For any of us men who might be interested in educating ourselves about the role of men in twenty-first century America, the following collection of thoughts might well serve as a brief introduction, a teaser, if you will, to stimulate reflection. The first are quotes from the seminal book, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, by Robert Jensen (South End Press; Sep 1 2007):

We teach our boys that to be a man is to be tough, to be acquisitive, to be competitive, to be aggressive. We congratulate them when they make a tough hit on the football field that takes out an opponent. We honor them in parades when they return from slaughtering the enemy abroad. We put them on magazine covers when they destroy business competitors and make millions by putting people out of work. In short, we train boys to be cruel, to ignore the feelings of others, to be violent.

U.S. culture’s most-admired male heroes reflect those characteristics: They most often are men who take charge rather than seek consensus, seize power rather than look for ways to share it, and are willing to be violent to achieve their goals. Victory is sweet. Conquest gives a sense of power. And after closing the deal, the sweet sense of power lingers.

George W. Bush learned an unforgettable lesson about the anxious nature of masculinity in America when Newsweek tarred his father with the “wimp” charge, a perception Bush 41 never really overcame. The resolve never to be branded a wimp is the key to Dubya’s psychology: the you-talkin’-to-me? pugnacity and cock-of-the-walk swagger at press conferences; the cowboy bluster about getting Saddam dead or alive; the Top Gun posturing on the aircraft carrier, in a crotch-gripping flight suit that accentuated the Presidential Unit (leading G. Gordon Liddy to swoon — on Hardball, for Freud’s sake — “what a stud”).

Doesn’t all this chest-thumping machismo and locker-room homophobia protest a little too much? Paging Dr. Freud, pink courtesy phone: What can we say about a country so anxiously hypermasculine that it can give rise to Godmen, a muscular-Christianity movement that seeks to lure Real Men back to church with services that feature guys bending metal wrenches with their bare hands and leaders exulting, “Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!”

And this, from Sam Keen’s book, Fire in the Belly: On Being A Man (Bantam, 1991):

When men define themselves by power they are at once driven by the impossible desire to become replicas of omnipotent gods and are haunted by their repressed knowledge of their semipotence. By definition they are able to feel their manhood only when they have the ability to make things happen, only when they can exert control over events, over themselves, over women. Therefore they are condemned to be forever measuring themselves by something exterior to themselves, by the effects of their actions, by how much change they can implement, how much novelty they can introduce into the slowly evolving history of nature. I did it; I made it happen; I exist.

And, finally, this by Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War

Men make wars for many reasons, but one of the most recurring ones is to establish that they are, in fact, ‘real men.’ Warfare and aggressive masculinity have been, in other words, mutually reinforcing cultural enterprises.

Just a little something to think about…

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There’s a great scene (one of several, actually) in the movie The Right Stuff. Chuck Yeager, the Air Force test pilot who earlier in the movie had become the first man to travel faster than the speed of sound, was now test-flying a new fighter jet, the F-104 Starfighter, to determine its altitude ceiling and to possibly break the high-altitude record currently held by the Russians. The flight plan called for Yeager to climb as high as he could, using the jet’s afterburner until it’s fuel was exhausted. At that point he would shut down the main engine (to prevent overheating and to conserve fuel in the main tanks) then light off an auxiliary booster rocket which would provide the thrust for the remainder of the flight. Once that, too, was exhausted—hopefully at an altitude higher than any man had thus far traveled—Yeager was supposed to force the nose of the Starfighter over into a dive and hold it there until sufficient air was flowing through the main engine to permit an in-flight restart. Then he’d simply fly the jet back to base.

Yeager’s plane reaches 104,000 feet, still short of the record. Of course, Yeager is disappointed, but undaunted. He figures he’ll return to base and try again another day. But something goes wrong. The mechanism which is supposed to cause the nose of the aircraft to drop, and which will in turn allow critical airflow through the engine’s intake for restart, fails in the too-thin air of the upper atmosphere. The plane begins to fall in what is called a steady-state flat spin. The lack of airflow (the relative air is hitting the plane perpendicularly) renders the jet’s monstrous engine, as well as the various control systems which depend on it, useless.

As the plane falls, spinning around “like a length of pipe in the sky,” Yeager tries desperately to pull it out of the spin, to no avail. He finally ejects from the crippled plane after falling nearly 100,000 feet—only to be nearly killed when his ejection seat, still gushing flaming rocket propellant, crashes into him while he hangs in his parachute.

Yeager hits the ground, landing in desert mesquite, then manages to stand up, amazed he’s still alive. But he’s mightily injured, with third and second-degree burns to his face and one hand. Blood is caked in a baked mass over his left eye. Nevertheless, he starts walking, carrying his rolled-up parachute and his flight helmet. Soon he is on the runway of Edwards Air Force Base, from where he’d taken off just a short time earlier.

At the other end of the runway, a rescue vehicle with two men inside speeds toward Yeager, who walks resolutely out of a cloud of smoke and burning wreckage of airplane (a little Hollywood embellishment). The driver of the vehicle points through the windscreen. “Sir,” he says, “is that a man?” “You’re damn right, it is!” says the other rescuer.

Okay, it’s a long story with a short punch line, but the gist of the episode is this: Chuck Yeager is a real man. And he proves this unequivocally in the film by having the balls to ride a shuddering hunk of metal into the nether reaches of the atmosphere, thence to survive the return to earth when everything goes to hell in a hand basket and tries to take him with it. It’s a great story. I remember cheering at the end of the movie. And while I drove back that night from Fresno, California down to the Lemoore Naval Air Station, where I was myself actively pursuing a career in flying as a carrier jet pilot, I couldn’t help feeling just a little smug, being a part of that same small community of “real men.”

