It ended on a low note, but then, almost ironically, my journey took an even more undesirable turn when almost exactly one month after I wrote the last installment I suffered an incident that put me in the hospital, in the operating room, then into bed for several weeks (and not in a good way), on crutches with a brace for several more weeks, hopping around with just the brace or just a crutch for several more weeks, and just about a year after the incident, to my final visit to the surgeon and not quite healed yet, but good enough. It was an injury to my knee and it had a rather negative effect on my overall level of athletic fitness, bringing me to an all time low point. From which I am now rapidly ascending like a swift and powerful Phoenix from a pile of ashes. And I exaggerate only a medium amount.

So I’ve decided to rewrite, revise, extend, and repost the original story. Those can be found in the archives under the category heading “exercise and fitness.” The present version will be archived under the heading “From fit to fat to fit,” to help keep them separate.

I recommend printing this out and reading it at the gym while you are on the treadmill. You’ll feel much better about yourself, I promise.

… Continued…

An interesting and entirely inappropriate trend has developed on this show.

Individuals decide that they should leave the show while others must stay. They accomplish this by gaining, rather than losing, pounds. The show is about brave people in an uphill battle doing amazing things, except for when the strategy dictated by the rules of the show lead individuals to gain weight on a show about losing weight, add fat in a contest to lose fat, do something unhealthy on a show about being more healthy. Older contestants say the youngsters are like their children, and thus are willing to sacrifice themselves by adding fat. Sometimes it is actual parents giving up their own position on the show for their actual children. Two twins tried to save each other’s place on the show (both failed successfully, somehow). At some point, it became a matter of guilt. If you did not go along with some plan to save one or more other contestant by putting weight on rather than taking it off, then you were a bad person.

I call bullshit at two levels. First, on the individual level, this should be rather obvious. There are a lot of reasons a person is two or three hundred pounds over their “healthy” weight, but one of them is liking to eat pie a lot more than liking to get some exercise. (I oversimplify.¹) There are other reasons, but that is one of them. I’m sorry, but when I see a bunch of people who for thirty years have preferred pie over running and doing jumping jacks competing with each other to see who gets to NOT lose weight in a given week to “save” the others, I’m thinking …. well, I won’t say it because someone will likely get mad at me. So I’m not going to say it. You already know what I’m thinking.

Second, there is the level of the game itself, the show, and their rules. This show … The Biggest Loser … is about saving people’s lives. People who are morbidly obese (or, as a TV news caster once said “morbidly overbese”) may need to lose dozens and dozens of pounds to save their own lives. “Eliminating” people from a game like this is not just a matter of drama or show. It is a matter of health. It may even be a matter of life and death. But, I’m sure the marketing drones at the network that puts this show on insist on elimination because of some survey they’ve done.

That whole situation may change the first time a “Biggest Loser” loser, a person voted off or sent home by the rules, dies of a heart attack. Frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. Well, I think they should change the rules first. Stop voting people off. Just make losing more weight a very very desirable goal. Like everybody gets a car. A small car (more incentive!).

Writing this blog post was a lot of work. I feel weak. I think I need a piece of pie.²

¹And when I say I “oversimplify” I’m trying to give you a pointer to the fact that the problems people who end up weighing two or three hundred pounds or more than they probably should are not about liking pie. See comments below in which people scream at me. They make important points.

²Disarming reference to my own inadequacy.

In rodents. So far.

The research team made obese rodents exercise was found to increase the amount of IL-6 and IL-10 protein levels in the hypothalamus, which in turn changed the threshold for the feedback system that ultimately releases insulin and leptin, which are the magic juices that seem to affect hunger and related system. Indeed, leptin has been seen for some time as a key to understanding weight control, has been implicated in various concepts like the “set point” and is linked to numerous rather complex systems. What may be happening here is that insulin and leptin levels act one way in the sedentary person and a slightly different way in the active person.

I’m going the gym.

Oh, wait, OK, I’ll finish this blog post first.

Here’s what the authors say about the study:

The hypothalamus is a brain region that gathers information on the body’s nutritional status and governs the release of multiple metabolic signaling molecules such as insulin and leptin to maintain homeostasis. Overeating and obesity are associated with insulin and leptin resistance in the hypothalamus, and recent studies provide an intriguing link between inflammation and dysfunction of hypothalamic insulin and leptin signaling through activation of IKKβ, a key player in immune response, and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. This means that strategies to reduce the aberrant activation of inflammatory signaling in the hypothalamus are of great interest to improve the central insulin and leptin action and prevent or treat related metabolic diseases. Using a combination of pharmacological, genetic, and physiological approaches, our study indicates that physical activity reorganizes the set point of nutritional balance through anti-inflammatory signaling mediated by interleukin (IL)-6 and IL-10 in the hypothalamus of rodents. Hence, IL-6 and IL-10 are important physiological contributors to the central insulin and leptin action mediated by exercise, linking it to hypothalamic ER stress and inflammation.

And, if you want to know a LOT more about this process, click here to download a PDF primer on Exercise and Hypothalamic ER Stress.

You can read the paper, published in PLoS Biology, here.

