by Phillip Day
IN CELEBRATION OF the release of my new booklet, The Essential Guide to Exercise, I've been hammering this subject over the last few weekly health tips. You might be thinking that this book was probably easier to purchase than it will be to read. The reason? Most people don't like exercise because exercise equals pain so they don't want to do it. You might be curious about the methods I might use to get you off your backside (if you're still on it). Read on! As I write this, I've got books on exercise piled up before me (my reading list for this little project), and they're all full of scientific explanations about what jogging or weight-lifting will do for you, gene/DNA modification, maximum heart rate, exercising heart rate variability, reversing cancer, super fast-twitch fibres, clearing arteries, curing diabetes, yadda, yadda.
But what they miss is that most fascinating social aspect of exercise. Namely why normally frugal individuals will pay a gym membership faithfully every month for years and never go ONCE. Not even to cancel their memberships.
Why don't we exercise (when we know it's good for us)?
So what better way to start a primer on exercise than to confront the big rhino in the yoga room. I'm a consummate expert on this, having owned up to a gym membership for four years in my early twenties and I never went once. That's right. The manager used to call me up and ask if I wanted to renew. "Of course!" I thundered. "What for? You never come!" What cheek. "So, what are you? The Shower Police?"
Well, bad decisions make good stories. Of course, I realised at the time that exercise could give me untold benefits of a rippling physique, longer, trouble-free years of life, a sharper mind and avoidance of the major disease killers, but it was the grunting and sweating bit I had a problem with.
Notice the illogical trade-off. I was dealing with difficult health problems at the time - issues I KNEW exercise would help me with, but that still didn't make me go to the gym. Four years later I moved to California and within a month I was going to the famous LA Sports Club on Sepulveda Boulevard four times a week.
Why? Because the women who work out at the LA Sports Club on Sepulveda Boulevard sweat a lot and wear next to nothing. Suddenly my brain was no longer linking exercise to pain but pleasure. An admittedly puerile but true story, yet bearing the golden nugget to this little booklet.
Change your focus, be motivated
Confucius say, "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines". Why? Because weasels don't want to fly. Put another way, you're never going to succeed at anything if you don't want to do it. To want to do something, you have to be motivated. You have to change your focus.
"I need you to exercise every day."
"Forget it. Haven't the time."
"All right, I'll give you £5 a week to exercise every day."
"Get lost."
"All right, £50 a week."
"Well, don't expect me to enjoy it."
"All right, £500 a week."
"Coots, when do I start?"
There's a point at which even Nigella Lawson will willingly exercise. For any of what follows in my booklet to work for you, taking the time to change your focus must make that much sense to you that you'll get spooked if you don't do it.
One of the greatest blocks to any success is the inability to take action. The scale of the action does not matter. Taking action is simply the ability to do something.
Did you know that a thirty-minute walk at 8 am will activate fat burning enzymes in your body for twelve hours? Did you know that a further thirty-minute walk twelve hours later at 8pm will activate fat burning enzymes for another twelve hours, bringing you back to 8am? That's right. Trot around the block. Rock around the clock.
"Forget it. Can't be bothered."
"All right, how about fifty quid?"
"Don't start...."
Notice how pain motivates. So does pleasure. The carrot and the stick. We can tolerate a certain discomfort but when it is pain, we take action to do something about it. The sharper the pain, the quicker the action. We're back to motivation. Nigella Lawson may not sprint a hundred metres for her health, but she will if a Grizzly's after her hotdog.
Pain
... for most people hurts, which is why Nike's famous slogan ‘Just Do It!', for most people, didn't. ‘No pain, no gain' discovered instead a world full of fat people like me paying £50 a month for a gym membership they never showed up for. We avoid things or people that cause us pain. We aggregate pleasure. I can tell a lot about you simply from observing what you link pain or pleasure to. Linked with pain is the need to do something about it.
Pleasure
...too can provoke action if we let it. Multi-billion-dollar industries spring up around the need to stop pain or ease it with pleasure. Advertising doyens play pain and pleasure games like the pros that they are. Five hours a night of TV ent(e)r(t)ainment, infomercials, ads and soaps plug us into the pain matrix. Pleasure, the billboards snarl, You're Not Getting Any. Cooking gurus make food we can't get at. Exotic travel shows contrast dream locations with our own crummy neighbourhood. Adverts show people in pain gaining pleasure from the advertiser's product. We want those things we are told will bring us pleasure: cars, sofas, quad bikes, fashion clothes, Crazy Frog ring-tones and, if there's cash left over, a card for the spouse.
