Inspiration and Wonder from My Time as a Personal Trainer

No, no one's hired me as a personal trainer. I decided I would help my son succeed in his first attempt at competing in an individual sport: cross country running in the Public School system. He's eight years old.

My son has always struggled physically. He's not physically handicapped but he has other emotional struggles that have limited him in the past. He has always lagged behind with his fine motor skills and is even surpassed by some things that his four-year old sister can do. As his father who loves him, I have fiercely tried to help him overcome these limitations.

He's active but not a "jock." He's not a sports-oriented kid by any means. He's played soccer and it was a struggle. Mostly he doesn't participate in the games and is overwhelmed by the whole thing, but he happened to be on three teams that won A or B-side trophies so he felt proud and happy about the experience. 

Cycling is something that got into him at an early age, long before his dad could even get on a bike, so it wasn't me who influenced him. He runs around a lot, but not for sustained periods. In fact, he used to skip or hop involuntarily after taking only a few strides while running. This slowed him down in his soccer games. His coordination has been very slow to develop but it's coming along.

Even as a fat kid I had a whole lot of fun playing unorganized sports when I was a kid. I was no jock either but I had fun. In a world where obesity seems like an unstoppable epidemic, I want to encourage my kids to embrace an active lifestyle for the rest of their lives.

I started my son training about a month or so before his first race. I put him on the treadmill at home which he's used before, but mostly because he's seen me using it. He'd walk fast and hop every few steps involuntarily. It was unnatural and a little bit concerning. He loved looking at the numbers and seeing how far and how fast he was going. That continued into our training.

I got him to jog at a speed that prevented him from hopping every few steps. The treadmill forced him to keep going in a continuous, fluid motion. His heart and lungs could more than keep up at that speed. Soon he was asking me if it was time to do his training each day. He made charts to put on the wall to track his progress and even set goals for himself. I'm so proud of him.

Quickly, the hopping disappeared and he was getting faster and faster, covering the 1.2 KM distance of the race. He started running 1.2 KM at 10 minutes and 40 seconds. As he progressed, he pushed himself further to beat his "record" times. And he did, shaving 30 seconds or more off when he tried hard. I told him that you try to shave one or two seconds off when you're doing this sort of thing but he proved me wrong time and time again.

His last training session on the treadmill came in at 6:12. When we started, I had hoped he'd get down to 7:30. In the qualifying race he came in 14th and got to go onto the final race of fifty kids. We never dreamed he'd do that well. In his final race he came in 23rd. We call him the 23 fastest eight year old in the city. Had he shaved another 20 seconds off, he'd be the fastest. It's been surreal, especially since the kid couldn't even run properly when we started.

Even now he doesn't hold his arms up in a punching like motion when he runs. Instead, he flails them around randomly. We worked on this a bit at the end and made some progress. But it illustrates how physical things don't come naturally to him.

So what have I learned?

It was an astonishingly wonderful gift to watch my son's body and technique improve the way it did in a few weeks. And it was hardly work for him. The kid barely broke a sweat. 

Even in the last week, I could see his heart and lungs getting undeniably stronger from the training he did the week before. He could do far more at the same breathing level than he did a few days earlier. An eight year old's body can repair itself and strengthen really fast. A night's sleep does the trick.

I've seen this progress in myself, measured by constant heart-rate monitoring. But to see it happen before your eyes in a person you love is beyond description.

It reinforces the notion that you are the master of your body. You can change your body and it is ready to change for you. 

Running, I hope, will be a part of my son's life until the day he dies. He needs it, not only to stay healthy physically, but for all the psychological benefits it will bring him as well.

My Life-long Love Affair With The Bicycle

The closest relationships are built on trust.

My new-to-me bike passed the hug test last night. I've been fixing it up after buying a few weeks ago but something came over me when I was putting it away. It was a feeling of fondness that you don't have for an object normally. It got me to wondering.

Near the beginning of my fitness quest when I dusted off my other (road) bike after ten years of being hauled around the country and stored in garages, it was like getting re-acquainted with an old friend, a close friend.

Looking at and touching that bike as I inspected it brought back a flood of memories. We had been through a lot together and covered a lot of miles, some far from the security of home. I realized that I trusted that bike. I know it sounds odd, but there's something about the bonding of rider and bicycle that creates an emotional relationship between man and machine.

