) What I ate (I log all of my food in My Fitness Pal), 2) what I did for exercise (goes in My Fitness Pal and this blog), and 3) what I did with my life - sexually (Well, I think I'll keep that to myself), socially, morally...whatever you care about.  By journaling or writing everything down, it's a symbol that someone cares, even if it's just you.  He finishes the chapter by saying, whether you try the log or not, remember:  The great trick in life is to care.

When Harry gets to take a stab about the importance of caring, he gets to the biology of it all and talks about the Limbic Brain and the Biology of Emotion.  He tells us that, Staying emotionally connected turns out to be a biological imperative, a critical part of the good life - and a real challenge as we age in our society.  He says that it all comes back to the biology of connect and love.

Basically, Harry tells us that the survival of social animals, such as humans, chimps, wolves, and dolphins, is dependent on being part of a group.  There is no such thing as a solitary human in nature, because isolation is fatal.  We were designed to be emotional creatures, which is to say that we are mammals.

Mammals have a second brain that sits on top of the primitive brain, it is often referred to as the emotional brain but its real name is the limbic brain.  It is the part of our brain that runs our emotions and, according to Harry, in many ways it is the most important brain that we have.  Complex emotions, from the limbic brain, are the reason mammals succeeded.  We are emotional creatures from start to finish.

Our deepest and most primitive emotions, fear and aggression, have control centers in our primitive brain. Killing prey, territorial defense, fight or flight, sexual predation and ruthless self-interest are the legacy of our earliest ancestors.  The great differentiator between mammals and earlier creatures is the ability to create positive emotion.  Reptiles run purely on negative reinforcement.  Mammals invented love, joy, pleasure and play, all of which are enshrined in our DNA, in the chemical and neurological pathways in our limbic brains.  The survival of humans was dependent on this ability to live and thrive as a group.  Reptiles are hardwired for individual survival...many of them eat their own young, for instance.  While humans still have that hardwired instinct for personal survival, we also have the concern for the survival of our children and the ability to sense emotions in others.  Our limbic brains give is the ability to love our young and work in groups, two essentially critical items to our very survival as a species.

Our third and final brain is the subtle, thinking, calculating, problem-solving, tool-using, social-climbing, chatting, linguistic neocortical brain:  the thinking brain.  The physical brain speaks the language of sensation and movement.  The emotional brain speaks the language of feelings and mood.  The thinking brain the conscious, thinking brain, our brain, your brain, speaks the language of...language.  With the development of the thinking brain we not only had own brain maps of the environment, we had access to other people's brain maps, too.  Collective activities like hunting, foraging, raising children and teaching each other how to make things took priority in early communication.  This ability to be part of a tribe allowed humans to expand to every climate on earth.

These three brains are intricately wired together.  We are primitives, mammals and humans all at once.  Our thoughts (thinking brain) and emotions (limbic brain) are partners in the never ending dance of life.  Thoughts and emotions alternate the lead, but most of the time our emotions, not our thoughts, take that lead, and our thoughts follow.  According to Harry, Emotion literally precedes thought at the neural level.  So a positive emotion will tend to generate a positive thought in response, which will loop back through the limbic system to generate a positive feeling.  The same loop works for negative emotions and thoughts.  Therefore, it is possible to train yourself to live in either an optimistic or a pessimistic frame of mind regardless of your external circumstances.  How you view your life has a surprisingly large role in determining how your life goes, so there is a real premium on having positive emotions.  You can help create these positive emotions by reaching out to good stimuli:  exercise, decent sleep, rational diet, love and play.  Happiness comes primarily from building connections, from giving and getting love and friendship, and that just takes good old-fashioned work- hard, but deeply satisfying work.  Connect and commit, in other words to generate positive emotions and drive away despair.  Study after study show that social connections are a more powerful factor in health and mortality than smoking, alcohol, exercise, nutrition or age.  Interestingly, staying physically active increases your likelihood of staying socially connected.  In a study of 6,500 older adults there was a linear relationship between levels of walking, biking or gardening and the number of social contacts.

To sum it up so far, exercise 6 days a week; don't eat crap; care about your life, the life of those around you, and the greater good; connect and commit, and keep an optimistic outlook on life.  Yeah...it all makes sense to me!!