Page 14 | Michael T. Miyoshi

Cruise Ship Weight Gain · 17 July 2013

Conventional wisdom says that people tend to gain a lot of weight on cruises because they eat so much.

When my Dad said that people tend to gain between ten to thirty pounds on a cruise, I believed him (even though between five and ten is probably more reasonable). Food is available almost all the time and people tend to eat as much as they want whenever they want.

On our recent seven-day cruise, there was food everywhere. But I am proud to say that I only gained two tenths of a pound. (Yes, I am bragging a bit.)

Some might think that I held back. That I did not eat very much. Those people do not know me very well. I ate and ate and ate. I had hearty breakfasts, usually of fruit, oatmeal, and some sort of bread like pancakes or French toast. I ate salads and wraps and even some French fries at lunch. And I had at least two entrees at every dinner. The last three nights, I had three! And of course, I had dessert with pretty much every meal.

The key to eating so much and not gaining any weight was sticking to my eating regime. The food I ate was mostly whole plant foods. Eggs were in many dishes and I had plenty of seafood. In other words, I ate like I do at home. I just had more volume and the food was more decadent. And I still only gained two tenths of a pound.

Conventional wisdom might be right, but when eating a whole food, plant-based diet, you do not need to gain a lot of weight on a cruise. Even when you eat a lot.

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Impatience · 16 July 2013

Impatience is the key to ruining any attempt at getting healthy. Whether we are training our bodies to eat a plant-based, whole food diet or to run with minimalist shoes (especially no-shoe shoes), the best way to get off track is to be impatient.

When I first started eating differently, I weaned myself from meat. I was not trying to be completely vegan, but I did want to get away from processed foods so that I could run better. I wanted to be leaner so that I could be fitter, but I was not planning on cutting out meat or eating that much healthier. I just wanted to run. I just wanted to be a little bit of an athlete.

That desire to be athletic was probably why I have been able to make the transition to eating a plant-based, whole food diet fairly easily. Everything I was doing, including eating right, was geared toward making me healthier so I could run a little farther and hopefully, a little faster.

Even so, I have not completely gotten rid of processed foods or sugar from my diet. In fact, I have gone through the detoxification process many times as I rid myself of these noxious foods. It will be a lifelong process that I am willing to keep going through, especially since I find myself having fewer episodes of sugar binging. I am finding that I can be patient with myself.

Unfortunately, impatience is much easier to have than patience.

Most people want to lose weight and get healthy immediately. When health does not happen right away, they give up. They go back to sitting around instead of exercising and eating the way they did before instead of eating healthy. (Fortunately, if they give up processed foods and eat plant-based, whole foods, they will lose weight quickly.)

They do the same thing with shoes.

As I have talked to people about shoes and going to no-shoe shoes, I find that most of them are not willing to go through the long body reeducation process. They want immediate results. Maybe it is just that they do not understand they need to educate their legs, feet, and supporting muscles. Maybe they do not understand that years of wearing shoes with too much support has atrophied their muscles. Maybe they do not understand that it takes time to get to a place where they can exercise barefoot. Whatever the reason, most of the people I have talked to about no-shoe shoes give them up too early in the process. They do not give themselves time to build up the muscles. They are too impatient.

As I look at our largely unhealthy society, I believe that misinformation and ignorance play big roles in why people eat poorly and are out of shape. But once people know the right things to do, they ought to be able to get healthy. They ought to be able to get on the right track.

Unfortunately, even when we find the right track, we find ways to get derailed. And all too easily, we find the real key to ruining our attempts at getting healthy is impatience.

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Effortless Running · 13 July 2013

There are times when I have felt like I was running effortlessly. I want to run that way all the time.

I just read an interesting book on running called, Chi Marathon by Danny and Katherine Dreyer. While I have not signed up to run a marathon yet, applying the concepts is helping me figure out how to run with less effort.

The main concept of chi running as explained in Chi Marathon is to let your ligaments and tendons and gravity do most of the running work instead of your leg muscles. There is, of course, more to it than that, but essentially, all you really need to do is lean and stay balanced.

I am not there yet, but I can see how all the work I have done in the past has built up to this type of running. As a matter of fact, I read one of my old posts (see Running Form) and realized that it was pointing me to effortless running long before I read Chi Marathon.

In that old post, I thought I was contradicting my own thoughts on how we are supposed to run. It seemed that my thought process was leading to letting my hands and arms flail willy nilly across my body instead of working hard to keep them moving in a straight line following my running direction.

In reality, I have found that running with my arms pumping straight forward and backward is indeed the way run. At least it is part of sprinting. But even while sprinting, engaging the hips and using the lower abdominal muscles to move the legs is much more efficient that trying to reach forward using the leg muscles. (Again, there is more to the concept than what I have mentioned here, but we can run efficiently at any speed if we learn the proper techniques.)

Unfortunately, as I was working to keep my hands and arms moving straight forward and backward like a sprinter, I was hampering my hip movement. I ended up trying to keep my hips always aligned perpendicular to my motion, which kept me from engaging my abdominals. I was not running efficiently or effortlessly. I was plodding along trying too hard. For even though my arms were not wasting any motion, my body was. Then, when I started engaging my hips and abs, my arms seemed to be out of sync (again, see the old post).

What I have found is that as long as I do not let my hands cross my body’s centerline, I am really not being inefficient. I am relaxed and letting gravity do most of the work. Especially, when I relax my body, rotate my hips, let my feet fly out behind me, and allow my arms to follow a circular (rather than linear) path.

I am not sure exactly where the notion of Chi Running will take me, but I want to be as efficient a runner as I can be. And that means letting gravity do its work while using my own body in ways that use little energy. Like I said, I have felt it at times, but now that I know a little more about how to do it, I always want to have effortless running.