Me and My Calories

A short while back I had to go through a bit of a wringer in the form of a hospital rotation. I worked for 3.5 weeks at Madigan Army Medical Center, partially to maintain currency as a medic, but mostly as part of my civilian education. At the same time I was doing 11 credits of college coursework online, and preparing for a deployment with my unit. During one of those weeks I clocked 100 hours at work!

I noticed a strange thing during that time, and in the months since. I did not have time to work out, but I kept eating as I always did and my weight went up. It crept up from 210-ish, to 215, then 220, and finally topped off at 225 right before I deployed. More interestingly still, it did not spontaneously drop on its own!

Now, I have always despised dieting. I have never needed it before. When I was 19 in Korea, I used to order a 21 inch, 6 topping meat lover’s pizza and a dozen wings from Anthony’s Pizza on post, eat the whole thing in one sitting, and then go out and run six miles the next morning like it was nothing. I did this every weekend, and never weighed more than 205.

Now at 28, almost 29, I do not have that ability anymore. Ironically, I would not for anything in the world go back to being the 19 year old me. 19-year-old Ryan was a bit of an idiot.

However, now I have to think about things realistically. I have diabetes, hypertension and high-cholesterol on both sides of my family, with a tendency towards overweightness I get from my mother’s side. My fiancée keeps insisting that I am not allowed to die at 55 or 60. Additionally, I have always been active, and I enjoy being active. I like to be able to run up a mountain to see the view at the top, I like to be able to pick up heavy things without breaking my back, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be caught in a tight spot and not be able to give a good account of myself without passing out from exhaustion. All this to say, I have had it easy up to now, but from here on out if I want to be healthy and active for the long haul, I am going to have to pay for it.

So I have started counting calories. L

It isn’t as bad as all that. Wouldn’t you know, there is an app for that! I simply type in what I eat, use the drop down menu to select the closest match, and all the calories and most of the nutritional data are added for me. If it has a US barcode I can scan that, but not many things in the Philippines come with US barcodes. I guesstimate a lot. I can also add my workouts, and that gives me a ballpark of how many calories I am burning. Having used it for a month now I have gone from 225 to 220, while also bulking up quite a bit from heavy lifting. It is neither as difficult nor as time consuming as I thought it would be. The only downside is the hit to my pride, but as my mother would say, a little “humbilification” never hurt anyone.

There are two things I have learned from it so far. As Aristotle would say, errors come in pairs. On the one hand it would be very easy for me just to let it slide a little here and there and eat a little bit, and not plug it into the app, as if I was fooling anyone but myself, but in the end my body doesn’t lie. It either is a lean, strong 215, or it is not. The iPhone does not control that.

On the other hand, it is also easy for me to get obsessed with things, and start looking at food as simply numbers, just nourishment to be shoveled into my mouth. It’s like budgeting money. I can become obsessed with budgeting to the point where I become stingy.

As with everything, this has a spiritual dimension as well. The old monks used to practice asceticism in food by eating only enough to maintain life, but denying themselves any pleasures of the sense by eating not one scrap more, and denying themselves anything tastier than dry bread, bitter herbs, gruel and so forth.

There was a touch of Manicheaism among some of those practices. The notorious contempt for the body and physical creation so often caricatured was more of a remnant of old pagan notions than an authentic Christian tradition. However there is some truth in their philosophy. The body should master food, and not be mastered by it. (I am not talking about fasting. I am talking about establishing a baseline daily diet that is mastered by reason.) The idea of a daily calorie and nutritional allotment is a way of tailoring their spiritual discipline to my personal vocation. I eat enough to maintain my bodily health and strength, and then I say “No.”

On the other hand it is also true that the pleasure of eating is a legitimate gift of God which we ought to take care not to despise on the grounds that it is “unspiritual.” We may choose to give it up for a time, short or long, but, I think it should only be because we hope to receive a greater gift. This is why the Church calendar revolves around both fasts and feasts. But we are a Resurrection people, so the feasts outnumber the fasts.

So I find it is best if I maintain two simple rules:

1)   Eat tasty food. Do not sacrifice taste for quantity, i.e. go by the “I can eat as much as I want as long as it tastes like cardboard” mentality. Instead I look at it as a spiritual exercise. I eat good tasting food, I enjoy it as much as I can, and try to glorify God in my enjoyment of it.

2)   Just like with my financial budget, it is important deliberately to blow the budget once in a while. Once a week I have a day, usually the Sunday, where I celebrate by eating whatever I like (although still within moderation for spiritual reasons.) When I get back to the states I will still be throwing pizza parties, and I will still be making my pizza with all the verve and pizzazz I can muster, serving the best beer I can afford, and rejoicing in the magnificent prodigality of gifts God has given me.