Alas, $#!+ happens. (What was that saying from the Bible—”pride goeth before a fall?”) Less than a year later, I found myself suddenly, permanently, “out of the cockpit.” The reasons don’t matter, at least for now. What did matter was how it affected me. I was angry, of course. But I was also scared. The way I saw it, I’d been stripped of a critical facet of my identity: my manhood. The sense of loss was palpable, almost physical. When I finally said goodbye to the Navy several months later and drove away to a non-flying future in the civilian world, I felt as if I’d been told to check my balls at the gate. I’d no longer be needing them.

The obvious question that was forming in my mind, and which I would carry with me unanswered for the next twenty-five years, was this: if, as I seemed to believe, I was no longer a real man, then what was I? What, exactly, is a real man? And, finally, how does an otherwise ordinary male achieve that illustrious state?

More to come. I welcome your comments here, and in the forum.

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Chronic Neck Pain — Ouch!

I have some great neck pain exercises, including herniated disk exercises and even TMJ neck pain exercises which, if you do them religiously, will amaze you in their effectiveness. I’ll get to them shortly. But first, a little background on my own story and how I came to discover this “Pain Free” program.

It started several years ago as the vague sensation in my neck that it needed “cracking”. You know what I mean: the way a person’s knuckles sometimes beg to be cracked, there’s a sort of tension in the joints that can only be alleviated by manipulating them. It’s why a trip to the chiropractor usually feels so good, the tension in your spine is released (the “crack” by the way is theorized to be the sudden release of nitrogen from surrounding fluids into the joint, via a process known as “cavitation.”) Anyway, the bones in my neck felt as if they were out of alignment. I also felt tension building in my neck muscles. Turning my head to one side and stretching my neck in the opposite direction usually resulted in a satisfying “snap”, and the tension would be relieved, things would seem to be pulled back into alignment. But as time went on, my neck seemed to require “cracking” more often, and the resulting release seemed to be less and less satisfying.

The tension grew into a burning pain which, finally, wouldn’t go away. For awhile, it was at least tolerable. But since I work as a freelance writer, spending many hours at a computer and keyboard, it wasn’t long before the pain began to affect my work (which, as it turns out, was exacerbating the pain; it was a vicious circle). I couldn’t sleep at night. The only position I could twist myself into for any sort of relief was with my right arm pulled tight behind my neck. After awhile, even that didn’t work.

I was becoming a walking zombie, and my writing had all but ceased. My wife begged me to see a doctor.

The Doctors Might Be Able To Help–Or Might Not

My doctor sent me to a specialist for an MRI, or magnetic resonance image, to take a picture of the inside of my neck. The MRI scanner was loud and frightening (you’re put into a very tight tunnel-like space; a difficult time for people like me who suffer from claustrophobia!). But I managed to survive the ordeal without becoming completely unglued.

A few agonizing days later, I went to my doctor to hear the results. The doctor looked at me grimly. “There are seven vertebrae in your neck,” she said to me, “separated from one another by doughnut-like cushions called disks. Six of your disks are herniated.” The doctor went on to explain that, when the vertebrae are chronically out of alignment, the disks can bulge out of position between the vertebrae. Bulged discs are called “herniated.” Herniated disks are dangerous–and extremely painful–when they press up against the spinal cord, which runs along channels through the vertebrae.

“You have a couple of options,” the doctor said. “We can inject a nerve-block into your neck, which might relieve the pain. We’ll have to do one of those every few months. They are, themselves, quite painful, and there is some risk to them.”

“What’s the other option?” I asked her.

“Surgery,” she said. “We go in and take out the disks and fuse the vertebrae together.” I knew a little about this procedure. It was dangerous–after all, the spinal cord was running through the vertebrae which would be fused! Additionally, since I would be losing most of the disks in my neck, I would have very little flexibility in my neck after the operation. I would also be shorter in height.

“There’s one complicating factor,” the doctor said. “You might not be able to find a surgeon willing to operate on so many vertebrae at one time. You could be looking at several operations over the next several years. And, of course, there’s no guarantee all of this will work.”

The doctor prescribed several medications for pain and sent me home to think about what I wanted to do. I was miserable, and depressed. And in pain.

A Third Option?

I went home and thought about my options, and decided that, doggone it, I wasn’t going to mess with either the nerve block injections or the surgery. Call me stubborn. But what did that leave me? The option of living in excruciating pain for the rest of my life? It didn’t take long to figure out that wasn’t an option either. I was becoming frantic.

And then I remembered a book I had bought a few years earlier when I was suffering from low back pain. It was called Pain Free, and was written by a physical therapist by the name of Pete Egoscue (pronounced e-GOSS-cue). I remembered I had been amazed by the results–I was, indeed, pain free in my lower back after following his simple exercise plan for just a few weeks. But did the book address neck pain? And, more importantly, would his program work for neck pain caused by herniated disks?

I pulled the book from the shelf and dusted it off, then browsed through it for a couple of minutes. Then I ran into this passage:

“In the clinic, the basic treatment we use for stiff necks or neck pain releases the neck from flexion by reengaging the load-bearing joints and posture muscles. Do these [five exercises] in the order presented.”

It seemed too simple. I didn’t have just a stiff neck. What about neck pain from herniated disks? I kept looking. Sure enough, all I had to do was go back a few pages to confirm that, indeed, Mr. Egoscue intended his exercises to alleviate ALL neck pain–and yes, even pain associated with herniated disks:

“The forward flexion of the body, which starts primarily in the hips because we sit so much, reverses the cervical curve [of the neck] from convex to concave. This shift brings the head out of vertical alignment….The disks, meanwhile, are under great stress; the conditions are in place for a stiff neck, neck pain, and damage to the cervical disks.”

I decided to give the routine a try. I certainly had nothing to lose. And if it didn’t work, well, there was always the surgery….