Placebo/Nocebo
Pain and pleasure affect us at such a fundamental level, our thoughts can change our cellular biochemistry. Witness someone caught in a traffic jam who has to be somewhere in a hurry. Someone in love. The fight or flight response when danger threatens. A ‘terminal' cancer diagnosis. There are four interesting effects that spin off from this:
Threat = mental pain = depressed immunity
No threat = mental pleasure = raised immunity
Placebo = raised immunity
Nocebo = depressed immunity
Someone given a fake pill or placebo[1], who holds to be true that the pill will heal them, stands a good chance of recovering by boosting their immunity. If they know the pill is a fake, the effect does not work. That's faith for you. Faith changes your biochemistry.
For centuries, doctors used placebo to assist in their work. Drugs are tested today in double-blind, placebo-controlled studies[2] to see whether the drug can outperform the placebo effect. Witness two doctor's declarations almost 100 years apart:
"I was brought up, as I suppose every physician is, to use placebo, bread pills, water injections and other devices. I used to give them by the bushels -"
Professor Richard Cabot, Harvard Medical School, 1903
"Whatever the rights and wrongs, placebo prescribing is widely practised and, if we admit it to ourselves, so is the habit of prescribing for largely social reasons." [emphasis mine]
Dr K Palmer, British general practitioner, 1998
Nocebos have the opposite effect to placebos and depress immunity. Nocebos don't have to be ‘bad' pills at all. They can be anything we process in a negative fashion. Consider the following:
A child is repeatedly told, "You're no bloody good." - Nocebo
"Good news, Mrs H, the cancer is gone." - Placebo
"You have three months to live." - Nocebo
Bad news - Nocebo
Good news - Placebo
Love - Placebo
Hate - Nocebo
Changing state
What's the point of all this? Simple. Exercise has a lot to do with our attitude and emotions. I didn't exercise because I linked pain to it. The moment I reassigned exercise to pleasure, it became a phenomenal state-changer. When we avoid pain and move towards something pleasurable, our whole biochemistry changes.
The older among us relieve stress with walking, reading a book, going to a good pub or restaurant, socialising, watching a film or having friends around. For the young among us, it's football, shopping, food, clubbing, sex, alcohol, invading foreign countries and the use of controlled substances which change mental focus to ban pain and gain pleasure.
We just like how pleasure feels. It's feral. ‘Just Do It!' cries Nike, so we bloody did, mate.
There is nothing wrong with changing state so long as the measures used do not harm us or others. Sometimes, though, we banish symptoms instead of the cause: the headache is treated with painkillers; money problems with shopping; a gnarly husband with Valium.
In the meantime, the underlying problem continues unabated until you bury him under the patio.
What's this got to do with exercise?
You must learn more about yourself. Work out why you do those darned things you do to understand your relationship to exercise and general well-being and health. Here are some interesting questions:
Do you need to exercise or do you want to exercise?
Do you feel unwell most of the time?
What causes you pain?
What causes you pleasure?
What placebic events are operating in your life?
Which nocebos?
How do you usually change your state to relax?
Are any of these state-changes harming you?
Are you solving your problems or just masking the symptoms?
How badly do you want to be disease-free?
Having read this list quickly, go back over each question individually and see what each means for you.
Leading Internet doctor Joseph Mercola writes:
"Exercise is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful ways to improve your health. If you're still avoiding it, perhaps this latest study will be the final straw that motivates you to take action...
After reviewing 40 papers published between 2006 and 2010, researchers found that exercise reduces the risk of about two dozen health conditions, ranging from cancer and heart disease to type 2 diabetes, stroke, dementia and depression. Exercise also slows down the rate of aging itself, providing perhaps the closest example of a real life fountain of youth as we will ever find." [3]
What I can do
If I am unhappy with my life, I can do something about it
If I feel unwell, I can take action
I will only take action if I am uncomfortable enough
When I am uncomfortable or motivated enough, I gain leverage
Gaining leverage is when I am compelled to act immediately and irresistibly because I've had enough of my current predicament
To take action I must decide where I want to go
Setting goals gives me a course of action
Now I can plan the steps to carry out my mission
Each step must impress me enough to move on to the next
My goals must be irresistible, impress the heck out of me
I must take action if I want a result
To achieve my goals, I must really want them
I can improve my well-being by increasing placebic effects in my life and decreasing nocebos
I can steer my own destiny
I can really do this.
Resources
The Essential Guide to Exercise by Phillip Day
Health Wars (2011) by Phillip Day
References
[1] placebo – a harmless, pharmacologically inactive medicine given to a patient which effects ‘a cure’.
[2] Studies where neither the patient nor doctor knows whether the tested substance is the real drug or a fake (placebo).