On the whole, so far it seems to be a sensible and maintainable habit to build. We will see how I modify it as time goes on.

“So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:32

HHS Health Reform Strategy: Two Scenarios

There has been a huge hue and cry in the Catholic blogosphere recently in reference to the White House’s recent statement that there will be no broadening of the conscience clause in the Health Care reform bill. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and many other religious organizations in America have been lobbying for this broadening since the bill was passed, and this month, three days before the National March for life in Washington, the White House stated that “This group (Faith based institutions) will ultimately have to offer female employees cost-free contraception, just like others across the country.”


This was not at all what those faith based institutions were hoping for. In a somewhat insulting nod to these organizations, the White House is allowing them an additional year to comply. This is not an acknowledgement of the conscience issue, but to allow more time for administrative changes that will need to be made. “We know that a lot of these organizations may be large organizations, there are approval processes that require the approval of boards,” an administration official told reporters on a call this afternoon. “The transitional period responds to those concerns.”

Unfortunately, these were never actually concerns. This is not a question of “an approval process” as if the implication were that “boards” just need enough time to argue about it before finally bowing to the mandate of Washington.

The uproar has been considerable, though not as widespread as the response to the SOPA bill. Catholic bloggers and bishops, not-for-profit organizations and media personalities have been firing back. I cannot say anything that they have not already said.

I am interested, though, in the Administration’s point of view. What is the end game here? It was a bold strategy, not only the decision to ignore the principles of the largest religious body on the planet, but to drop the ultimatum three days before the largest gathering of Catholics in one place in America. Coincidence? I’ll just say, competent strategists don’t allow coincidences like that. If the timing was not taken into account it was sheer incompetence. If it was, then what on earth was the strategy?

You see, only an idiot goes into battle without knowing his enemy. While there are varying levels of competence in Washington, I’m not ready to believe that the architects of this bill are idiots. They went into battle, and they had to know how the Catholics were going to react. This isn’t an administrative policy we are talking about here, this is a matter of moral principle. The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception is a matter of history, and She has been before now the single voice in the world condemning the contraceptive culture. We made it through the 60’s without changing that for crying out loud. There is no excuse for ignorance about the Church’s position on this topic. Therefore, there is no possibility of compromise. We literally cannot give in to this law. It would be like forcing Jewish businesses to sell Kosher Bacon.

So I have no choice but to believe that at the very least the Administration knew that there was going to be an uproar. Perhaps they underestimated how rapid and loud it would be, but they took it into account in the decision making process. What part did it play?

I can think of two possible strategies that account for this blatant aggression. The first, and I think the most likely, is ideological. Perhaps the President and his advisors really believe that contraception and abortion are so obviously mainstream healthcare, that anyone who does not provide them shouldn’t be in healthcare anyway. An analogy would be someone who did not believe in prescribing antibiotics and refused to do so on moral grounds. Such a person has a right to believe that, but no hospital in America would hire them. They would not be allowed to practice as a physician, and rightly so. I think it is possible that Obama and his cronies are so in love with the idea of contraception that they have deluded themselves into thinking that contraceptives are on the same level as antibiotics and other routine, life-saving interventions. The rhetoric of “reproductive rights” might well have tricked its authors.

If this is the case then the move to engage in open warfare, as it were, was seen as a calculated risk. They think they are right to force people to take care of their employee’s health and welfare (their view), and they are counting on popular support and even more popular apathy to wear down religious resistance over time. In this scenario they expect to hunker down, weather the storm and keep up an endless stream of propaganda. It will blow over eventually and they will get their way.

The second scenario is more sinister, and I think less likely. In this scenario the motives are not ideological but pragmatic. They don’t give a damn about reproductive rights or contraception or any of that. What they do want is power. The Catholic Church, by Her nature, is always a possible threat to the power of the State, because She claims divine authority to resist laws it deems unjust. In this view the goal is to hamper the freedoms of this institution, consolidating power for the State. What you need for that is to do two things, simultaneously: First, you need to isolate and weaken the institution’s base of support among the population. Second, you need to create the opportunity to take action against that institution in such a way that it will be perceived as legitimate. To accomplish these you need an issue which will be at the same time odious to the institution in question and widely popular among the rest of the population.

So in this scenario this particular issue is not the issue. Instead it is simply a weapon. The goal is to draw intense, outspoken, and hopefully hot-headed or even inflammatory response from the Church, which can then be construed as backward, selfish and intolerant. The Church is forcing her beliefs on employees who do not even share the same beliefs! The hope then is that when the inevitable confrontation occurs, whether the Catholic institutions try to continue operating in defiance of the law, or close their doors, any government action can be presented as preventing the Church from imposing Her ideas on other people. No one will come to our aid in any effective way.

