Category Archives: slice of life

Exercise and gluttony

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My selfSim comes home from jogging and makes spaghetti. Hopefully I will be able to eat spaghetti again soon – my digestion seems to slowly recover (most of the time) from the antibiotics three weeks ago. 

The Zeitgeist – spirit of the times – is certainly strong. Today my pulse watch told me that I had burned 1500 calories (well, a bit more, but I think it exaggerates). And I was feeling all “Yay! Lots of fat burned!”

And then I thought “Wait, what? I’m not overweight! This just means I have to buy more groceries! The more I exercise, the more I’m going to eat.” That is certainly true in the long run, if any. And I actually don’t even run – I just take long walks with some jogging here and there.

I believe it is right, or wise, to exercise the body somewhat when I have a job that mostly leaves me sitting. The body is not built for passivity; it needs to be reminded that it is still inhabited, at least at my current level of development. I believe that when people become more alive inwardly, the need for external exercise becomes less. Certainly scholars and sages seem to live just as long as athletes, if not more so. So there is probably more to this than what meets the eye. But for now, it is an enjoyable way to stay healthy, I think.

So where does the gluttony come in? Well, in its crassest form, there is the notion of exercising more so that I can eat more. This is not all that different from the rumored practice of the decadent Roman parties, where people supposedly gorged themselves on expensive food, then threw up and went back to the orgy. OK, it is healthier and less insane, but the underlying mode of thought is disturbingly similar. They attribute this quote to Socrates: “Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.” I suspect most of us fall somewhere in between, but I also think we will gradually drift in one or the other direction over the years.

But even if you eat and drink to live, or mostly so, the fact remains that you eat more if you are physically active. Of course, if you have manual labor, if you work with your body, this is for the good of society (presumably). But simply by running around, it is within your reach to double your energy output. (Not that I am near that, even on my best days; but then I don’t even jog more than short stretches.) If you double your energy output and keep the same weight, you obviously also double your energy input, or in other words the food you eat. And once you’ve eaten it, no one else will.

Luckily we now live in a world where there is enough food for at least 9 billion people, perhaps 10, and we are only just over 7 billion. So other things probably count more, like throwing away food (huge amounts both privately and especially from shops) or distribution problems in poor countries. There is in and of itself no reason why we should need to eat less right now. And if we do, the first thing would be to eat less meat (and to some extent milk) since much of the energy in plant food is lost while passing through animals.

But there may be a future, not so far away, when food might be less abundant. Fossil fuels will surely continue to grow more expensive, and western agriculture (especially American) uses a lot of oil to produce all this cheap food.  So with more expensive oil, food will also be more expensive. This could put it out of reach for the poorest, and the more we in the rich world eat, the less there will be overall. So at that time, eating twice as much may cost someone else their life. That is a heavy burden … except we really don’t care usually. It is not like we can’t afford, most of us, to keep some poor kid alive in a developing country if we really, really want. But most of us don’t do it, at least not regularly. So we’ll probably not think of our eating that way either.

In either case, eating more veggies and grains should help keep the world fed for a while at least, and that may be all we need. The population explosion is set to stop and even reverse around the middle of the century.

Still, there are definitely purer motivations for exercise than eating as much as possible. And it may be that at some point I am going to change my exercise to  get more health benefits with less energy use, like hard interval training instead of long, leisurely walks. But for now, this is not a high priority. I just want to be aware of what I do, and not drift mindlessly like flotsam on the stream of time.

 

Pulse while jogging

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No. A high pulse while jogging is not a good thing.

After reading the transcript from my cardiologist, I pondered how to make my potential “superpower” of super-low resting pulse into something useful. When walking fast, my pulse is typically around 110-120 depending on the day. But jogging even a short distance brings my pulse up in the 140es, at which point I slow down to a walk again. No point in taunting the asthma to attack.

