Mental role-play
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough.” William Blake, Proverbs of Hell.
6th Feb – Days to go on 100 days dry: 65. Days until the Dartmoor Way: 98
There is so much information available to you these days. I cannot remember how I learned things before the advent of the internet. At school, when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, I won a prize for a project I did on the industrial revolution. I can still remember the black cardboard binder, with string bindings, about a hundred pages of handwriting, hand drawn diagrams and a huge sticky label on which I had drawn the Clifton suspension bridge as cover art. It was a huge document.
I am not harking back to the ‘good old days’ in any way. I am sitting here at my desk, having completed the first draft of a competitor analysis, wondering what I would do, what people did do, before the internet.
The reason for this curmudgeonly trip to the run down area of the nostalgia docklands is that there is so much information available at the push of a button. The challenge is how to tell the wheat from the crap. (Mixing metaphors is apparently called a ‘malaphore’, which I didn’t know, and I should have, since I use them all the time.)
I have been a little overwhelmed by the volume of information that these various apps and devices have been throwing at me over the last month. Never being the sort of person who likes to take things at face value, I have been looking up the terms that I either didn’t know or have never heard of.
As I have said in a previous post, visceral fat is the one that caused the most intense reaction. It sounds like something from a Stephen King novel. But is in fact the fat that encases your vital organs. There shouldn’t be that much of it. I have it in abundance. It is a big health risk.
So, down the rabbit hole I went, looking into how to get visceral fat under control leads me to understand that exercise alone won’t do enough. You need to get your basal metabolic rate up, increase production of some hormones, whilst keeping others to a minimum. The adage that you build muscle in the gym and lose weight in the kitchen keeps coming up. The ease in which your body assimilates fat, carbohydrate and protein takes increasingly more energy, in that order. Eat protein, avoid seed oils, fats, specifically medium chain triglycerides and drastically cut back your daily carbohydrate intake.
After an hour of trying to make sense of this my head was spinning. I can see why a lot of people get obsessed over this, I can see why a lot of other people make a lot of money out of this.
So, I stopped looking. I mean, I have a degree in chemistry, so a passing knowledge of some of the terms being bandied about, but honestly. And how much of it is based on peer reviewed research? How reliable is this info? How many diets are fronted by supermodels? Why are the fitness videos on YouTube all hosted by Mr. Universe?
Enough!
So, I am simplifying my mental intake, along with my diet and exercise. Last night was salmon and veggies. Tasty, filling and supremely better than a lamb kebab. Still no alcohol, up to 4 litres of water a day and exercise a big part of my week. Everything in moderation, including moderation itself.
I say this because next weekend, a small group of us are getting together for a day of playing the Alien table-top RPG.
There will be pizza!
“Hey. What the hell are we supposed to use, Man? Harsh Language?” Private First Class, Ricco Frost, Aliens.