I don’t think this is the scenario, because it means that the Administration thinks the Church is weak enough that they can get away with it. You don’t deliberately provoke an all-out power struggle until you are certain you have the tactical advantage. I don’t think we are at that stage yet. In fact, if anything can bring out a little fight in us, this is it. But in the short term, motives matter very little. In either scenario the crux of the matter remains the same. The side that sways the people will win, and if Obama has proved adept at anything, it is influencing the people. People will point to his crashing polls, but the mystery is not that they have crashed so far, but that they have not bottomed out. The man can spin a yarn, and people listen. This is the most dangerous quality he possesses and we must not underestimate it.

In any revolution or counter-revolution, the propaganda war is the real war. The human terrain is the only terrain that matters.

Punching Bag Woes

So this is a complaining post. I’m complaining about the fact that there are no good punching bags in any of the gyms I’ve been in on Fort Bragg, and I’ve been in most of them.

I’m serious, this is an issue to me.

You would think, on a military installation a punching bag, in fact, multiple punching bags, would be standard equipment. They had one hanging up in the student gym at the medic school, but it was pretty worthless. It was one of the kind that hangs up on the metal frame with the two support pipes running to the floor on either side of it. Perfect for breaking your foot on if you do a round house kick just a little off target. It needed to be weighed down with several hundred pounds worth of weight plates just to keep it flying across the floor. But it was better than nothing. Then the cadre got angry at us for denting the floor by dropping weights on it so the closed the gym to students and it became the cadre gym.

So then I brought my own personal punching bag in and hung it up in the quad by the barracks. It was a perfect set up. Alas, there was a small cut on one surface of the bag, and with too many people abusing it and not using it properly and constant exposure to the elements, it ripped open. I took it down planning on repairing it, but the Sergeant Major had it thrown away because it was an “eye-sore”. My punching bag! The one that I paid good money for.

A gym just across the street came to my rescue, though, They opened up a boxing room and a grappling room. The grappling room is a 20’ x 20’padded room with good quality matts, and the boxing room had six short bags and two long bags hanging from two stands. As soon as I saw the stands, I knew they wouldn’t last long. Each stand consisted of a single steel post going straight up into the air and branching into a four sided frame. It stood on a 12” x 12” metal plate, held in place by four bolts into the concrete. The leverage was so obviously too great for the bolts that I couldn’t believe anyone had seriously paid money for it. Some fat civilian contractor who has never thrown a punch in his (or her) life probably okayed that purchase. At any rate I used the heck out of it for about a month and a half before the kicking accumulated, and then came the one kick so hard that the bolts ripped clean out of the concrete. After that the gym took down the bag stands and has not responded to any of my inquiries about when they will replace them. The people at the desk tell me I should, “Take it up with the committee.” Something about budgeting. Please! They have the bags. I’ll go down to Lowes and pick up all the stuff I need to hang them so that they will never break, and it would cost me about fifty bucks.

I bought another punching bag and hung it up again in the quad, and I did a lot of good training on it. Then somebody took it down while I was on clinical rotation, and I have no idea what happened to it. Probably another “barracks cleanup”. How by any stretch of the imagination does a punching bag constitute a non-military appearance? A barracks without a decent punching bag is the disgrace, in my opinion.

The gym tried to set up a punching bag stand with a water filled base, but I kicked the top off of it with my third kick. It was a lousy design.

Now they have fallen back on the muscle guy dummies. These are not as good as a bag for hitting because of two flaws. The rubber they are made out of is too soft, and if you hit them too hard they fall over and you have to pick them back up again. Still, better than nothing.

So yesterday I threw 800 punches on one of those dummies. My left hand is a little bloodied. The space between the knuckles of my pointer and middle fingers blistered and ripped, and I got a small rip on the knuckle of my pinky. That’s the problem with punching rubber, it creates more friction, and my left hand wasn’t ready for it, but my right hand is still like a rock.

I sometimes say that the perfect fitness program requires very little equipment. At a minimum you need something to lift, something to hang from, and something to hit. Of those three, hitting things is possibly the most satisfying. There is just something about a solid, perfectly placed punch that pleases me. Deep down inside I enjoy it. When every muscle and bone in my body works together as a single unit, all contracting, twisting, tightening and cracking like a whip, in perfect cooperation as fast as you could blink, and the whole force and weight of my 210 lbs smacks into the leather focused behind the point of a single knuckle, it’s just satisfying. It really is. You have to experience it to understand it.

But it is important to me, both as an esoteric exercise and as a practical skill. I firmly believe that every man needs to know how to throw a proper punch at a bare minimum. How much more every soldier? Can you, then, explain to me why a punching bag is not a standard fixture in every barracks in the army?

I can’t.