Not An Easy Program

I’m going to cut to the chase here: I followed the program—consisting of five exercises straight from Pain Free, plus an additional three exercises my wife Jeanie found for me while looking through the Egoscue web site–for about sixteen weeks. The bottom line? It worked! My cervical curve, which had become flattened, forcing nearly all of my cervical disks to become herniated, returned to its natural curved shape. The disk herniation was relieved enough to completely eliminate pressure on the spinal cord. And my pain disappeared completely. No spinal nerve block injections. No neck surgery.

I’m tempted to cry Miracle, Miracle! here, but the truth, as I see it, is actually more a matter of common sense: as Pete Egoscue emphasizes time and time again in his book, bones follow muscles. Not the other way around. If you want to realign your bones (as in my case, my cervical vertebrae), the only way to do it is by moving your muscles first. The bones will follow every time. And that is the simple philosophy behind the Egoscue Method of exercise.

But before you rush out and buy the book, there are a couple of caveats (three, actually) you need to be aware of. The first is this: the program is hard. I’m not kidding. Very hard. The exercises, themselves, are simple enough, and are not difficult—if you are not in pain. But since you’re likely to try this program because you are in pain, expect that it will hurt. A lot. You need to be prepared for that. The second caveat is: you’ll need to devote time for the exercises on a consistent basis. The group of eight exercises I performed took me on average about 45-60 minutes per day, every day. You can’t get around it: your body isn’t going to straighten itself out on its own; you’re going to have to be dedicated and diligent. And the third caveat: it’s going to take time. Depending on your degree of flexion, it’s quite possible this exercise program will take several weeks, even months to completely eliminate your pain. And you might as well know this right now: you’ll probably need to follow a maintenance schedule of at least a couple of performances per week, for the rest of your life.

Too much pain? Too much work? I’m not going to judge, I promise. What it all boils down to is what you can commit to. If you don’t have the time in your schedule, or you don’t deal well with protracted pain—and don’t mind losing flexibility in your neck and an inch or so in height–this program might not be for you. But if you want to eliminate your neck pain without surgery or drugs, then this just might be the ticket. And, likely, you’ll be tempted to think you’ve discovered a miracle too.

That said: let’s move on to the exercises. (As was previously stated, do these exercises in the order in which they are listed.)

Static Back Exercise

This is a great exercise and requires very little effort. Lie on your back with both legs bent 90-degrees at the knee and resting on a block, as illustrated, or on a chair seat. I use a flat coffee table. You can place your hands on the floor, palm up, or rest them on your stomach. All you have to do from this point is let your back settle into the floor on its own, and breathe from your diaphram (belly breathing). Hold this for five to ten minutes.

Gravity Drop Exercise

Wear tennis shoes (for traction), and stand on a stairstep as illustrated, with your heels off the step and hanging midair. Keep your feet parallel with one another, pointed straight ahead, and shoulder-width apart. They should be more than halfway off the step. Keep your knees straight (not bent) and let your weight stretch the posterior muscles of your legs. Hold this position for three minutes.

Static Wall Exercise

Lie on your back with your legs straight up against a wall as illustrated, hip-width apart. Get your butt as close to the wall as possible. Tighten your thighs, and point your toes back toward the floor (this will probably hurt a little). Try to keep your upper body relaxed. Hold this position for three to five minutes.

Sitting Floor Exercise

Sit against a wall, as illustrated, with your legs straight out, hip-width apart. Press your butt and your shoulder blades as close to the wall as possible. Tighten your thighs and flex your feet, pointing your toes back toward you. Rest your hands on top of your thighs, palm up. Hold for four to six minutes.

Frog Exercise

The final exercise is another of those “feel good” stretches, like the Static Back, that you don’t want to get up from. Lie on your back, as illustrated, with your feet pulled toward your torso and the soles of your feet together. Let your knees turn out, but make sure your feet are centered in the middle of your body. Relax into a comfortable stretch in the inner thighs and groin muscles. Hold for one minute.
More Exercises on Pete’s Website

There is a small bonus-routine of three exercises you can find on Pete Egoscue’s website. Click on the neck pain link in the panel on the left, and follow the on-screen instructions.

Suffer from TMJ? Pete has a routine of eight exercises just for temporomandibular joint disorder, requiring just fifteen minutes each morning. You can get details on Pete’s web site, or in the book, Pain Free, Chapter 11.

In fact, do yourself a favor, and buy the book, Pain Free. It’s cheap, compared to the alternative. And you’ll learn a lot about human anatomy you probably never knew. Then give the exercise routine a shot for a couple of weeks. If you’re diligent and follow the instructions correctly, you should begin to see improvement, a lessening of the pain. Maybe it will be enough to convince you that you can heal your neck pain without surgery or drugs. It was for me.

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I first joined the US Navy thirty years ago, while I was still a junior in college. The recruiter was happy to sign me up, but he was blunt about the rigors of the physical exam, which I was scheduled to undergo thirty days after I signed the enlistment papers. “If you don’t lose about twenty pounds,” he said, “you’ll never pass. My advice is to start cutting the calories and fat.” I fully intended to make the Navy a career, and the window of opportunity for the job specialty I wanted was closing fast. I certainly didn’t want to blow this chance over something as trivial as my weight. I took his suggestion seriously.

“Portion control” became my new mantra, as did “low fat” and “low calorie”. I dutifully threw out my loaded-with-sugar Raisin Bran, my five pound stash of sugar, the half gallon container of butter brickle ice cream, barely touched in the freezer, as well as the loaf of recently purchased white bread and the carton of whole milk I hadn’t even opened yet. Then we drove to the market and shopped carefully, looking for whole grain cereals without added sugar, honey, fresh vegetables, white-meat chicken, nonfat milk and margerine. Back at home, my wife-at-the-time dusted off a thousand-calorie-a-day diet she’d used periodically during her days as a college cheerleader, and handed it to me with a promise to help me stick with it.