Ropelle, E., Flores, M., Cintra, D., Rocha, G., Pauli, J., Morari, J., de Souza, C., Moraes, J., Prada, P., Guadagnini, D., Marin, R., Oliveira, A., Augusto, T., Carvalho, H., Velloso, L., Saad, M., & Carvalheira, J. (2010). IL-6 and IL-10 Anti-Inflammatory Activity Links Exercise to Hypothalamic Insulin and Leptin Sensitivity through IKKβ and ER Stress Inhibition PLoS Biology, 8 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000465

And as the cattle do, so do Scienceblogs.com bloggers. And the current stampede about to form up is about fitness. I’m not sure where it started, but I first noticed it at ERV‘s blog, but Page 3.14 has also picked it up.

We’re not talking about Darwinian fitness, but rather, physical fitness.

So, because I’m as much a member of the herd as the next cow, I decided to join in and tell you my fitness story … or at least, a version of it. Part I is below the fold.

Africa. Some time in the early 1990s.

I started out walking a good six feet behind her, to avoid the sand she was kicking up and the occasional thorn-lined branch that might swing behind anyone walking through the African Bush. We were traversing, extra-legally, an area people were not allowed because of the dangerous wild animals (mainly lion) and the chance of getting lost on this difficult to navigate terrain. We crossed the parallel linear dunes at a right angle …. up a grass covered dune, across it’s narrow top of red sand, down the next side, then across the bushy flat to the next dune. The reststation we were staying in, along with a dozen American travelers distributed among eight or nine grass-roofed chalets, was surrounded by a series of fences, the largest and outermost one being a 15 foot high affair designed to keep lions out and tourists in. Earlier in the day, I followed some of the camp workers to see where they got through the first fence, to the village they lived in. Then, using this intelligence, Lynne and I passed through that unlocked gate, and Lynne talked our way past a couple of security guards at other gates, then we found what was probably an informal smuggler’s opening in the 15 footer, and we were free.

Free in the Kalahari.

By now I was a full 20 or 30 feet behind Lynne, way more than necessary to avoid snapping branches. I decided to catch up a little just as we were about to mount the next dune, a bit larger than the last few. But Lynne took that moment to sprint rather than walk to the top, so while I also sprinted, I did not close the gap. In fact, she was down the other side of the dune before I attained the crest, and it took me a bit of work to get within 50 feet of her.

I hadn’t known Lynne very long, but we had been traveling together now for several days, and for reasons far beyond what I can explain here we had bonded rather quickly. Let’s just say diversity makes fast friends, and when there are only two of you in the lifeboat, you either sink or learn to trust each other. I was probably thinking about that, or about the strange holes we kept passing on the lower dune slopes that we later discovered to be silk spider traps, or the bright blue sky and the pleasant afternoon winter warmth when I noticed that Lynne had been out of my sight for a long time.

Finally, a few dunes later, I saw her at the bottom sitting in the shade of a Shepard’s tree. Eventually, I arrived at her rest spot, and we relaxed a bit and talked.

This is when I learned, while trying to catch my breath and not look too exhausted, that Lynne was considering herself to be rather out of shape. She told me that this trip was killing her. She needed to spend some time at the gym, she said, and this walk was telling her that she needed to do it soon. You see, Lynne was supposed to be in training for her first Ultra Marathon, a 250 kilometer race across the Green Kalahari. She had already run a couple of 50 km races that year as part of her prep, and she had also won a regional Ultimate Frisbee tournament and that was good, but with the race coming up soon she needed to be running every day and working with weights at least a few times a week. Neither was possible while we were guiding these tourists, staying mostly in game parks where we were not allowed to wander freely in the bush, and where there were no gyms.

So now I understood why Lynne was so keen on breaking out of the Kalahari restcamp, and I was glad we had done it. But I also realized, as I sat in the shade admiring my new friend’s stamina and resolve, that I had gone from a person who was always in pretty good shape to a person who was in the process of serious deterioration.

When I was a kid, I walked all the time. My parents were forever leaving me in various forests or on the side of lonely mountain roads, and I would always make my way home eventually, on foot. When I was a teenager, I had a girlfriend who lived far away, and a couple of five or six mile walks a day was a virtually daily thing for me (I did not grow up in a car culture). At that time, I would also spend a couple of weeks a year in the Adirondack mountains. I would cover between 90 and 150 miles, much of it over peaks reaching beyond 5,000 feet, often trail-less. Later, as an archaeologist, I walked and walked and walked, but often carrying piles of equipment and digging dozens and dozens of holes per day, on survey. Eventually, I went off to the Congo for fieldwork. I was famous among the pygmies for my walking there. I would routinely walk 10 miles through the forest one way with an empty pack, then 10 miles the other way with 110 pounds of food, or along the “road” either 10 or 20 miles, depending, to and from market.

I was always the one who was not tired, no matter how far we went or how much I carried.

Then it came time to write my thesis and do some other stuff, so I spent a few years mostly at a desk job and slowly slowly, month after month, my legendary walking muscles turned into something other than muscle, and though I had no more visible body fat than I had ever had I’m sure my muscle had all gone south.

And I knew this because as I sat under the Shepard’s tree, I realized that for the first time in my life, ever, I had been out-walked by another human being. Never mind that she was a semi-professional athlete marathon runner training for an ultra (which, by the way, she would indeed run, and in fact win, several times over the coming years).

So I resolved.

I resolved that on my return to the states, I would get my self in shape. And I did. I got myself very much in shape, and the next time I returned to South Africa, Lynne did not out walk me. And the next time after that, people at the gyms across South Africa found themselves in awe of my physical prowess as I traveled from place to place being … really really fit.

How did I do it? Well, I found Lenora, Inflicter of Pain. And I let her have her way with me. I’ll tell you about Lenora in the next installment.

…. continued ….