[3] www.mercola.com
IN CELEBRATION OF the release of my new booklet, The Essential Guide to Exercise, I've been hammering this subject over the last few weekly health tips. You might be thinking that this book was probably easier to purchase than it will be to read. The reason? Most people don't like exercise because exercise equals pain so they don't want to do it. You might be curious about the methods I might use to get you off your backside (if you're still on it). Read on! As I write this, I've got books on exercise piled up before me (my reading list for this little project), and they're all full of scientific explanations about what jogging or weight-lifting will do for you, gene/DNA modification, maximum heart rate, exercising heart rate variability, reversing cancer, super fast-twitch fibres, clearing arteries, curing diabetes, yadda, yadda.
But what they miss is that most fascinating social aspect of exercise. Namely why normally frugal individuals will pay a gym membership faithfully every month for years and never go ONCE. Not even to cancel their memberships.
Why don't we exercise (when we know it's good for us)?
So what better way to start a primer on exercise than to confront the big rhino in the yoga room. I'm a consummate expert on this, having owned up to a gym membership for four years in my early twenties and I never went once. That's right. The manager used to call me up and ask if I wanted to renew. "Of course!" I thundered. "What for? You never come!" What cheek. "So, what are you? The Shower Police?"
Well, bad decisions make good stories. Of course, I realised at the time that exercise could give me untold benefits of a rippling physique, longer, trouble-free years of life, a sharper mind and avoidance of the major disease killers, but it was the grunting and sweating bit I had a problem with.
Notice the illogical trade-off. I was dealing with difficult health problems at the time - issues I KNEW exercise would help me with, but that still didn't make me go to the gym. Four years later I moved to California and within a month I was going to the famous LA Sports Club on Sepulveda Boulevard four times a week.
Why? Because the women who work out at the LA Sports Club on Sepulveda Boulevard sweat a lot and wear next to nothing. Suddenly my brain was no longer linking exercise to pain but pleasure. An admittedly puerile but true story, yet bearing the golden nugget to this little booklet.
Change your focus, be motivated
Confucius say, "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines". Why? Because weasels don't want to fly. Put another way, you're never going to succeed at anything if you don't want to do it. To want to do something, you have to be motivated. You have to change your focus.
"I need you to exercise every day."
"Forget it. Haven't the time."
"All right, I'll give you £5 a week to exercise every day."
"Get lost."
"All right, £50 a week."
"Well, don't expect me to enjoy it."
"All right, £500 a week."
"Coots, when do I start?"
There's a point at which even Nigella Lawson will willingly exercise. For any of what follows in my booklet to work for you, taking the time to change your focus must make that much sense to you that you'll get spooked if you don't do it.
One of the greatest blocks to any success is the inability to take action. The scale of the action does not matter. Taking action is simply the ability to do something.
Did you know that a thirty-minute walk at 8 am will activate fat burning enzymes in your body for twelve hours? Did you know that a further thirty-minute walk twelve hours later at 8pm will activate fat burning enzymes for another twelve hours, bringing you back to 8am? That's right. Trot around the block. Rock around the clock.
"Forget it. Can't be bothered."
"All right, how about fifty quid?"
"Don't start...."
Notice how pain motivates. So does pleasure. The carrot and the stick. We can tolerate a certain discomfort but when it is pain, we take action to do something about it. The sharper the pain, the quicker the action. We're back to motivation. Nigella Lawson may not sprint a hundred metres for her health, but she will if a Grizzly's after her hotdog.
Pain
... for most people hurts, which is why Nike's famous slogan ‘Just Do It!', for most people, didn't. ‘No pain, no gain' discovered instead a world full of fat people like me paying £50 a month for a gym membership they never showed up for. We avoid things or people that cause us pain. We aggregate pleasure. I can tell a lot about you simply from observing what you link pain or pleasure to. Linked with pain is the need to do something about it.
Pleasure
...too can provoke action if we let it. Multi-billion-dollar industries spring up around the need to stop pain or ease it with pleasure. Advertising doyens play pain and pleasure games like the pros that they are. Five hours a night of TV ent(e)r(t)ainment, infomercials, ads and soaps plug us into the pain matrix. Pleasure, the billboards snarl, You're Not Getting Any. Cooking gurus make food we can't get at. Exotic travel shows contrast dream locations with our own crummy neighbourhood. Adverts show people in pain gaining pleasure from the advertiser's product. We want those things we are told will bring us pleasure: cars, sofas, quad bikes, fashion clothes, Crazy Frog ring-tones and, if there's cash left over, a card for the spouse.