And then I used Google to learn more about normal pulse while jogging, and found numerous young people asking “Is it normal to have a pulse of [180 / 190 / 200] while jogging?” The answers varied in quality, but generally the answer is NO WAY! Most humans have a maximum pulse below 200 even when young. A pulse of above 180 should be reserved for when you try to outrun a tsunami, or during the spurt phase of a championship. Or in other words, don’t voluntarily bring on a pulse like that unless there is a cardiologist and a heart starter nearby, or unless your life is forfeit anyway.

(The exception to this is high-intensity interval training, where you exert your muscles and heart very hard for a brief interval. This is used by athletes who want to improve their maximum performance. As long as you know your limits and do it right, it is surprisingly harmless. But if you are not already an athlete, don’t do interval training without the OK from a competent physician. Get to know your max pulse and that you don’t have any illnesses that may interfere.)

Back to the joggers. It is likely (and sometimes they actually say it) that these people are in a similar situation as I, only younger. They have not actually been jogging before, but they have seen others do it. So they set off, but it is harder than it looks. Why is this? It is usually because the body is not adapted to this particular use.

Even if you are in good shape, when you switch from one type of exercise to another which you are unfamiliar with, the pulse will go way up for some weeks. In part the body simply does not know how to do this exercise efficiently. In part the muscles for that task are not developed. Two things happen to muscles when you start using them in a new way: 1) They add muscle fiber, if you are straining them harder than before, and 2) they add small blood vessels, if you are using them longer than before.

If your body tries to bring sugar and oxygen to the muscles but the blood vessels are too small and too few, the heart needs to work that much harder, and your pulse will go way up, even if you don’t have an illness. What you need to do then is to give your muscle time to adapt. This means weeks where you exercise in the new way but not too hard.

For instance, after I have warmed up by walking, if my pulse is below 120, I start jogging until the pulse passes 140 on its way up. Then I slip back into walking, which I am quite experienced at. When the pulse fall below 120 again, I can jog for another stretch. If you are young and don’t have asthma, you can go quite a bit higher than that, but the point is that you should not stress test your heart when your muscles can’t benefit from it anyway. They still need to grow to their optimal size, and interval jogging three times a week will be enough to make them do that. But you have to keep at it. There is no magic wand. You have to put time and miles into walking if you haven’t even done that, and later you do the same for jogging, and eventually running. It may look easy on TV, but you have to put your own miles into it.

When you’ve got your jogging right, you should be able to keep a simple conversation while jogging, without having to slow down to get your breath back. If you jog alone, you should be able to recite a poem, or a familiar prayer. If your pulse is anywhere near 180, I’d go for the prayer.

My belated superpowers

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Unfortunately I can’t manipulate time to slow down or speed up other people, but evidently I am slowing down myself. Not that this will surprise many… ^_^

The report from the cardiologist arrived, and I left it on the fridge for a while. Turns out it actually contains more details than I got when I was there (or at least other details – while there, I got to look at the ultrasound pictures and cool stuff like that).

The report could barely have been more upbeat if it were ordered by an elderly presidential candidate trying to convince the world that he was not going to keel over at the start of his term and leave the country in the hands of a pretty but cheerfully ignorant vice-president. Not that such a thing would ever happen. Anyway, upbeat. Vague pun intended at heartbeat.

Did you know I have physical superpowers? My mental superpowers are a matter of record, of course. I mean, you see them here almost every day. Plus, I used to be an amazing programmer, back when it was necessary to be an amazing programmer. These days, you can make whatever you want in some high-level programming tool, and the super fast computers will run it at a decent clip even if it is sloppily written, as long as the logic is not insane. I don’t really feel there is need for me as a programmer anymore. But the good news, if true, is that I now have superpowers of the body as well!

I refer to the observation that my resting pulse, which used to be around 55 back in 2005 and 50 last year, is now evidently 44. The portable heart monitor came to this somewhat disturbing conclusion, at least. Disturbing how? Disturbing in the sense that this is the resting pulse of a national level athlete. Well, for small nations like my native Norway, I guess. World class athletes may have slightly lower, though not all of them do. Just the outliers, the ones most people (but not me) have heard about. Yeah, baby. Magnus Itland, world-class athlete without even trying.