By the end of the third day I was nearly incapacitated with hunger. I imagined I smelled doughnuts in the air anytime I ventured out of the house. My part-time job at the college, which was cooking mornings and evenings in the school cafeteria, became torture: I was preparing oatmeal, pancakes, fritters, bacon and toast in the mornings; enchiladas, spaghetti, and macaroni-and-cheese for dinner–most of which I wasn’t allowed to eat. I was miserable. I was hungry to the point I could barely concentrate on my studies.

Then, while I happened to be browsing the school bookstore, I ran across a book entitled “Dr. Atkins’s Diet Revolution.” The title intrigued me, and, curious, I began flipping casually through the pages. What I read there was, indeed, revolutionary—and thrilling: Calories didn’t count, I recalled reading. The real culprit in weight gain was carbohydrates. And the key to weight loss was limiting carbohydrates, while eating moderate amounts of fat and lots and lots of protein. My heartbeat quickened as I read how I could eat virtually unlimited amounts of red meat, pork, eggs, cheese, cream, and butter—as much as I could stuff into my face (I’m not sure it actually said that, but I remember thinking it had), and the pounds would literally melt off your body—as much as five to ten pounds a week! I nearly cried. Here, it seemed, was a new and exciting way to lose weight which didn’t involve starving! I bought the book, nearly shaking with anticipation as I handed the cashier the five bucks. I took the book home and devoured the entire thing that very day.

I got up from finishing the book, a man on a mission. While my bewildered wife watched, I cleared the pantry and refrigerator of the low-fat, low calorie garbage I’d been eating and threw it into the trashcan. Then we drove to the store. I bought everything I could find that was high protein and low carbohydrate. And over the next week I did exactly as the book (I thought) said I could: I stuffed myself with bacon and eggs in the morning, stacks of deli meats and cheeses for lunch, and broiled beef, chicken, or fish and fresh vegetables for dinner.

Amazingly, at the end of a week, I was even hungrier and more miserable than I had ever been on the low calorie, low fat regimen. How was this possible? I couldn’t stand Atkins. The thought of eating another rib eye steak nearly made me retch. I finally dismissed Atkins as a well-meaning quack, and his diet as just another stupid fad, like the banana-and-hot-dog diet I’d tried a couple of years earlier. I cleared my shelves of the high protein stuff, and loaded them up again with the low-cal, low fat things. It was easier, so much easier, I could eat pretty much anything I wanted as long as I limited the portions so that I stayed below my thousand-calories a day. I increased my exercise, and gutted it through the rest of the month. By the time I took my physical for the Navy, I was barely under my max weight. Relieved, I walked from the recruiting station and immediately went to a nearby diner and ordered a stack of pancakes and eggs with sausage and lots of warm syrup and melted butter, and ate myself into a sugar oblivion.

Fast forward twenty years. It’s now 1998. I’m now out of the Navy. But over the years I’ve watched my weight slowly crawl upward until I’m now embarrassed to look at myself in front of the mirror. And my blood pressure is starting to climb, too. It’s time to lose some weight.

Enter “Protein Power”

A friend and work associate asked me if I’d ever heard of a new diet program called Protein Power. I told her I hadn’t, and she handed me a paperback with a picture of a husband-and-wife medical team, Michael and Mary Dan Eades, surrounded by dozens of ordinary-looking, but apparently happy clients. “Give it a try,” she said. “I think you’ll be impressed.”

I took the book home and read it. It seemed to be based on the old Atkins diet, and I wasn’t particularly excited about getting back into that again. Still, the writing style was engaging, and more important, the book had extensive scientific research and clinical studies to back up the Drs Eades’s claim that, not only was low-carb, high protein eating the best way to lose weight and keep it off, it was the only style of eating appropriate for humans, period. Additionally, the book contained a section of sample menus,comprised of several recipes that looked downright delicious. I was psyched. I cleaned out my pantry and refrigerator, and drove immediately to the store to buy everything I could find that fit the low-carb regimen.

I was more successful with Protein Power than I had been with the Atkins diet. But after several weeks of struggling with low energy, bad breath, and a persistent craving for the high-carb foods I’d been used to eating for the past four decades, I finally abandoned it for the (I thought) more reasonable portion-control, low calorie approach. I was troubled about this for awhile: the Eadeses had, in my mind, demonstrated how much less healthy the low-cal, low-fat, high-carb diet was for humans. But it was just too damned difficult to do it their way. I simply turned away from the subject whenever it came to mind, until eventually I quit thinking about it altogether.

Fast forward another ten years. I was forty pounds heavier than my max ideal weight. My blood pressure was riding at the high end of the ohmygod section of the chart, and my feet were beginning to swell. I couldn’t seem to control my eating, often putting away an entire box of cereal or a pound of spaghetti in a single sitting. I looked in the mirror and saw a stuffed sausage shaped to look roughly like a human; certainly I don’t look anything like myself anymore. And my closet is filled with clothes I’ve officially dubbed my “fat boy” wardrobe.

I told myself I couldn’t do much to improve my situation. The source of my weight problem seemed rooted in my very genes. My mother had struggled with obesity much of her life, eventually developing Type 2 diabetes in her later years. And my uncle, my mother’s brother, had blood pressure so high he finally quit having it checked, it scared both him and the technicians measuring it. What could I do? The only remote possibility I could think of was to begin a serious and extreme exercise program. Unfortunately, my exercise of choice—running—had, over the years, begun having deleterious effects on my joints and my back, and I soon had to abandon it. It soon occurred to me that I would have to content myself with being fat. Like most people who feel helpless, I simply tried not to think too much about it. And in large part, I was successful.