It's something about knowing what it can do, when it can do it and how it relates to what you can and cannot do. Knowing it won't break down and, most importantly, knowing the positive emotions you've experienced in it's presence. I've always enjoyed bike riding, it's instilled in my DNA.

It's one more punishing sadness about my 10+ year decent into the abyss of obesity.

Does Nike Ad Exploit Obese Boy?

From the Globe and Mail:

"Twelve-year-old Nathan Sorrell jogs down a country road. He’s 5-foot-3 and weighs 200 pounds. He nears the camera, panting. (video link) 

“Greatness is not some rare DNA strand. We’re all capable of it,” a voice intones in the video, an ad for Nike that ran during the Olympics, purporting to highlight everyday feats of greatness."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/does-this-nike-ad-exploit-an-obese-boy/article4479445/

No, not in my mind. If someone is improving their health and inspires others, I can't see the fault. Millions of people see these ads during the Olympics and I can't help but think even if one obese kid was inspired to do something, or have hope, it's a good thing regardless if the actor is actually jogging in his own life or not.

I Might As Well Blame My Mother -- It's Her Fault

I might as well blame my mother for my poor health. My closer friends often encourage me to blame her for things because they know the stories, they know my history with her. It's not functional and it certainly isn't brief so I won't jump into it here. But in addition to all the unhealthy things that I endured growing up, both emotionally and psychologically, there was also a lot of negative things going on when I was learning how to eat.

My mother was a nurse from the World War II era who was and is always concerned what people think of her. Dr. Phil could write a book on her. I wish he would.

I was born a few weeks premature and underweight. The nurses let my mother take me home just shy of five pounds because she was a nurse who should know how to take care of me. Well, that was an error in their judgement. She fed me Pablum the night she got me home so she could fatten me up.

Doctors and scientists know that eating solid food early in life can lead to obesity but even back then it was not something you did the first night home from the hospital. Nor was I breast fed, more common back then but now we know bottle feeding is another factor in your chances of becoming obese. I'm no expert but I read the occasional newspaper.

Needless to say, my mother wanted me fat, anything else was a sign of her personal failure. Even now she criticizes me for having skinny children. I'm thankful my children are of a normal weight. I consider it a minor miracle considering the bad habits that endure with me. And my kids are in no way skin and bones, they're perfectly healthy.

My mother, the nurse, even poo-pooed my wife's breast feeding of our kids every now and again. Our kids were breast fed beyond the two years they now recommend (it's not exclusive, obviously, after they start eating solid foods.)  I hope my kids get a good start in life.

My mother is now 86 and she isn't involved much with my kids, partly because I'm the black sheep of the family and partly because she's getting too old. But she revels--I mean really revels--in feeding them. She takes delight with every spoonful she can get into them. She erroneously thinks I never feed them junk food or meat and as a result she's convinced they're starving.

I was reminded of all this yesterday when I brought my three-year old daughter to my mother's home at lunch time. My mother made scrambled eggs and toast for both me and my daughter. I buttered my own toast and I was criticized for the 'small' amount I put on it. I'm a man who likes far more margarine on his toast than any reasonable individual yet it wasn't good enough for her. "That's all you're putting on? This is good margarine, one of the best there is..."

Don't worry, she'll be dead any day now. She eats a lot of bacon.

You learn early how to eat and you acquire your lifelong tastes for food before the age of five, some say before the age of three. My toast habits have lived with me for 45 years and it's a hard habit to change but if I can piss off  my mother, I must have made some progress.

I Felt Like I Was a 1000 Pounds in Grade School

Stop thinking that purple shirt and red tie wasn't stylish. I cruised right into the disco era when it peaked in grade six.

I was at an assembly at my son's school today and could see all the kids spread out before me. My first impression was, "Boy, there sure are lots of fat kids." My second impression was, "The fat kids are really overweight."

When I was in grade school I was considered the fat kid. There might have been one or sometimes two other kids in the class that classmates referred to as overweight, but I felt really, really fat. As I got older and looked back at old photos, the images don't match my memories. Some years I could barely be considered "big boned" for crying out loud. I was certainly not obese, no one in my school was that I can remember. But there's all kinds of kids who are obese now.

