Today I Learned...

This is the story of a woman carrying a fetus that was self-evidently non-viable, but still had a heartbeat. The heartbeat is used as the definition of life for the purpose of Chicago laws. Right now, this means that she had to listen to a doctor explain what abortion was and sign consent forms 24 hours in advance, and that her insurance carrying wouldn't cover it. If abortion was banned, or only allowed for dead fetuses, or only in cases of imminent deadly threat to the mother,* she would have had to carry a dying fetus inside her until she spontaneously miscarried or went into labor. This could have left her infertile, or killed her. If it did none of those things, she would still have to carry around a reminder of the child she wasn't going to have, fake happiness for strangers or share an intensely personal story, and suffer the usual risks of pregnancy.

Individual pro-lifers may not want this to happen, but the laws they advocate predictably lead to this result. They can either admit that this is an acceptable cost to them, or they can advocate for something else.

My whole life, I've had issues with inflammation. Joint pain, inflexibility, allergies, dental pain, weak immune system. Treating my hypoadrenia helped, but we have reached the point where that is not the problem, or at least the old cure (cortisol supplements) will do more harm than good. So we're going to try diet, specifically the To Quiet Inflammation diet. Honestly, the description and testimonials look sort of crazy, and I'm suspicious of anything that assumes the modern American aesthetic ideal for body fat is healthy, especially given that all the evidence points to exactly the opposite. But someone I really respect said several people she respects had a lot of success with it, and I've exhausted the stock of things I thought were good ideas, and five weeks is a reasonable amount of time for the potential payoff. Even if it doesn't work, I can see the denial being an interesting spiritual exercise. So I'm giving it a shot.

TQI has some principles you have to follow forever, but kicks off with an even more stringent elimination diet. I do not like my chances starting off with the strictest form of the diet, so I'm introducing phase 0, where I learn to cook according to the forever-rules, so that when I have to cut out a bunch of delicious, delicious foods, I will at least be able to feed myself.

So my goals for now through Halloween are:

• breakfast is 1/2-2/3 produce, with the remainder being made up with protein. No grains.
  
• I am debating following the "no additional sweets" rule for breakfast, because I think honey is good for me.
  
• Stop eating several hours before bed. I do this one naturally unless I badly screw something up. This may mean planning workouts better.
  
• At least one meal a day where I'm not doing anything else while I eat.
  

Martial arts, like every other sport, yelled at me to "commit" to it a lot. Committing simultaneously a completely undefined concept and something everyone knows when they see it. I really want to dissect it until I prove it isn't real, but I also know damn well that committed more to jumping kicks than I did to the same kick on the ground, and was more awesome at them even when you remove the awesomeness of jumping, so I am forced to conceded that commitment is probably actually a thing. A frustrating nebulous thing that it is not helpful for people to yell at you about, but a thing.

I think I have finally figured it out, and it's all thanks to toddlers and tiaras.

Compare



Apparently you can't embed and mark time, but skip to 29:00, 30:05, 31:00, 32:15 to watch them in rough order of increasing commitment. These girls simultaneously are not good at dancing, not committing to the movement, and don't want to be there.



This girl, Eden, is an excellent dancer and is having fun or reasonably good at faking it. She's far more fluid than the girls in the candy pageant. And yet, she's not quite there.

Then there's Madison.


(skip to 32s)

Madison fucking owns it.


A couple of key differences:

• She looks genuinely thrilled to be there, the entire time. More impressive when you saw how miserable she was backstage.
  
• Madison's motions are much, much bigger than everyone else's- even the girl doing the backflips (Eden is somewhere inbetween).
  
• Madison clearly believes she has all the time in the world for each movement (see especially the thumbs up around 1:30).
  
• Madison's much, much more fluid between movements (Eden starts fluid but gets increasingly stilted as time passes, even though her smile gets bigger).
  
• She's much more fluid across her body within movements. Compare Madison's shoulder shakes (1:38) with the girl in the Mickey Mouse dress in the first video (29:15), or Eden's at 0:28. She's getting way more movement with way less muscle because the movement is transferring through other muscles rather than being stopped by them.
  

I think the muscle thing is key. Committing is when you set up the initial movement and then just let it flow, rather than making constant course corrections. This explains why little kids are not nearly as good at committing as you would think, given their total lack of shame: they're still sort of crap at using muscles. Every agrees that fluid, committed motions look better than precise but rigid ones, so why don't people commit every time?

Because you look like an idiot.

Take a look at this guy, who I actually thought was pretty good when I watched it through the lens of commitment, but the judges absolutely crucify for having the audacity to audition.


So this is pretty much the physical manifestation of the punishment for presumption. You had so much confidence in your initial motion you didn't feel the need to correct it, and you were wrong and you much be punished. This is maybe what I was getting at with this post. Confident fat people do better than unconfident fat people, but fat people are punished way more for perceived-unmerited confidence than otherwise identical thin people would be.

I'm about halfway through Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters by Courtney E. Martin, and mostly it's great. It captured the appearance-related bind my generation has trapped itself in really extraordinarily well. But there's something that's bugging me.

