August 5, 2012: Week 23 Photo and Day 4 of 30

Week 23, 181.2 pounds, 41.8 pounds lost to date

8/5/2012: Day 4 of 30
Weight: 181.2
Today's calorie count: 1183
Morning exercise: 60 minute jog - 4.9 miles
Evening exercise: 15 minutes at level 7 on the elliptical machine - 1900 strides
Alcohol consumption: None
Younger Next Year Pages Read:  20
Notes from book:
Now things get a little technical.  This book is written by two people, Dr. Henry S Lodge and one of his patients Chris Crowley.  Chris provides the anecdotal, apply the science to every day life, chapters and Dr. Henry provides the details behind the science of health chapters.  The result is a book that is as fascinating as it is easy to read.  The science behind why we should exercise every day is amazingly compelling.  After reading this book you will never be able to be idle for days on end again without knowing, deep down, in your heart of hearts, that your body is just hiss-bumping its way to decay and you could be doing something to prevent it.  That's just it...you can do something to prevent (for the most part) this uncomfortable, painful, seemingly irreversible thing we call aging.  Not prevent, completely, as the book points out, but if you are like most of us, you can get noticeably younger over the next few years and then level out and be much fitter, healthier and younger than you are right now into your 70s, 80s, and 90s.  As Chris points out, our hair will still go gray and our skin will still wrinkle, so we will still look old, but we will not feel old.  If we start doing what we need to do today, and everyday from here on out, we can be climbing mountains at 80.  And that is exactly what I intend to do.

Speaking of the difference between looking old and feeling old, I'd like to tell you a little story.  Last week I saw a friend that I had not seen for a month and she said, "Wow, you look great!  How much weight have you lost?"  I told her that I had lost 40 pounds and still have 34 to go.  (I don't know why, but I always do that when someone asks me how much weight I've lost.  I always tell them how much I lost and how much is left to get to goal.  Maybe it's just to remind myself that this is a process.)  My friend's response was, "Are you sure you need to lose that much more weight?"  And I answered with the fact that I still weigh 184 pounds, which to me is self-explanatory.  And she said, "Well, yes, but if you lose that much more weight aren't you afraid you will look older in your face, maybe get more wrinkly?"

I sat there for a second, kind of surprised by the question and wondering what the answer to it was.  And then, the answer was there.  I told my friend that my goal is to climb mountains when I'm 80 and my face isn't going to get me up any mountains, my body is.  She was a little surprised by my answer, but she got it.  Immediately.  I really don't care if my face is wrinkly, I care about how I feel and what I can physically do and accomplish.  Wrinkles, schminkles! 

So I started out by saying this chapter of the book gets a little complicated, and it does.  Dr. Henry starts talking about the chemicals in your body that are in charge of regulating the cycle of growth and decay.  Apparently there are thousands of these chemicals, but he simplifies the story by talking about two of the primary players that he calls Cytokine-6 (C-6) and Cytokine-10 (C-10);  C-6 is the master chemical for inflammation (decay) and C-10 is the master chemical for repair and growth.  Dr. Henry explains that the 60-70 pounds of muscles in our bodies are the store houses for C-6 and C-10.  When we exercise our muscles automatically release C-6, which causes the soreness in our muscles.  After exercise, our muscles release C-10 to begin the process of rebuilding our muscles.  The amazing part of the story is that our blood is flowing through our muscles and picking up the C-10 and washing our entire bodies with this rejuvanating chemical that causes growth and regeneration of healthy cells and tissues.  Obviously, Dr. Henry does a much better job of describing this process than I do and I am not going to quote the entire chapter, but suffice it to say that when I was at the gym this morning and I found my weight lifting to be particularly difficult, I was happy about that.  Because I knew I was stressing my muscles, causing my body to release C-6, which would in turn cause it to release C-10, and that I would be younger tomorrow than I am today.  Yes, that does make me feel good.

Dr. Henry also talks about the difference between the stress of exercise (or of hunting or being hunted) and the chronic stress of modern life, and how these same chemicals, C-6 and C-10 work differently under chronic stress, particularly when combined with our modern diets.  To make it easy, I will quote those short paragraphs of the book:

In nature, chronic stress is always coupled with starvation.  The blood is caustic, but carries no fat.  In the wild, there is no cholesterol to be absorbed.  You are under chronic stress because you are starving to death.

C-6 draws white blood cells right into the wall of your arteries, and when you combine chronic stress with our rotten diet, the white cells turn into vacuum cleaners sucking fat out of your bloodstream.  They grow to obscene proportions.  They absorb so much fat that the actual cellular machinery of your arterial walls become invisible, buried under a mountain of goop.  We don't even call them white blood cells anymore; we call them foam cells.  In a renovation project run amok, the walls of your blood vessels fill up with all the junk of random demolition, held fast in a glue of fat and cholesterol.  Over decades, this turns into the stuff called plaque, and plaque kills at least half of us.

I can't begin to convey the book's message as well as the authors have done, so I definitely recommend reading the book.  It is enlightening, convincing, and inspirational.  Dr. Henry is very convincing when he makes the claim that vigorous, daily exercise is the only signal that you can send to your body that life is good.  Repair thyself, body, send out the C-10.  Life is good, game is abundant, and I need to be strong to be ready for the hunt tomorrow!!!!