Dear Lord, bless our bodies with enough daily exercise

It was about 6 years ago that I noticed strange striation marks on the inner side of my thighs. They stretched from the buttocks and radiated down the thighs, resembling a network of ditches. They didn’t hurt but I sure was self-conscious about them. At first, I ignored them, but they just kept spreading and spreading, slowly creeping downwards over the course of years. I admit I got a bit freaked out and so I did what any sensible hypochondriac would do: I googled my symptoms.

As it turns out, striations are mostly a sign of weight gain. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was gaining weight on a steady basis. Since I was mostly sitting at home, I found myself vegetating in front of a PC day in, day out. When I started making money, I began gorging on candy, ice cream and potato chips as a way to celebrate the completion of a project. As a result, I found my gut ballooning and none of my pants would fit anymore. I finally went to the local pharmacy to weigh myself and the number told me all I needed to know: 91 kilogram at 180 cm high, which was at the edge of obesity.

Rapid response

Since then, two years have passed. My initial reaction was to radically change my diet and start running on a daily basis. I considered carbs to be the main culprit, so I stopped eating bread completely and switched over to chicken drumsticks. It worked: I lost almost 10 kilograms, but it all came back when I went to visit my aunt in Germany, who simply couldn’t stop offering me pasta and bread.

This was my first ever foray into the world of dieting. I truly realized how difficult it is to plan ahead and buy enough meat for 3-4 meals in advance. Without a supply of chicken drumsticks, i found myself gradually reverting back to my old ways and eating whatever junk was within reach. This is the biggest problem for anyone wanting to lose weight: abundance of junk food in our lives.

The reaction of my younger brother and my father was a singular one, and they roundly mocked me for trying to improve my health. Even though my father has a bulging gut that weighs him down tremendously, he never missed a chance to snicker whenever I would lift up my shirt to show my progress. He would still rather that I never become a better person than him. I guess it gives us solace when there are others in a similar or worse situation than we are.

Going into steady waters

Eventually, I started relaxing and no longer consider weight as such a big deal. As it turns out, about 50% of body weight is water, and it cycles on a constant basis. When your body starts retaining water, you’ll temporarily gain weight. If you happen to weigh yourself at the peak of one such cycle, you’ll start panicking and thinking of contrived ways to lose that weight, but it will simply come off naturally. For example, if you skip a meal or two, your body will release the excess water it would normally use in digestion of that food. But, as soon as you start eating again, the water weight will return.

A much better way to measure your actual weight is to pay attention to your waist. If you can measure your waist at the bellybutton over months or years, you’ll have a pretty good idea if your diet is going the right way. Also, you can try walking or running over a certain distance and measure your time. Compare your times and you’ll know if you’re fit, which is a much better way to look at things. Instead of focusing on weight as a negative number that must be reduced at all costs, simply focus on positive numbers that can be increased, such as your running/walking distance or split time.

“Why am I so fat?”

Body fat is a necessary part of our lives. Simply put, our bodies evolved over millions of years to survive, and that meant scrounging for every last calorie that could be eaten and storing it for as long as possible. For the internal accountant in your brain, body fat is the most wonderful thing in the world, because more fat means a greater chance at survival. But, that same fat weighs you down and slows down your metabolism.

You simply cannot get rid of fat by wishing it away; you have to roll up your sleeves and start moving. This might mean walking, running, swimming, playing basketball or whatever other activity comes in naturally in your life. An important tip I can give you is to do it for free, so as to avoid putting too much expectations on yourself. Simply go out and move in a way that feels great. When done over months or years, you’ll build muscle mass and they will start burning that fat, one molecule at a time. Not only that, but you’ll also feel amazing.

Being a positive role model

A thing I found that works for me is to go visit the local school’s basketball court and shoot some hoops. I’d bring some local kids with me and we’d actually have plenty of chilled fun just throwing the ball around. Hours simply fly by, believe it or not. Everything that I’ve learned on the basketball court so far has been a life lesson in a nutshell. I’d miss 20 shots in a row but I wouldn’t give up as a I normally do. Instead, I’d keep trying until I succeeded, which mostly meant just relaxing and not thinking about the outcome that much.

The kids love playing with me and pester me all day long to go to the court again. If you too can find a group to do your exercise with, that’s great. So, to recap: don’t fret about your weight, do exercise and find some youngsters and be their role model. Now that’s an exercise plan worth your weight in gold!

