Body Flux
Changing my exercise regimen yet again. I suppose at some point I have to recognize that part of the fun of exercising is mixing it up, making changes. Part of me would just like to do the same thing all the time, forever and ever, actually. I definitely have a facet of my personality that embraces habit to the nth degree. But I think it's important for me to see exercise as something that I enjoy for various reasons, something that I enjoy for the long-term effects (i.e. health), but also because of the intrinsic joy it can bring (i.e. the good feelings during a workout). Another facet of enjoying exercise can be the planning/listmaking/goalsetting/goal achieving involved.

My goal has never been to 'loose weight'. From the outset that just seemed like the wrong sort of goal to set; it buys into the various unhealthy attitudes about the body that I want to avoid. Which is not to say that the goals I do have (to feel healthier, to be healthier, to enjoy my body more, to feel more attractive--this is not an exhaustive list!) can't be tied to 'losing weight'--but they can't be directly tied to it, and, in some cases, may be antithetical to it (i.e. I want to gain muscle mass, and gaining mass tends to mean gaining weight!).

The Way Things Have Shaped Up
For the first 8 or 9 months of my exercise changes, while I resisted the goal of 'losing weight', I embraced some effects that aren't unrelated to losing weight. Mostly I loved that my waistline was getting smaller. More holes in the ol' belt, and that felt good. It felt good for other reasons--I can breathe more easily, I'm more comfortable sitting at a desk for extended periods (though I fidget more now, I think, as a kind of weird exercise) and the like. I also was obviously losing fat in various parts of my body. My arms were showing more definition, my face was losing some of its fullness, my shoulders look more taut. My legs, which have always been sort of the region of my body that I was most happy with, became even more muscular and showed even more definition. My chest was getting slightly more definition, too, and losing a bit of fat.

And then recently I recognized how much time I was spending exercising, and started to feel a little bit strange about it--there were other things I wanted to do. Part of this is finally seeing light at the end of the breakup tunnel: When I first started exercising, part of the whole thing was to give myself something healthy to do, to keep my body and mind more occupied, so that I didn't dwell on the sadness as much. Now that I'm less sad, my interests are multiplying again, and exercising must be factored in among them more than it had to be before. So I compromised, decided to cut down on cardio a bit, do a little bit less on the weights, but keep the number of times a week I did things the same. I wasn't sure what effect this would have, as my body is just in a general state of flux all the time these days, what with changes in mood, diet and exercise.

Part of the effect is that I ended up just doing less exercising. Which isn't a bad thing necessarily. But then, my appetite began to grow again. Exercising, for me, seems to be the best sort of appetite suppressant, and more than that, it focuses me on eating more healthy--I tend to crave better stuff when I'm exercising, presumably because my body needs that stuff more when it's getting worked. So, combine less exercise and more eating, and what do you get? It's a pretty easy equation--the changes in my body began to slow, and my waist actually grew a little bit.

But even these changes aren't that simple. The whole time, I've been building muscle mass--and part of that has been in my abdomen. At least part of the gain in my waist has to do with this, I think. I've reached a point now where losing fat off my belly doesn't mean that my torso will get smaller--it might stay the same or even get bigger. And it will take a looooong time for definition to show in my abdomen, if it does at all. Different people carry most of their fat in different places, and that's where I carry mine. In fact, there's a way in which it might actually be unhealthy for my belly to lose enough fat to show much definition--it might mean that the rest of my body has less fat than it needs to have. And what I'm after is mainly health, so it's something to keep in mind.

Changes in the Making
So I do want to balance the various things I want to do in life, but I've come to realize something that is sort of suprising to me. I like exercising. At first I thought that maybe I was just trying to fool myself--the days where I decide to walk my bike up the hill after exercising for an hour and a half seemed to be evidence that I don't really like exercising: If I did like it, wouldn't I just do it all the time, whenever I can? And of course that's silly, and I'm srtarting to understand that the walking up the hill time simply reflects that I'm not as healthy as I'd like to be, and also reflects that there are different times to do different things. It does not mean, and I'm trying to keep this in mind, that my 'default' is to not be active. I'm figuring out that I don't think I really have a default, or that it can be changed through effort.

And keeping all that in mind changes how I decide to weigh (pun intended) my various options as far as what I like to do with my day. That is, for the first time in my life, really, I recognize that, sometimes, I want to exercise just as much if not more than I want to, say, read a book. Exercise is a priority. More importantly, I want it to be a priority. Which isn't to say that it's always the top priority--it clearly isn't, and I don't want it to be. But it's up there. And that's new for me.