But when my wife, whom I love more than life itself, began having many of the same health symptoms, I couldn’t ignore the situation any longer. We were both in our fifties. If we expected to live into our sixties, we needed to lose weight, and a lot of it. In fact, between the two of us, we had more than a hundred pounds to lose.

Enter Weight Watchers

Of course, we went with the easier low-calorie, low-fat, high-carbohydrate approach. This time, it was with Weight Watchers. The choice seemed logical at the time. WW had the highest documented success rate of any weight loss program in existence, ever. It was rated number one for weight loss programs in Consumer Reports. Best of all, they had recently developed what they called the Core Program, where we could eat as much as we wanted from a huge list of Core Foods! We jumped on the program, bought all the right foods (WW even had its own brand of desserts!), and stuck religiously to the program, tracking our progress on line.

In a matter of months, averaging the requisite two pounds per week, we’d shed pretty much most of our excess baggage. We went to the local mall and bought ourselves an entire “skinny person” wardrobe.

From the weight loss standpoint alone, we should have felt great. But there were little nagging problems that had me perplexed. Number one, my digestion didn’t seem to be working quite right: I had chronic constipation, coupled with a resultant case of—no surprise here—hemorrhoids. (Add to this the public embarrassment of an outrageous flatulence problem.) And, as I would discover later, while I’d lost a lot of weight, I had also lost a lot of lean muscle mass. But most troubling was the fact that I was still hungry much of the time. My wife and I would eat a huge breakfast at seven a.m., high in fiber (the only recommended treatment for constipation outside of a stool softener) and by ten a.m. we’d be ready for a large snack. We were eating five, sometimes six meals a day. Large meals.

ReEnter Protein Power, And The Low Carb Lifestyle

I finally had to start looking for some alternative remedies for my constipation issues. I hit the Internet, and came up with some interesting possibilities. Then I happened upon this startling item in Google:

“In the past year, I cut out most of the fiber from my diet (very few veggies, very little grain, etc.). Lo and behold, my constipation disappeared. This past year has been great.”

Two things interested me about this bit of text, which Google had apparently lifted from a forum. The first was the idea that constipation can actually be caused by too much fiber (Weight Watchers, along with ninety-percent of the nutritionists in the world prescribe more fiber and more water to relieve constipation. Additionally, Weight Watchers insists on ingesting huge quantities of fiber in its Core Program). The second thing that caught my attention was the source of the comment: Protein Power Forums. My good friends the Drs Eades, were still going strong. In fact, they’d written two more books expanding on the earlier work they’d done with Protein Power.

I felt suddenly as if I had come home after a long journey to the other side of the planet. And, just as suddenly, I felt as if a part of my brain which had been asleep for many years, had now awakened. I spent hours poring over the forum, as well as the individual blogs written by each of the Drs Eades. Questions I’d had years earlier, but which generally went unanswered (blogs and online forums were still fairly unknown to me back in 1998) were now there for me to view, asked by many others. And the Eadeses, along with many of the online Protein Power community, were offering solidly credible answers backed by solid science. The Eadeses had refined their original program to include new research conducted since I had last encountered Protein Power—much of which completely upends a lot of the earlier nutritional thought which has been the basis for our ideas about what constitutes “healthy” eating to this very day. Ideas which are still fundamental to many of the popular diet programs—including Weight Watchers.

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway) I couldn’t go back to eating on the Weight Watchers program. And after doing some independent research on her own, my wife joined me in pursuing the low carb lifestyle. We have been successful beyond our wildest dreams, enjoying better health now than we did back when we were very young adults.

But that isn’t to say it was easy.

The Difficulty–Carbohydrate Addiction

One of the questions I’ve had for much of my dieting life is this: Why is eating on a low carbohydrate program so hard in the beginning? If eating low-carb is so healthy for us (and there is now a considerable body of evidence showing this is the case), why do our bodies seem to resist it so vociferously?

The answer came to me via Dr Mike Eades’s blog. The title to one of his later posts pretty much says it all: Carbohydrates Are Addictive. Please take the time to look at this post, it is a real eye-opener. But to briefly summarize here: Dr Mike (as he’s affectionately referred to) came upon an article in Time Magazine, which reported on a study to determine if a high-fat, high-protein diet, eliminating carbohydrates, would have an effect on cancer. Apparently, this study had as its population a group of terminally-ill cancer patients who were offered this experimental therapy. All they had to do for the study (and, if the hypothesis was correct: to save their lives) was to eliminate carbs from their diet. Here’s a quote from the Time article:

“The good news is that for five patients who were able to endure three months of carb-free eating, the results were positive: the patients stayed alive, their physical condition stabilized or improved and their tumors slowed or stopped growing, or shrunk.”

But here’s the kicker, and the point of this post:

“[Some] dropped out because they found it hard to stick to the no-sweets diet: “We didn’t expect this to be such a big problem, but a considerable number of patients left the study because they were unable or unwilling to renounce soft drinks, chocolate and so on.”

Here is Dr. Mike’s comment on what this means exactly:

“Let me see if I’ve got this right. A lifesaving therapy is offered to patients who have undergone the misery of radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and surgery, and who are beyond hope, and this therapy requires nothing more than eating a lot of butter, meat, cream, cheese, etc. while avoiding most carbohydrates. And a considerable number” drop out because they can’t give up carbs?

I say it again. And you don’t think carbs are addictive?”

Of course they are. More, perhaps, than even nicotine, which was at one time considered the most addictive substance on the planet, more so than even heroin and cocaine. Not only has it been shown conclusively (thanks again to Dr Atkins’s research so long ago, finally proven accurate over thirty years after having first being ridiculed) that carbohydrates are, generally, the real culprit in weight gain, obesity, and adult-onset diabetes; but carbs have also been shown to be the real culprit behind the difficulties in restricting them from our diets. Our bodies have been tricked into believing we need carbohydrates. Lots of them. The more, the better. They’re a monkey that refuses to get off our backs.