Actually, it is not quite that easy. On the contrary, the good doctor admits that “the patient has however a lower physical capacity than one should expect”. Uh, not if one bases one’s expectations on the patient not having exerted himself for even half a minute for the previous 45 years, I think. But yeah, the pulse rises really fast if I actually exert myself. Jogging for a brief stretch raises my pulse to 140. Of course, I have never actually jogged before, beyond a few steps now and then, so there’s that. Evidently to translate that ridiculously low resting pulse to actual working capacity, I will have to actually exert myself. Perhaps one day!

While I was at the lab, I asked him whether my low pulse wasn’t a case of bradycardia (as the Wikipedia rather strongly implies it is). The doctor did not think so. He said it came from there just not being much resistance in my blood vessels. He showed me ultrasound pictures that indicated less rough surface and plaque than normal for my age. Overall, I seem to have a body that is several years younger than my chronological age. This makes sense, I suppose, if my heart has beat less times than the heart of people much younger than me. By that measure, I may be closer to 40 than 53. Someone please tell my hair.

In fact, I suspect this is a lifelong trait: I reached puberty later than all the other boys my age, and I kept growing taller for longer than all the other boys my age. That probably means I was also immature for much longer than other young men my age, which certainly fits the fact. If this keeps up, I may die from old age much later than the other boys my age too. On the other hand, the sad truth is that most people don’t die from old age. They die from cancer, or heart infarcts, or stroke, or blood poisoning, or the flu, or being too demented to realize that the cows don’t need to be milked and they are not on the farm and it’s below freezing outside and the nurses who should keep track of them are playing Facebook games. Stuff like that. So my 120 years birthday is far from secure, alas.

But at least my cardiologist is giving me a chance. Thanks!

Testing the heart

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Tomorrow is the scheduled day for stress-testing my heart. The physical heart, that is! The doctor is a heart specialist, so it is probably the safest place to do it except for an actual hospital. Still, I have not actually exerted myself fully (or even nearly fully) for over 40 years. So I look at this with some worry.

I have had exercise asthma since I started running around as a toddler. There were no inhalers in rural Norway at the time, so the way I survived was learning early on to never exert myself. I mastered this in grade school, more or less. Around the age of 10-12 I had stopped even dreaming at night about running, so my nightly asthma attacks also faded. I credited this to divine intervention, which may well be true, although it was in that case an internal one rather than external: A change of me rather than of my circumstances. Actually these are my favorite divine interventions, may there be many more of them.

I intend to update my journal pretty soon after returning from the test.

If not … thank you all. It’s been great.

 

Chaotic reading

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Today is for those who have wanted to peep in on my reading. I have to disappoint you though, these books are mostly about religion and not about sex. Not sure which is the most controversial these days though…

You have seen my “chaotic” writing, in the sense that I may write about tentacles one day and saints the next. But you have not seen the books I read, unless you follow my Goodreads page, and even that is pretty terse and doesn’t include rereads. It will perhaps not surprise you that this is pretty chaotic too: Both in the subject matter, but even more in the haphazard way I keep grazing the books.

I am in the habit of reading a large number of books at the same time, some of which I finish and others not. With e-books it has become much easier to get back to where I left, so now there is no limit to the fragmentation. Still, entirely random it is not.

For instance, I have read 83% of The Way of Perfection by St Teresa of Avila (also called Teresa of Jesus, although I like to think all Christian saints could be called “of Jesus”. ^_^) This book is one I read on the commute bus most workdays, in the morning. The books is quite intense in its brightness, and I willingly choose to go through it slowly, so that I can be reminded of it regularly for a long time. Still, we approach the home stretch. This is a book I will probably read again if I live long enough, but not immediately. With my fairly good memory, I need some time before I can actually see the text a second time, rather than simply remember it while skimming.