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Dietary supplements as ways to fortify your health

A few years ago, I started experiencing leg cramps during sleep. I’d wake up with one of my calves hard as rock and unable to extend that leg. I’d writhe in pain for 20-30 seconds before the cramp subsided, but couldn’t figure what was causing the problem or how to fix it. When I asked my friend about it, he suggested to try taking more magnesium. I bought a 1-kilo bag of Nigari Salt from a local pharmacy, took a teaspoon of it daily and the leg cramps went away. That’s when I started looking into other supplements.

As it turns out, the majority of things peddled in pharmacies is useless garbage. It will probably not harm you, but that’s the extent of its benefits on your body. Effervescent pills in particular are just bubbly drinks meant for children and containing trace amounts of vitamins and minerals, and even then in forms the body can’t use properly. But there are some hidden gems in pharmacies as well, such as potassium iodide.

A word to the wise

Before we get into the topic proper, a few words of warning. The topic of supplements is a contentious one, since they have a gradual effect on the body and nobody can tell if they’re working or not except the person taking them, who might be too invested or experience a placebo effect. As a consequence, plenty of people push their supplements with exotic ingredients that are classified as “dietary supplements”, meaning they aren’t proven to work at all while those who bought into the hype buy them. This blog post isn’t meant for either one of those people.

In this post, I’d like to talk about the essential supplements, which is those containing minerals and vitamins that we know our bodies need. This includes things such as magnesium, which you need about 300 mg a day and potassium, which you need about 10 times the sodium you ingest or more. So, no Kratom and magical dietary fat-burning supplements.

“Meh, your body works just fine”

The medical standpoint on supplements can be handily summed up as the above headline. They aren’t considered medically relevant and a physician will never prescribe vitamins and minerals as a way to heal your body. There is a potent insight behind this: mainstream medicine considers anything that isn’t surgery or antibiotics irrelevant.

Furthermore, for doctors chronic pain isn’t that big of a deal, and neither are tiny nuisances, such as split nails or hair falling out. You can find a doctor to prescribe you medicine for any of those things, but those medicines will never be supplements. So, from a medical standpoint, we’re on our own. But just how much minerals and vitamins do we need?

The holy trinity of balance

From what I remember reading in high school, there is a mechanism called “Na-K pump” that helps our body push stuff through cell walls. So, if you lack sodium (Na), there will be the same imbalance as if you lack potassium (K). But, if you ingest salt and something like bananas in 1:10 ratio, the body will keep what it needs and dump the rest. You see, the two keep one another in check and this seems to be the case with all other minerals, such as calcium and magnesium. Simply taking calcium will actually cause you a lot of harm in the long run since the body can’t balance the excess on a daily basis.

My intuition tells me this is what the concept of “Holy Trinity” was hinting at: two substances act on one another in the presence of a third one as a catalyst. In any case, for us as supplement takers this means we should aim to take comprehensive vitamin and mineral sources, and the problem is, food hasn’t been one for decades.

Intensive farming is the ruin of us all

If you’re interested to know more about the causes of our poor nutrition, I suggest you research “intensive farming”. Essentially, that means the food we eat is grown as a monoculture on a massive scale, which depletes the ground of micronutrients and minerals various plants put into it. Our ancestors knew that crops needed to be rotated or the soil will go barren but today’s agricultural wisdom simply says to dump tons of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and fertilizers and you’re good to go.

In fact, the definition of “weed” is “plant you don’t want on that particular plot”. If you’re growing corn and a perfectly healthy apple tree grows on that parcel, it’s weed the same as a stalk of healthy, edible corn growing in your apple orchard. You see what I’m aiming at? The crops we eat should be combined and rotated around to maintain the soil balance and let the plants absorb in various micronutrients that we need on a daily basis. Instead, crops are standardized, controlled and simply grown to look pretty and taste sweet. Seeing a shiny red apple without a single spot on its skin is all the average consumer needs before gladly buying it, regardless of its nutritional value. Apple is a better choice than Fig Newtons, but it’s still not a perfect one.

Choosing the right supplement

Now you understand that commercially grown food might be tasty and spotless, but be fairly empty of nutrients. Sure, you’ll get calories, but the idea is to ingest an abundance of nutrients with a minimum of calories on a daily basis to avoid weight gain. After investigating for myself, I settled on Duovit tablets for men, produced by Slovenian Krka, containing:

I wasn’t able to find an international link for purchasing these tablets, but you should take a gander in your local pharmacy and find something that fits this description as close as possible. In any case, they cost 9 BAM (about $5) for a bottle of thirty pills, lasting for a month when taken one per day. It’s a low-cost investment that might soothe a chronic condition or prevent one from flaring up, so if you can afford it, feel free to try it out.

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