Some of these kids must be approaching twice the body weight of their peers. If they're like this now, at age nine, ten and eleven, what are they going to be like when they hit adulthood and sit behind a desk all day? They need intervention at as early an age as possible. I can't help but think that it's already too late for these kids. I see misery and hardship before them.

If I had to speculate on what I saw today, I'd say the poorer kids are more likely to be the ones with weight problems. I think statistics back that up. So why is that? I know they always say fatty food is cheaper but I have to think it has more to do with the parents' education and dedication to their children's upbringing.

But what do I know? All I know is that there are a lot more kids with weight problems than there were when I was a kid and being a kid with a weight problem isn't that much fun. I can say that with great authority.

Why Seeing Obese Children Bothers Me

I get bothered when I see overweight children, particularly bothered, I presume, because I know what it was like to be them. Instinctively, I want to blame the parents even though I have no way of knowing if they voluntarily contributed to the problem.

Research has long been talked about in newspapers and on television programs that show maternal obesity and smoking are risk factors for childhood obesity. But what I always imagine in my mind is parents being stupid and feeding their children excess calories and abandoning them in front of TV sets and video games.

When I became a parent eight years ago, I wanted to know things about parenting. Most people nowadays pick up a book or two to prepare themselves to be better parents to their children than their parents were to them. It wasn't hard to come across information that doctors and researchers believe calorie-laden beverages, including fruit juices, are not a good idea for children to consume on a regular basis. I occasionally see toddlers sucking on a Coke and it's as disconcerting a sight to me as seeing a pregnant woman smoking.

I desperately want my kids not to be overweight. For starters, it's a health issue but it's also the psychological aspect. And for me it's not the school yard taunting that most people assume happens to fat kids because that didn't happen very much to me and when it did, I wasn't traumatized by it. I guess it's more the feeling left behind and the prejudices that come with being overweight.

My father smoked until I was five and then had a heart attack that scared him straight. Most of the next fifteen  years I lived in fear of him dying until he did when I was twenty. Smoking likely contributed to his early death and during his last fifteen years he begged his kids not to smoke. None of us three boys ever did. For years I refused to even pretend to smoke as an actor. I refused to put a real cigarette to my mouth, in honour of my father.

So my parental issue is obesity and I am adamant about not contributing negatively to my children's health. So far so good, but it's been challenging. We have spent far too much time at fast food restaurants or eating prepared and processed foods. I do, however, allow my kids to be active and encourage outdoor activity without stressing about unreasonable fears for their safety.

I take it quite personally when I see an obese child. I think to myself, rightly or wrongly, "Well that kid is screwed." and I think that the parents let her or him down. I know it's a very negative reaction but it's how I react.

My mother did things that could have affected my obesity yet it's not really possible to know if she should be blamed completely. She was a nurse who was and is always worried about what other people think of her. I was born several weeks early and they let her bring me home from the hospital before I reached five pounds because she was a nurse. The first night at home, she fed me solid food so I'd gain weight and she wouldn't look incompetent to her co-workers. That's a no-no and they knew that back then but my mother began trying to fatten me up from day one.

She also didn't breast feed me, which was more common back then but now we know it reduces the risk of obesity and is helpful in so many other ways. In fact recent studies show that it is beneficial for mothers to breast feed as long as they can. Two years and beyond is a good target from what I keep reading.

My mother insisted on feeding and feeding me. A thin child was a sickly and embarrassing child. Even now she complains about how fat I am in one breath and then complains how my children aren't eating enough in the next. She's 85, sure, but she should know better.

I'm particularly bothered when I see very overweight toddlers. There are several overweight kids in my daughter's preschool that aren't even five years old yet. One girl has the appearance of having breasts because she's so overweight. I would guess that some kids weigh almost twice as much as others of the same height. If they have this problem now, it's only gong to get worse when they become adults and their activity level slows down.

There was a story in the news recently of a child being taken away from their parents due to the parents clearly being at fault for the child's poor diet. I hate to see any kid have to face this disease if it's not necessary. We need more education and more support for parents. Giving a tax break for putting your kid in hockey isn't going to solve the problem.

Overweight, Male and Having to Be Shirtless

Not me.