The last book I completed was The Nine Dimensions: Revealing the Laws of Eternity, by Ryuho Okawa. Despite the name which implies it is a follow-up or companion books to the original Laws of Eternity, it is simply a new translation with some marginal added material. One of the earliest books by Okawa, it is also one of my favorites. In this book there is some mention toward the end of his “new” deity El Cantare (of which he says the historical Buddha was one incarnation), but there is none of the “I am God and your Savior, the greatest of the great” until the more recently added afterword, which has a certain taste of that.

The book teaches that the Spirit World is not a geographical place you travel to, as much as a state of mind. Heaven or Hell are within us, and we in them, already in this life. Various levels of enlightenment correspond to various spiritual planes or dimensions, and we are there now. What happens at death is that we can no longer hide who we are. Our thoughts will manifest instantly, clearly visible. For some, this will be Hell. For others, it will be Heaven. This seems like a wonderful teaching to me, as it will get people involved with what really mattes, rather than rituals and appearances. So if Happy Science remained like that, it would be a worthy contender as a religion, although in my view there is no reason why the same principle could not be applied to Christianity, for example.

The Fullness of God is the book by Frithjof Schuon on Christianity. I wrote about Schuon in late January, when I started on this book. I have come pretty exactly halfway through it. The problem with Schuon is that he is so high, high above me that I cannot really screen him for heresies or even factual mistakes. It would be like a high school student trying to figure out whether Albert Einstein made a mistake in his general theory of relativity. I suppose there may be high schoolers like that, but I am not one of them. Nor am I one of the people who can evaluate Frithjof Schuon. I can admire him, but I am not sure whether I can believe him. Some of what he says I can understand, but some I cannot follow. Since he uses a method of direct intellection rather than logic much of the time, one either sees what he sees, or not. If not, then one either recognizes it with the heart, or not. If not that, one either believes it, or not. It is this latter situation I would rather avoid. If I cannot see it for myself or understand it, I am more inclined to just pass it by without judgment.

In dramatic contrast to the above, we have Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. In case it was not obvious from the title, this is a parody of a biography of Jesus Christ. That said, while it is horribly irreverent and not family-friendly at all, about a quarter through the book it is quite likable. While the child and teenage Jesus is portrayed as more human than most pious fantasies about this part of his life, he is definitely a good guy. As a teen, the chaste and responsible Joshua (Jesus) is contrasted by his pal Biff who is not exactly evil but is definitely an example of fallen human nature. Not really a religious book and I have no idea whether I am going to complete reading it. It is not impossible though.

Valhalla by Jennifer S Willis is a book I started on, but which failed to pull me along. It is a fiction based on Norse Mythology, reinterpreted into contemporary America. Not a bad concept, but somehow it slid down on my list after only 9%. I think the problem is that I see it only as entertainment, and The Sims 3 is more entertaining than books. A book needs to have something more to compete these days. If I find time for entertainment (and most days I do) it will probably not be a book, unless it is awesome. Books are for learning. (Not that I can’t learn from games too, but I mean more theoretical learning.)

Speaking of non-fiction books again, there’s The world in 2050 published by The Economist magazine. I have referred to that magazine repeatedly over the years. It may sound like some sort of accounting magazine, but actually this British weekly has a wider approach that also includes technology, politics and even culture. Its intelligence and integrity makes me happy to be a subscriber, even when I sometimes don’t agree with them. So also here. The book is respectably sane and humble when faced with the impossible task of charting out the next 38 years of a world where change has become the constant, and where the speed of change itself is speeding up faster and faster. This is a book I will not be ashamed to read at work if there is a slow day. Still, I have only read 14% so far. I guess there are other fun things to do at work most days. ^_^

 

 

 

A worker and his pay

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A worker may be worth his pay, but an abundant harvest is still a blessing. As is the ability to work in the first place, if you ask me.