Placebo/Nocebo
Pain and pleasure affect us at such a fundamental level, our thoughts can change our cellular biochemistry. Witness someone caught in a traffic jam who has to be somewhere in a hurry. Someone in love. The fight or flight response when danger threatens. A ‘terminal' cancer diagnosis. There are four interesting effects that spin off from this:
Threat = mental pain = depressed immunity
No threat = mental pleasure = raised immunity
Placebo = raised immunity
Nocebo = depressed immunity
Someone given a fake pill or placebo[1], who holds to be true that the pill will heal them, stands a good chance of recovering by boosting their immunity. If they know the pill is a fake, the effect does not work. That's faith for you. Faith changes your biochemistry.
For centuries, doctors used placebo to assist in their work. Drugs are tested today in double-blind, placebo-controlled studies[2] to see whether the drug can outperform the placebo effect. Witness two doctor's declarations almost 100 years apart:
"I was brought up, as I suppose every physician is, to use placebo, bread pills, water injections and other devices. I used to give them by the bushels -"
Professor Richard Cabot, Harvard Medical School, 1903
"Whatever the rights and wrongs, placebo prescribing is widely practised and, if we admit it to ourselves, so is the habit of prescribing for largely social reasons." [emphasis mine]
Dr K Palmer, British general practitioner, 1998
Nocebos have the opposite effect to placebos and depress immunity. Nocebos don't have to be ‘bad' pills at all. They can be anything we process in a negative fashion. Consider the following:
A child is repeatedly told, "You're no bloody good." - Nocebo
"Good news, Mrs H, the cancer is gone." - Placebo
"You have three months to live." - Nocebo
Bad news - Nocebo
Good news - Placebo
Love - Placebo
Hate - Nocebo
Changing state
What's the point of all this? Simple. Exercise has a lot to do with our attitude and emotions. I didn't exercise because I linked pain to it. The moment I reassigned exercise to pleasure, it became a phenomenal state-changer. When we avoid pain and move towards something pleasurable, our whole biochemistry changes.
The older among us relieve stress with walking, reading a book, going to a good pub or restaurant, socialising, watching a film or having friends around. For the young among us, it's football, shopping, food, clubbing, sex, alcohol, invading foreign countries and the use of controlled substances which change mental focus to ban pain and gain pleasure.
We just like how pleasure feels. It's feral. ‘Just Do It!' cries Nike, so we bloody did, mate.
There is nothing wrong with changing state so long as the measures used do not harm us or others. Sometimes, though, we banish symptoms instead of the cause: the headache is treated with painkillers; money problems with shopping; a gnarly husband with Valium.
In the meantime, the underlying problem continues unabated until you bury him under the patio.
What's this got to do with exercise?
You must learn more about yourself. Work out why you do those darned things you do to understand your relationship to exercise and general well-being and health. Here are some interesting questions:
Do you need to exercise or do you want to exercise?
Do you feel unwell most of the time?
What causes you pain?
What causes you pleasure?
What placebic events are operating in your life?
Which nocebos?
How do you usually change your state to relax?
Are any of these state-changes harming you?
Are you solving your problems or just masking the symptoms?
How badly do you want to be disease-free?
Having read this list quickly, go back over each question individually and see what each means for you.
Leading Internet doctor Joseph Mercola writes:
"Exercise is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful ways to improve your health. If you're still avoiding it, perhaps this latest study will be the final straw that motivates you to take action...
After reviewing 40 papers published between 2006 and 2010, researchers found that exercise reduces the risk of about two dozen health conditions, ranging from cancer and heart disease to type 2 diabetes, stroke, dementia and depression. Exercise also slows down the rate of aging itself, providing perhaps the closest example of a real life fountain of youth as we will ever find." [3]
What I can do
If I am unhappy with my life, I can do something about it
If I feel unwell, I can take action
I will only take action if I am uncomfortable enough
When I am uncomfortable or motivated enough, I gain leverage
Gaining leverage is when I am compelled to act immediately and irresistibly because I've had enough of my current predicament
To take action I must decide where I want to go
Setting goals gives me a course of action
Now I can plan the steps to carry out my mission
Each step must impress me enough to move on to the next
My goals must be irresistible, impress the heck out of me
I must take action if I want a result
To achieve my goals, I must really want them
I can improve my well-being by increasing placebic effects in my life and decreasing nocebos
I can steer my own destiny
I can really do this.
Resources
The Essential Guide to Exercise by Phillip Day
Health Wars (2011) by Phillip Day
References
[1] placebo – a harmless, pharmacologically inactive medicine given to a patient which effects ‘a cure’.
[2] Studies where neither the patient nor doctor knows whether the tested substance is the real drug or a fake (placebo).
[3] www.mercola.com
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