Of course, I had a hard time embracing the low-carb lifestyle. How could I not? I was addicted to carbohydrates. And dealing with that addiction is probably not much different from an alcoholic dealing with his/her addiction to whiskey.

You work the program, one day at a time.

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Step One: Learn The True Meaning Of Love
I remember hearing an anecdote several years back about a famous Hollywood couple. My recollection is, they were Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, but I won’t swear to it. The story went thusly: Natalie apparently awoke one morning and looked over at her sleeping husband and realized she no longer knew who he was. “I had no feeling for him at all,” she was (as I recall) quoted as saying. The way Natalie saw it, the relationship was clearly over. She filed for divorce and, soon after, ran off with Warren Beatty.

The story, gossip-fueled or not, stuck with me over the years, not because of what I thought of Wagner and Wood (I happened to like them both, the rumors surrounding their tumultuous relationship notwithstanding), but because the basic tenet of this brief story–the experience of “falling out of love”–is a common refrain in relationships lasting more than, say, just a few months.

• She says: he’s not the exciting (or romantic) man I fell in love with; he spends too much time in front of the TV (or in the garage, or at work, or on the golf course); all we do is fight over finances (or child-rearing techniques or leaving the toilet seat up); he tells me he’ll change (spend more time at home, do the dishes once in awhile, make love to her more often), but he never does; sometimes I think I don’t love him anymore.

• He says: she’s changed; she nags me all the time, just like my mother; she’s not sexy anymore; she’s gotten fat (or old, or sick); we don’t see eye to eye on anything (raising the kids, frequency of sex, finances); the feeling is gone; I guess I’ve just fallen out of love with her.

The tragedy is that couples who might well have all the ingredients for a successful and satisfying marriage often split up because one or both of the partners has “fallen out of love” with the other one.

Well, here’s a shock, boys and girls: the truth is, you’re supposed to”fall out of love.”

Notice I’m not saying you are supposed to stop loving your spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, whatever. Because there is a world of difference between loving someone and being in love with that person, even if they seem to be closely related. In fact, I would go so far as to say, you can’t really begin the business of truly loving your partner until you’ve moved past being in love with him.

A brief aside here: I’m not referring to relationships which are physically or emotionally abusive or otherwise burdened with alcoholism, drug abuse, and the like. Those are matters which must addressed and eliminated first, for there is virtually no chance of building and maintaining a healthy relationship while any of these issues is a component of either partner’s life.

With that caveat, then, I will reiterate: you cannot begin to love your partner until you have moved past being in love with him. It is only then that you can make the conscious choice to love.

Wait a minute, I hear you say. We choose to love? How is this possible? I can’t just make myself feel something I don’t feel.

And you are exactly right. You can’t, as Bonnie Raitt laments, “make your heart feel something it won’t.” But here’s the good part: you don’t have to feel it. Why? Pay attention here, because understanding this point is perhaps the single most important key, if not the key, to having a healthy long term relationship: love is not a feeling. I’ll say it again: love is not a feeling.

Wait a minute, I can hear you protesting, of course love is a feeling. When I first met my wife, I was nearly exploding with feelings of love. There was excitement in the air, this feeling that I couldn’t live without her. I wanted to make love to her constantly, to spend every moment with her. And being without her was like– dying!

Indeed. But I would counter that what you were feeling wasn’t love at all, but rather a psychological phenomenon known as “ego boundary collapse.”

In his seminal work entitled The Road Less Traveled, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, M.D. offers this insight into the collapse of ego boundaries, and how it relates to what he calls “the myth of romantic love.”

…[People] know that they are individuals, confined to the boundaries of the flesh and the limits of their power…isolated from others by their individual identities, boundaries, and limits….It is lonely behind these boundaries….most of us feel our loneliness to be painful and yearn to escape from behind the walls of our individual identities to a condition in which we can be more unified with the world outside ourselves. The experience of falling in love allows us this escape–temporarily. The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an indvidual’s ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us as estatic. We and our beloved are one! Loneliness is no more!

[But sooner] or later, in response to the problems of daily living, individual will reasserts itself. He wants to have sex; she doesn’t. She wants to go to the movies; he doesn’t. He wants to put money in the bank; she wants a dishwasher….She doesn’t like his friends; he doesn’t like hers. So both of them, in the privacy of their hearts, begin to come to the sickening realization that they are not one with the beloved, that the beloved has and will continue to have his or her own desires, tastes, prejudices and timing different from the other’s. One by one, gradually or suddenly, the ego boundaries snap back into place; gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love. Once again they are two separate individuals. At this point they begin either to dissolve the ties of their relationship or to initiate the work of real loving.

Peck adds this sobering thought:

The unreality of these feelings when we have fallen in love is essentially the same as the unreality of the two-year-old who feels itself to be king of the family and the world with power unlimited.

From the above, I might point out that the state of being in love is not unlike being insane. Hence my earlier comment that one must move past the in love state in order to make the conscious (i.e., in possession of one’s mental faculties; not insane) decision to love someone.

I’ll say it again: love is not a feeling. But that isn’t to say you can’t feel a strong affection for the one you love. More on that later.

But for now, the question is begged: if love isn’t a feeling, then what is it?!?

Love is, as I’ve said above, a conscious choice. It is making the decision to love, as well as making a commitment to honor that decision. But Peck sums up the essence of love in two elegant words: work and courage.

Peck elaborates with this:

[The] definition of love implie[s] effort. When we extend ourselves, when we take an extra step or walk an extra mile, we do so in opposition to the inertia of laziness or the resistance of fear. Extension of ourselves or moving out against the inertia of laziness we call work. Moving out in the face of fear we call courage. Love, then, is a form of work or a form of courage. Specifically, it is work or courage directed toward the nurture of our own or another’s spiritual growth. We may work or exert courage in directions other than toward spiritual growth, and for this reason all work and all courage is not love. But since it requires the extension of ourselves, love is always either work or courage. If an act is not one of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions.