Yesterday was payday, for me as for hundreds of thousands of other Norwegians. It came a bit suddenly, was what I felt. Suddenly payday again! That is hardly a cause for complain, though. Well, it may be that I am just growing old and time is flying faster than it used to. But I think the reason why I did not notice payday approaching was that payday no longer makes a difference. The things I can do the week before payday are the same that I can do the week after payday. In fact, I paid most of the bills for April before payday. And that is definitely not a cause for complain.

That is not to say that I have enough money to do everything I want. In particular, I want a small house in the countryside, and I can’t afford that. But I have more money than I need, at least for now. And that’s what counts.

I have observed the human mind for many years, and I call it a “desire factory”. It will produce new wants, wishes, longings, attachments etc like some kind of automated assembly line. Normally it will not even wait until the existing wants are fulfilled before throwing up new ones. And you cannot stop it by giving it what it wants for a long time. If you lived for billions of years and ended up having the entire universe except for a single grain of sand, your mind would be sick with longing for that grain of sand. Or in the vivid imagery of the Jewish creation story, our ancestors had a literal paradise with everything they wanted for free – except the fruit of 1 tree. And of course they had to eat of that one tree, even though the Tree of Life stood right beside it and they could have eaten from that instead and lived forever. This is a poetic but quite exact report on the human mind even today.

Knowing this, I largely ignore any inconvenient wants. I am happy to oblige when my body wants yogurt or sleep, but I am in no particular hurry to chase the dream of the small red house in the countryside again. Perhaps in this life, perhaps not. I have food and clothes, and nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. An economic crash will come to Norway as well, unless some greater disaster befalls us. These things go in waves, and there is no wave crest that is not followed by a trough.  But even I do not know when, how, and how deep. I know however that unless I suffer untimely death, I will be surrounded by fear and confusion, and I would rather not be in debt to above the chimney at the time.

Since I have the luxury of living and working in Norway, I consider myself blessed as is. In all my years of working, I have never been unionized, and never asked for a pay rise above the general adjustment for inflation. My pay has increased a bit over time, even so, but my coworkers who are all unionized earn quite a bit more even with half the experience I have. They may need it too, since they are either women or living with women, and in many cases have children as well. Women love money in a way that I will probably never be able to understand, having never been one.

When I mentioned to my then best friend (codename Superwoman) that I never asked for pay rises, she reacted with an immediate and probably automatic shock and revulsion, probably not unlike what a man will see if he tells a woman that he has decided to cut his gonads off. The idea of man as Provider is politically leprous, but it is still the unspoken assumption of women even here in Scandinavia. It is part of the “man image”, if you want. We don’t really have gender equality in economic matters, but rather gender balance: Women earn less than men, but spend substantially more. And not just on food and clothes for the family, but on travel, entertainment, clothes and jewelry for themselves etc. There is an unspoken assumption that “his money is our money, my money is my money.” Actions speak louder than words, although the words are quite loud in this matter.

I have a lesbian friend who is not crazy about using as much money as possible though, so it may not be entirely down to the ovaries. And there are certainly many men who are spendthrifts, to the point where they live in constant worry and suffering even though they have a high-income job. Being single does not help at all, because then you have to constantly impress new women. It is even worse than being married. Celibacy is the only safe refuge from economic worries, and I suspect that for most people this is pretty worrying in itself.

But for me, once I left the perpetuation of our family’s superior genes to my brothers, I have found that money here in Norway is plentiful indeed. When I think of the hard work of my grandparents, the small and drafty house they lived in, the simple food they ate and how they hardly ever could travel further than to the next village… My mind may come up with a thousand dreams, but I’ll eat my delicious food with gratitude and  enjoyment. Since the days of our first ancestors, there has probably never been a better time and place than here and now. It is written in the Christian bible that “a worker is worth his wages”, but in my case I wonder if that can really be true. I think there may be some grace on top of the justice.