I've been blogging in some form or other since 1997, mostly for an audience of my friends. I've explored everything from bowel movements to public nudity, but this is the one post I kinda wish my friends wouldn't read. I've finally found a line that is difficult for me to cross. But for some reason, it's easier to tell strangers.

One of the most difficult pieces of writing I've done was telling the story of being diagnosed with chronic anxiety and realizing I suffered from it all my life. Because it gets into the stigma of mental illness, I feel like some friendships haven't quite been the same since. Yet, I have no regrets. Disclosing everything is what I do.

Some things, however, are embarrassing to admit. But today an overweight man confessed to me that he'd like to take up swimming as his much-needed physical activity but was afraid of the embarrassment. I decided then that this blog post was long overdue.

I have suffered tremendous anxiety over the issue of taking off my shirt in public over most of my life and have missed out on a great, great deal of things because of it. And I remember vividly the moment it started.

I was somewhere between the age of six and eight years old. It was a hot summer day and my best friend came over to play as he did almost every day. We were already inseparable friends for life at that point. We decided to play under the sprinkler or go in a paddling pool (I can't remember which.) He went home, got his bathing suit and returned. After he rang the door bell I showed up at the back door in my bathing suit and he laughed at me. I was starting to become overweight for the first time in my life and he had said something about me starting to grow breasts.

A switch went off in me. I said calmly, "I don't want to swim today" and I closed the door, changed into my clothes and we played something else. I'm not sure I swam in public again in public as a kid. Maybe a time or two at the beach with my dad but I was very self-conscious.

In grade eight I signed up for the wrestling team, coached by the same friend who was now in high school (I had to repeat grade two.) At the weigh-in, people laughed when 200 (pounds) showed up on the scale. I was nearly six feet tall and I wasn't that much overweight. I was fine with the whole school knowing I had hit a landmark weight that no one else had reached. I was told I would have to compete in a rare weight class.

I could train for wrestling with my shirt on so I was fine but I knew when the completion day came, I would have to take off my shirt. I was consumed with this for every waking moment of my life leading up to the competition. When the day finally came and I was tagged to get into the ring, I wasn't sure I was going to do it. But I took off my shirt and a great weight lifted from my shoulders. I had done what I had spent too much time dreading. Turns out I got dropped on my head moments into my match by a strong giant of a young man, but hey, I had faced shirtlessness and competed as an athlete for the first and last time in my life.

I got a second place ribbon because there were only two people in the city in that weight group. I still have it to this day and it's a source of pride. I'd like to tell you that I got over the issue then, but I did not.

I signed up for optional gym classes in high school but dreaded--really dreaded--days when "shirts" played "skins" in sports. I don't know if the teachers sensed my anxiety but I managed to somehow avoid being on the skins team dozens of times. The couple of times I was on the skins team, I was paralysed by embarrassment and anxiety. No fun was had.

Then came the most shameful episode of shirtlessness. When my gym teacher announced we'd be going swimming for two months of weekly classes, my insides almost fell onto the floor. I started jogging on my own time trying desperately to lose weight but without any education on the matter. I had no idea what I was doing and it was impossible too lose very much weight in a short period of time anyway.

I skipped the swimming classes, one at a time. It was easy to skip gym class. The teachers rarely reported you. But I knew I had to show up for class eventually, there were just too many swimming outings to miss. I came up with a plan at the last second, and out of all the stupid things I've done in my life, this was right up there. I decided to manually rip the inseam in my bathing suit at lunch time and claim I couldn't swim that day when I was already at the pool. No one would catch on, I thought. They did. My George Costanza-like  plan fooled no one. I was deeply ashamed and decided to swim anyway with a ripped and revealing bathing suit, tense body and arms folded over my fatty bits.

Of course, I always really liked being in water. Almost all kids do. A lifetime of excuses and anxiety over shirtlessness entailed. I'm not the only one. The internet is full of stories like mine.

When my wife and I bought our first house, I got the idea to save up for a steel above ground pool. I was freelancing at the time and had the opportunity to take on extra work. I worked for 60-80 hours or more every week for several months so I could buy a pool. In the end I spent several thousand dollars on it including a heater.

I remember the early summer day when it was ready to enter. Walking into the crystal clear, luxuriously-warm water sent waves of happy childhood memories through me. And the realization of all that had been lost in my life.