…and, finally, with this:

The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person’s growth. When we love ourselves we attend to our own growth. When we attend to someone we are caring for that person. The act of attending requires that we make the effort to set aside our existing preoccupations and actively shift our consciousness….By far the most common and important way in which we can exercise our attention is by listening.

I might summarize this first step by observing that the common mistake (as I see it) made by couples is confusing the in love state with the act of love. The former is merely a feature of the latter, in the same way enjoying the taste of a great hamburger is a feature of nourishing our bodies. We will continue to nourish our bodies even though we might eventually grow tired of hamburgers. We might, for instance, eat spaghetti. My point is that it is the eating–the nourishment of our bodies–that is important, not what it is we are eating, or whether we particularly enjoy what we are eating.

Still, one might ask, why should I continue to eat hamburgers–of which now I’m not particularly fond–when there’s a plate of spaghetti over there which smells wonderful!?! In other words, what if I’m not happy in my current relationship? What’s wrong with choosing to love someone else, especially when the one I’m with now is so difficult to love? Do we practice and learn to develop love merely for its own sake? Can’t I be happy, too?

Which, now, leads me to the second step in this series, based on the work of Harville Hendrix, Ph.d. and his book Getting The Love You Want. In this second article I will discuss why you should turn around and re-commit to a love relationship which, at least on the surface, appears doomed, and ways to do it.

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What???

I recall, sometime in the late ’seventies, an article appearing in the pages of Reader’s Digest. On the cover was this provocative title: “How To Kill Your Husband.” Of course, the article’s true subject was exactly opposite: how to keep your husband alive, and it extolled the virtues of eating a low-fat diet. Fat, it argued, was the bane of our existence, and was singularly responsible for a number of maladies, including high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, obesity, and diabetes. If you really want to kill your husband, the article warned, “just feed him eggs and bacon for breakfast–every day.”

Most of us, I think, took that article–and everything else appearing on the media scene decrying the presence of the now-evil fat in our diets–seriously. And we’ve been ultra-serious about reducing our fat consumption ever since. In fact, the low-fat ethos is so ingrained into our nutritional thinking that we automatically dismiss anything challenging it.

That said, it is my contention in this hub that it is high time we re-evaluated the low-fat requirement to reveal it for what it is: a myth. The truth is, there is no scientific basis for our continuing to eliminate fats from our diets. Furthermore, we are actually doing ourselves grievous harm by doing so. I will explain just how, momentarily.

So I’m going to resurrect the old Reader’s Digest article, but with this slight modification: If you really want to kill your husband, close out this hub right now and serve your husband up some extra-lean chicken and non-fat yogurt and any of the other thousands of low and non-fat products lining our grocer’s shelves.

But if you want to learn something that might save his and your own life, read on. Then, when you’ve done reading, go rustle up a big plate of bacon and eggs for the man you love. Chances are, he’s been needing it.

Why Are Nutritionists Still Pushing Low-Fat?!?

It’s hard to pick up any of the top women’s magazines and not find a plethora of fitness and nutrition-related articles scattered throughout their pages. Okay, I’m a guy, but I still flip through the small collection of More and Vogue and Vanity Fair my wife Jeanie has gathered in our “reading room.” I swear to you, I just read them for the articles and stories. Anyway, most of the time, I find them amusing. Some are truly enlightening. And then, there are some that get my blood to boiling.

The story I’m thinking of right now is from the September issue of More, the one with a very attractive Felicity Huffman on the cover. Go to page 190, and you’ll find a story about how three different women managed to beat heart disease. At first, I was impressed: there was a lot of information on the different signals of heart disease (many of which are subtle or confusing, and hence often ignored), and some useful techniques to help dodge that deadly bullet.

But then I noticed something curious about one of the stories. It involves a woman named Gina Jones who, throughout her life, exercised regularly, but ate pretty much whatever she wanted–until, in her mid-thirties, she experienced a heart attack. Doctors performed an angioplasty (an operation which makes use of a balloon in the heart to widen an artery). Jones recovered, but over the next several years, neglected to stay on her regimen of cholesterol drugs, which led to the need for two more angioplasties. The last of these was performed when she was forty-two. Finally scared literally half to death, she made and kept the commitment to stay on her drugs, and to eat a healthy, low-salt, low-fat diet.

But here’s the curious part. Three years later, during a routine medical exam, Jones was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. I wasn’t particularly surprised by the diagnosis (I’ll explain shortly). But what had me concerned, almost angry, was the off-handed disclosure of this important fact, almost as an afterthought, coupled with the obvious implication that a family history of the disease (Jones’s mother had been previously diagnosed with type 2 diabetes) was to blame. Nothing else is said about it. Her story ends with the observation that Jones manages to keep her blood sugar down by a strict regimen of six small (presumably low-fat) meals a day. Apparently, the writers didn’t think the matter was important enough to pursue, reasoning (I assume) that the focus of the story was the woman’s heart disease, not her diabetes.

Why Would Someone Eating Low-Fat Develop Diabetes?

The question I had hoped would be addressed was this: if Gina Jones was exercising regularly and eating a low-salt, low-fat diet, why would she still develop type 2 diabetes? The obvious answer, at least according to the way the story was written, was the fact that her mother had also been diagnosed with the disease. In fact, so their reasoning appears to have gone, that had to be the only possible answer, because there is no way eating a low-fat diet can lead to type 2 diabetes.

But there are two big problems with this quick and dirty answer: 1) it presumes a predisposition to develop diabetes based solely on genetics, when in fact that causal link hasn’t been proven, and 2) it presumes a low-fat diet itself will not lead to diabetes. And there’s the stumbling block. Because, in fact, a low-fat diet can easily lead to type 2 diabetes, regardless of your genetics.

