By Kevin Kolodziejski
It doesn’t matter if it’s a really good one or a really grim one. Far East philosophy explains there are three things you can do in any situation to put it into proper perspective and obtain peace of mind.
Relax. Breathe deeply. Observe without passing judgment.
Doing all three has benefitted me frequently — and especially during two trying nights in particular. Two nights out of the seven in my life when I was scheduled for next-day surgery. But unlike the other five occasions, I was not in my home. I was in a hospital, in pain, yet intent upon not pressing the button that would increase the morphine drip.
Leg strapped to a gurney with weight on the toes to keep it properly aligned as I awaited my situation’s alphabet-soup solution. To fix a J-fractured femur by screwing it to a metal rod, turning my upper leg into an impervious “I.”
Sometime After the Second Surgery
While the mantra I said in my head that second night — relax, breathe deeply; observe, don’t judge — did indeed lead to peace of mind, sometime afterwards I read such catchphrases are not as effective when expressed negatively. So I’ve since replaced “don’t judge” with something I do each day, it seems, even more than I shift gears on a hilly ride.
Look for a link.
While looking for a link is good, finding one is better. Better still is that doing so helps even when the connection is tenuous at best. Finding a link, to steal an E.L. Doctorow saying about writing, is like a car driving in the foggiest of conditions. “You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can drive across the entire country that way.” Another well-known American writer tells a story also worthy of thievery. It’s about her running coach and the need to remind him — to keep to the Doctorow analogy — that his car has headlights.
The Coach Who Wanted to Be a Writer
When Natalie Goldberg started distance running, she enlisted the aid of a local coach who had trained runners for years. During a meeting to decide her next few workouts, the coach confessed to wanting to become a writer — and having no idea how to get started.
But Goldberg countered that he did. That there was really no difference between starting as a writer or starting as a runner, something he had already helped dozens of people successfully do. So all he had to do now is look for links, recognize the ways in which the former is like the latter.
No Desire to Be a Novel Writer?
While you probably have no desire to be a novel writer, your visit to this website suggests you’d like to improve in one way or another as a bike rider. One way to do so — and I bet you saw this coming — is to find links between your efforts as a cyclist and things in life that either aid or frustrate them. Like sleep, or the lack there of . Or eating, whether it be healthy or, far more likely, a bit too much.
A prior RBR article, “It’s What Wise Cyclists Do: Get the Lead Out and Get Cooking,” addresses the most likely reason eating too much takes place. Because the eater is hooked to some degree on the added sugars and fat found in the 63 percent of the ultraprocessed foods that now make up, according to a Mayo Clinic estimate, the average American diet. While the RBR article mentions other problems inherent in consuming UPFs, it focuses on the fact that the aforementioned add-ins when eaten in tandem are really addictive, as addictive as alcohol, according to cited research.
That cited research was published by BMJ online last October. This January — and how’s this for link finding? — Cell Metabolism published research online that further explains why, as Carolyn Crist contends in a WebMD article, the sugar/fat tandem is “irresistible.”
The Dope on Dopamine: It Makes Bad Food ‘Irresistible’
In short, and by using mice, the new research first establishes that the ingestion of either sugar and fat causes your body to release the neurotransmitter dopamine. While dopamine helps control motor actions — a lack of it has been linked to Parkinson’s disease — its release leads to such positive mental and emotional responses that it’s long been called the happiness hormone.
But the immediate happiness it produces when you eat a doughnut, for example, leads to eventual sadness if — to prolong that good feeling — you continually eat a second and maybe even a third. Using this doughnut scenario is oh-so appropriate because a typical glazed cruller contains close to equal amounts of both sugar and fat calorically. And oh-so appropriate because of what the research revealed next.
That combining sugar and fat in foods “supra-additively increases dopamine efflux and eating,” which creates a “subconscious drive” to consume both, which “may impede conscious dieting efforts.”
In other words, a glazed cruller to a white-collar worker on break elicits pretty close to the same response as honey to a bear just out of hibernation. Except bears hibernate because food is scarce. White-collar workers pig out when it’s not. And these pig-outs occur in large part because the people who produce UPFs like doughnuts figured something out well before it became common knowledge.
That — because it affects your brain as much as your belly — eating bad food begets eating bad food.
Kevin Kolodziejski began his writing career in earnest in 1989. Since then he’s written a weekly health and fitness column and his articles have appeared in magazines such as “MuscleMag,” “Ironman,” “Vegetarian Times,” and “Bicycle Guide.” He has Bachelor and Masters degrees in English from DeSales and Kutztown Universities.
A competitive cyclist for more than 30 years, Kevin won two Pennsylvania State Time Trial championships in his 30’s, the aptly named Pain Mountain Time Trial 4 out of 5 times in his 40s, two more state TT’s in his 50’s, and the season-long Pennsylvania 40+ BAR championship at 43.
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