Vices: Chips and Dip

This is the first post in a series about the foods that got me into trouble over the years. I hope to explain my relationship with these foods so I can better understand why I binged on them.

I can't remember the first time I ate chips and dip but I imagine it may have been at one of the many parties my parents and the three neighbours they had on their short street hosted. It was the seventies when I was a kid and neighbours liked to party with neighbours.

There were lots of New Year's Eve parties, wedding anniversaries and "it's a hot night, you should come over" parties. Many of them included chips and dip as the central, if not only snack. Perhaps I associate chips and dip with happiness, happy people, or, more likely, happy parents. But that's a whole other blog post, or a whole other blog. Or perhaps a book I have yet to write.

Philadelphia cream cheese dips by Kraft were all the rage. Onion was my favourite, but just about any flavour got my happy-endorphins flowing when the creamy paste hit my taste buds. A salty, fatty potato chip alone is enough to make that happen, adding a creamy high-fat dip to the mix became drug-like.

Chips and dip eventually found its way into our home on non-party occasions. It may have been used as a treat for me when I was left alone, babysat by my older brothers. Or on Christmas Day and other holidays as a family treat, often consumed mostly by me. It became my favourite "food" in the whole world.

Soon I devised ways to get this heavenly treat all by myself by taking in pop bottles for refunds or convincing my parents to buy it at the grocery store every once in a while.

Both my parents worked and my neighbours were very close to my family so I'd spend a lot of time with them. One evening, when over playing with another kid, I was treated to home-made chip dip, made with whipped cream cheese, a splash of milk and chopped onions from the garden. I had never tasted anything so good. The kid whose mother made it got to use her fingers to clean out the bowl at the end. I was envious.

This image looks to me as a favorite drink might to an alcoholic.

I quickly moved to making my own dips based on this recipe, sometimes with onion but mostly without any added flavouring. When I could get my hands on a block of cream cheese and a bag of potato chips, and had the house to myself, it was a party of one. It was an intimate, sensuous session of freedom and gluttony. I was probably only nine years old but the recipe and the habit has followed me to this day. I've even decided as recently as a couple years ago that chips and dip would make a fine meal to be consumed alone in my car in a grocery store parking lot.

I usually serve chips and dip when entertaining. In the last decade I've combined flavoured cream cheese such a chive and onion with a little milk and whipped it up with an electric mixer, sometimes adding a little sour cream or mayo. It's very good and without exception has received rave reviews from my guests. You can't go wrong serving chips and dip, I always say.

Yet I somehow rarely allowed myself to have chips and dip in the last fifteen years. If I was entertaining, that was one exception, or if I was at someone else's house. But, like Peanut Buster Parfaits at DQ and chocolate milkshakes, it was forbidden by me. Still, so many other things weren't that should have been. I'll talk about those in future posts in the coming weeks and months.

But a kid whipping up his own chip dip and consuming the whole thing by himself with a large bag of potato chips was a kid destined to be an obese adult.

The 12-Year-Old Me Went Biking with My Son

Not actually us but it's strangely close.

I'm still reflecting on the bike ride I had with my son last night on one of the last warm evenings of summer. I asked him recently if he had any other goals or things he wanted to do before the summer ended. He thought about it and said, "I want to ride our bikes to Grandma's." He informed me it was only half the distance of our big 18 KM bike path bike ride a week or so ago. I checked it out on Google Maps and the kid was right (9 KM one way.) He knows his geography, that boy.

This was his first time in traffic. Mine too, in my latest cycling rebirth. It says a lot about how far I've come in two month. I was completely comfortable riding in public. And two months ago I was chasing my son, sucking wind. Nowadays the little bugger has to keep up with me (which is hard for the poor little guy.)

The bike ride was flawless and relaxed. No pushing hard to beat the sun or oncoming storms. It was leisurely, stress-free and fun. It reminded me of when I was about eleven or twelve years old, a time when I broke free from the constraints of my neighbourhood and started exploring the city, often on warm summer evenings. It was during that time that I really fell in love with cycling.

Last night those old childhood cycling feelings of freedom and joy were rekindled. My inner child who adored cycling got to go for a bike ride with my beloved boy, Aiden, who also adores cycling, even before he knew his daddy was capable of it.