Any time the author talks about exercise, it's always "running on a treadmill", and it's always negative, often contrasted with what a truly liberated girl would be doing. This is disappointing on several levels. I present to you this list of reasons someone might run on a treadmill that are unrelated to appearance

• Endorphin high
  
• Non-endorphin related enjoyment
  
• Stress relief
  
• Rehab after an injury
  
• Cardiovascular health
  
• Numerous other weight-independent health benefits
  
• Trying to get weight down before an athletic event
  
• Trying to up aerobic capacity in service of a job or sport
  
• Trying to up aerobic capacity because aerobic capacity is awesome
  
• It helps them think about things
  
• Induction of a medidative state
  
• Warming up before an activity that is risky to do cold.
  

and if you expand this to anything that could be theoretically classified as exercise:

• Self defense
  
• building muscles because they are useful
  
• Building muscles because they are awesome
  
• Being part of a team working together to achieve a concrete goal
  
• Experiencing parts of nature that are far away from roads
  
• Confidence building
  
• Sheer enjoyment
  
• All her friends were doing it
  
• etc
  

Which is not to say that these are all good or healthy things (Hugo Schwyzer has a great article up today about how he replaced cutting with running) or that these reasons have never been used as excuses by someone who, in their heart of hearts, was really motivated by a desire to look thinner. Or that treadmills are the best way to achieve any of these goals (I find the elliptical a pareto improvement). But there are excellent reasons to work out, even on the dreaded treadmill, and sentences like "Men prefer a woman who takes an improv class over one who spends all day on the treadmill" seem to encourage the worst kind of female competition for male attention. In a book that's all about recognizing interalized external pressure, that's really disappointing.

One of the nice things about Warrior Girls is it's a rare chance to hear girls complain about how much weight they lost during an injury. They're complaining about losing muscle, not fat, but number-on-scale means muscle to them, and that's awesome.

In semi-related news, I had to put back a shirt at goodwill because while I otherwise looked awesome in it, the sleeve was cutting into my bicep.

When the HPV vaccine came out, a lot of religious nutjobs opposed it because if we don't let God punish sluts with cancer, how will they get their comeuppance? Knowing that not all of us view sex as a capital offense, some of them phrased some of their objections as questions about the medical value of the vaccine. And so another group of people said "fuck you, sex is awesome and even if it wasn't, cancer is bad. we're going to promote this vaccine like woah." Many years later, I heard rumors the manufacturer had suppressed some evidence of adverse effects, which were possibly more frequent than seen in other vaccines. Any attempt to investigate this was drowned out by proponents so used to hearing bullshit criticism come from people who wanted to control women. Now, I don't know if the story of excess adverse effects is true or not (and I got the vaccine myself), but it's certainly a good story illustrating how you can get so used to tuning out the voices of your clearly wrong opponents that you miss legitimate criticisms.

My current book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports suggests that the same thing is happening with girls' and women's sports. As Hugo Schwyzer says, any book with the phrase "protecting our daughters" in the title is suspect, but the author, Michael Sokolove, really does seem to care about women's and especially girl's sports for the value it brings the participants, and simply wants to make these incredibly valuable activities not perform the equivalent of bringing down a hammer on the knee of one girl in twenty.

I'm of the opinion that even if there were no environmental effects, the range of men's behavior would differ from that of women's behavior. I'm still opposed to gender essentialism because humans are unbelievably varied and the fact that a trait is highly predictive for a group doesn't mean it's useful for predicting the behavior of an individual. But this fact was brought up mostly by people who didn't want girls to play sports because they thought it was bad for their uteruses, so the pro-sports people got used to tuning it out. Now, my personal opinion is that our training programs for high school athletes are abominable for both genders and aren't based on the slightest bit of research, but it appears to be even worse for girls than for boys, judging by rate of injury**, and this needs to be worked on. And while I think the training programs for male and female athletes, I think our pursuit of a one-size-fits-all approach is really part of the problem, and we need to focus more on how to teach kids to distinguish good pain from bad pain, how to track what exercises are most productive for them, and to respect the limits of their body.***

Meanwhile, there's the sexualization of female high school athletes.**** For years I assumed that the cheerleader bikini car wash was made up by hollywood and/or porn. The first time I saw one for real, I went apoplectic. I'm assuming I don't need to explain to any of you why this is bad, or why it was bad to illustrate the story with a picture of what a sexualized high school athlete might look like*****, so please just join me in being angry.

*while I have to work for every pound of gain. Bastards.

**I'm only a few pages in, the statistics given were for soccer, where girls have 8x the risk of ACL tears. If you count cheerleading as a sport, and you should, the discrepancy is worse, because they get no padding while risking considerably worse impact than football players.

***Which would have all kinds of side benefits too.

****I'm a bigger fan of this Schwyzer's blog than his officially published work- one of the reasons I don't do a lot of editing here, possibly too little, is that I've seen several bloggers I really like get more professional gigs and polish everything interesting out of their work. This article is saying valuable things, so I'm glad it was published, but it doesn't have the same sense of watching someone learn that his blog does.

*****I'm annoyed by the trend of including an on-theme but zero-information picture along with articles and blogs in general, but this one in particular.