An Increased Risk For Diabetes Is No Guarantee You Will Develop It

There is no genetic test for diabetes. Researchers agree that you can inherit a higher risk for type 2 diabetes, but there is no scientific evidence pointing to a purely genetic inheritance of the disease. According to this article, published on GeneticHealth.com, there have historically been a number of problems in finding a specific gene which will without exception lead to inheriting type 2 diabetes. Most notably is this (from GeneticHealth.com):

“We inherit more than just genes from our parents; we also inherit lifestyle. Poor eating habits and lack of exercise are learned behaviors that children can pick up from their parents. This type of inheritance has nothing to do with genes, and makes it hard for researchers to identify a genetic risk for diabetes.”

As I see it, Gina Jones might very well have “inherited” her type 2 diabetes from her mother. But it just might have been in the form of learned behaviors–which could easily (given the prevailing beliefs about nutrition) have included limiting fats from her diet.

Eating A Low-Fat Diet Does Not Prevent Diabetes

Gina’s untold story–the one about her diabetes, which wasn’t truly addressed–and similar stories of thousands like her, point to what many far-sighted doctors see as a global health problem: nutritionists are still prescribing a low fat diet (often combined with a low-calorie regimen) to treat and prevent diabetes. Historically, it is not clear where the belief behind this practice originated. In fact, before the low-fat era, diabetes was treated with a low-carbohydrate diet in order to control blood sugar. What caused the switch in thinking? Most likely it is the train of thought that currently links diabetes with obesity. Obesity is the fast track to developing diabetes. Treat the obesity, the reasoning goes, and the incidence of diabetes will be reduced. And, indeed, there seems to be some validity to that argument.

The problem lies in presuming a low-fat diet is at all effective in treating obesity. It is not. In fact, research studies have proven the exact opposite is true: low fat diets actually promote obesity along with the associated incidence of diabetes.

If you’re having a hard time swallowing this, just take a look around you. Our nation has been on a low-fat kick since the “discovery” in the 1970s that fat was bad for us. Strangely, the rate of obesity and adult-onset diabetes began a steady climb upward at about the same time. We have been consuming less and less fat, but at the same time have been packing ever-increasing amounts of it onto our bodies. How is this possible?

It Is Carbohydrates—Not Fat—Which Cause Obesity And Diabetes

In fact, it is entirely possible to eat virtually no fat at all, and yet become morbidly obese at the same time, for this very important reason: it is carbohydrates, and not fat, which make us fat.

The basics of biochemistry prove this to be true. Here’s how:

Our food is comprised of a combination of only three macronutrients (foods providing energy in the form of calories): fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. During digestion, fats are burned as an immediate source of energy, and proteins are broken down to be used as building blocks for various parts of the body. Carbohydrates are converted to glucose, or blood sugar. Like fat, glucose is also used as an immediate form of energy. But unlike fat, glucose also stimulates the secretion of the powerful hormone insulin. Insulin is an extremely important chemical whose primary duty (it actually has many functions throughout the body) is to take excess glucose from the blood, convert it to fat, and store it in the cells for later use as energy. It is important to note that calories from fats and proteins are not stored in this fashion. This is because insulin–in the role of fat-storer–is not secreted in response to fat or protein calories by themselves, as they are not converted to glucose in the same way carbohydrates are. The bottom line is this: if there is no glucose in the blood (as there would be if you consumed carbohydrates), there can be no insulin-driven storage of fat in the cells, and you will not gain weight.

But we can even go a step further and say this: limiting carbohydrates is the healthiest, most effective way to not only maintain, but to lose weight.

The simple reason for this is: for any particular caloric need (and we need at least a certain number of calories to sustain our lives), decreasing one of the three macronutrients forces an increase in the others to make up the caloric deficit. If, for example, you limit your fats, the resultant loss in calories must be made up by a commensurate increase in carbohydrates and/or proteins. And since most fats are bound together with proteins, eliminating fats often means a reduction in protein as well. The body’s only adequate source of calories, then, becomes the carbohydrates.

Too Many Carbs–Too Much Insulin

And that, as they say, is when things start going to heck in a handbasket. Here are some results you can expect from adopting a low-fat, high-carb lifestyle (and please don’t make the potentially-fatal mistake of believing, because you are exercising regularly and are symptom-free, or because there is no history of diabetes in your family, that these results cannot apply to you. Medical history begs to differ. Review Gina Jones’s story above.):

• A lack of fat results in decreased energy levels, a loss of essential fatty acids, a reduced absorption of the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, and a pronounced deficiency in magnesium.

• If your low-fat regimen is used in conjunction with a low-calorie diet for weight loss, you can certainly lose fat…but you’ll also lose much needed lean body mass (muscle) as a result of the associated loss of protein.

• Carbohydrates are addictive (see my article here); the more you eat, the more you want to eat, in ever-increasing amounts, stimulating an even greater secretion of insulin into the blood.

• While insulin, in the right amounts, is a critically-needed hormone in our systems, too much insulin can wreak havoc on the metabolic system. Adverse effects include higher blood pressure, increased cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, and, penultimately, insulin resistance–a condition which occurs where an over-abundance of insulin causes the cells to develop a desensitization to it. Hence, an increasingly greater output of insulin is required to process the same amount of calories–leading to more health problems. Finally, when insulin resistance progresses to the point that the cells no longer respond to insulin, the ultimate result is a condition known as type 2 diabetes.

This is precisely how someone–like Gina Jones, above–religiously following a low-fat, high-carbohydrate program can develop type 2 diabetes, and why I said earlier that I wasn’t particularly surprised by her diagnosis. Sadly, this scenario is all-too typical.

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