Either/Or, and Identity
The either/or fallacy always creeps in here, and I begin to think that if I become more athletic, that I have to become less, say, academic. And there's some truth in that, in a way--if I were to always exercise instead of reading (which is infinitely rhetorical, because that would never happen, then it may be the case that things shift that significantly. But that's either/or thinking, and it doesn't match up with reality very well. In fact, if I increase exercise a bit, I may actually end up doing more reading. This is because these aren't my only two options--and that exercising more might actually cut out some other options. I'm less likely to sit and watch a movie, for instance, when I've been more active. I'm more likely to read, or to play guitar, etc.

And the thing is: I can be both a thinker and athletic (to various degrees!). Why is it that I have to keep reminding myself of that? The nonexistent dichotomies have grown some deep roots, that's for sure.
Filed under:Health and Philosophy

Personal Responsibility
It's always difficult to know what to do when you hear somebody who you consider an ally to your cause using arguments that you would call bullshit on if offered by those in an opposing camp. If this happens in a small circle of friends, no problem, because usually you can point out the possible problem without people thinking you are trying to undermine their point--friends know that you may very well agree with their point and just not like how they got there.

But in larger social and political situations, it's tougher. You might explicitly state that you agree with the conclusion and not with how it was arrived at, but it still might, to some people, undermine the point.

An example is happening over on Feministe right now--in my mind, people are oversimplifying personal responsibility regarding rape in a way that they wouldn't want to oversimplify personal responsibility when it comes to, say, the number of female CEO's of big corporations (pointing to the glass ceiling) or to the skewed number of not-white people caught up in the US justice system (pointing to the racism). I took some time to formulate a position in a comment there--check it out if you're interested, because I think it's an interesting discussion (with or without my comment!).


Filed under:Feminism and Philosophy

Personal Responsibility or, The Ex-Libertarian
Had an interesting conversation with my neighbor the other day. I haven't talked to the guy very much, but it had been pointed out to me in the past that he's a die-hard libertarian. Now, knowing that isn't enough to size the guy up, really, because there are lots of different flavors of libertarian. Still, I knew it would be an interesting conversation to a point, if things got down to politics at all. Which, of course, they always do.

He's an interesting guy, actually--a study in blind spots and apparent contradictions--though I may have been projecting. He is a really devout libertarian, to the point that he is angry that his taxes help pay for the public education of other peoples' children and such. He believes in getting rid of all gun laws. That sort of thing. And yet, he was for a very long time a member of the machinists' union, a strong union. Presumably he gained quite a bit from being part of that union (in a good way, to me...but to him? hard to tell).

We argued for a while about particulars, but then I tried to delve into his underlying conception of reality. For him, he repeated again and again, it all comes down to individual, personal responsibility. When I tried to get him to elaborate on that, of course, it was difficult for him to say why he believed that, and what it meant, exactly. But he did think it means that, no matter what situation you are born into, it's your responsibility to create your life, and nobody else's.

It's tough to argue agains positions that are this (in my mind) incoherent. Or at least it's tough to know where to start. I talked a lot about it being a black-or-white fallacy to think that responsibility (whatever we decide it means, exactly) for an act is either all mine or all "the world's". I wasn't able to get it across to him--when I talked about the way we are connected, he said that I was suffering from guilt about what I owed people. He might be right, as far as that goes, but that isn't the whole picture, by far.

Later on, I realized that I should have brought out my old staple I use against uber-libertarians when they go into the hyper-individuality shpeil: What about family? Parents, brothers, sisters and kids make poor libertarians, in part because of the often explicity connectedness that they find in their lives. But I also thought about this:

The idea of a person being completely, utterly responsible for everything that happens to her doesn't even make sense, logically. This is what I wished I had asked him:
--Are you responsible for everything you do?
A: Yep.
--Then you are responsible for what you do to other people?
A: Yep.
--So if you smack somebody else upside the head, who is responsible?

Now, he might respond that he was responsible for doing it and the other guy was responsible for getting hit--but I think that's dodgy, of course. The more clear answer (I think) is that both are responsible, to varying degrees, and those degrees might change depending on how we frame the situation (i.e. if I am goading him on to hit me, maybe I'm more responsible). The point being that it just doesn't make sense, in a world full of other agents, that I am the only one responsible, all the time, for whatever happens to me--because then the same can't be said for any agents that interact with other agents.

I'm really sure that would have convinced him. He would have said, "Oh, yeah, that makes more sense than the fact-avoiding bs that I'm spouting!"

Or not.

Still, Linus gets it:

Filed under:Comics as Life, Philosophy and
Politics