Sunday 30 March 2014

Releasing Demons and the magical 'Cheat Day'

Nutrition and training.
They are a part of our lifestyle. And to get close to the health and vitality our ancestors had we need to be more conscious of both nutrition and training than they ever were.
They thought nothing of counting calories, eating clean, corrective stretching, warm ups, cool downs, high intensity training vs low level cardio blah blah blah. This because food was scarce; they hunted and gathered everything they could, and shared what they found, any calories were greatly accepted.

There was no processed or junk food, and no corporate media. Their only choice was to find and eat natural food. They ate their food raw and probably cooked some of it, but in general their bodies were not exposed to the chemical onslaught we face from birth and their minds were not bombarded with advertisements from junk food companies.

So we need to be ultra vigilant to fuel our meat vessels with what they were designed to use. It takes a significant amount of our life energy, effort, chi, if you will to eat and train right.

This means that over time demons build up. By demons I mean the voices telling you it will be fine to just quickly have some toast, one chocolate bar cant hurt. These minor inconvenient duals are easily won. The thoughts turn into wow that looks soooo good but I know its sooo bad for me. Id love to join you in that take away but id rather cook for myself thanks.  Ah go on then, no, no ill only regret it. I have found that I can go for months on a volley of victories and near misses with the devils of my appetite. Eventually my energy is run down and the war gets boring, WE FORGET WHY WE MAKE the choices. 

So rather than give in to temptation, I suggest something better...
Exercise the demons and remember the reasons for the choices you make.
To do this you need to throw caution to the wind and simply eat anything and everything you fancy. Eat because you can with reckless abandon! Revel in the supposed pleasures of consumption. Cookies, baked goods, pastries, a bun heavily laden with processed meat and fuck loads of salad cream. Toast and mother fucking margarine. Consume obscene amounts of cereal in the biggest bowl you can find. These are the things I have to spend my chi saying no to every day. For you it might be mac Donald's, fried fast food or biscuits.

Expelling demons is a personal thing, whatever it is that plagues you, that's your port of call brothers! For me its sugary baked stuff and heavy carbs like cereal and cereal bars man! Cereal bars till the cows come home!
I spend one day and one day only indulging in my carb craziness...
In the after math I remember fully and completely the reason I don't live this way every day. I feel like absolute shit. My body is flooded with toxins, overloaded in fact. The sudden surge of chemicals in the processed pleasures I submerged myself in had basically crippled me.  I felt like a corpse, I had head aches, stomach cramps, and my shits went weird as fuck, with my bowels having an extremely adverse reaction to the abuse. And in spite of the technical chemical energy that was going in, my body was not equipped to use it as fuel. Having been used to receiving its natural and optimal fuel for so long there was no way it was going to take kindly to this bullshit.

So now for quite a while all I will think of when I see the cereals, the bread buns, the ham sandwiches, flap jacks and Paninis, is pain, misery and lacking  energy. This is obviously a massive help in the ongoing battle for optimal nutrition.

Give it a try, work out your best fuel, focus your diet around it and see the results. Then observe the demons creep in. Then, instead of giving up control and caving in, choose to gorge yourself in a controlled manor. The beauty is that there is no guilt!

Have trust in the fact that because you have worked so very hard and been so very vigilant up to now, you wont suffer for very long and your athletic performance will not suffer in the slightest, as opposed to the weakly cheat meal, that builds up toxins and an inherent weakness where to get by you must have your share of junk, and that junk is soooo good man.

Well perhaps my method also shows my weakness, this is a perfectly viable claim but after I've had my cheat day, I can think of nothing more vile and atrocious than eating my demon foods; while after your cheat meal, you cant wait for the next one.

'This is just advice, do whatever the fuck you wanna do' - Elliott Hulse

Sunday 16 March 2014

Enjoying yourself?

Lately I've been neglecting one of my fundamental principles of life; don't take it too seriously! 

Although we as a species no longer face the same sources of physical and mental stress our ancestors had to, we are nonetheless equally stressed in our day to day lives.

There are deadlines, there are people to impress, your health to consider, money to manage, a myriad of daily choices between right and easy in all aspects of life, and that's just when we are young!

While I understand the necessity to be conscious and alert to who you are allowing yourself to be moulded into by the world; it is equally important to realise we can't control everything.

There are a great deal of things we let ourselves worry about despite the fact that that theyre beyond our influence. If you find that you are becoming stressed or feel that other happier people seem to give less fucks than you, ask yourself; 'Can I change this situation to make it preferable?'  If the answer is no, why worry? If the answer is yes, take action.

 I am not trying to say life is always black and white, I am simply dancing with the idea that we should accept that its not.
Many people embark on a mental road of deep thoughts and complex ideas. Some make a career out of thinking such thoughts, others just have brief insights when they zone out in the shower.  Am I more than just my body? What is this essence that looks out through my eyes? Am I more than what Alan Watts referred to as 'a skin-encapsulated ego'. Does my skin separate me from other beings?

These ideas and a million others like them  usually lead back to simple ideas about 'the meaning of it all'...

We will probably never know. Sure enough we can breathe meaning into our lives of our own accord, there are endless options open to us...
 We can create our own truths rather then seeking some greater authority.

Or we can whole heartedly accept what world religions tell us. An advantage of this is that our curiosity can be poured into other places if we have the whole universe thing locked down. 'Right I'm happy that Allah is behind all this and I need to embrace this guy or whatever to be happy, now I can go learn about rally driving or the ins and outs of snowboarding technique etc' obviously I am exaggerating this idea but the point is constantly wondering about the meaning of life can be a cumbersome, thought-consuming habit and having a set truth in that area can free up room for other ventures!

We may also reject all previous knowledge and make our own ideas up.
We can commit our lives to figuring this thing out and enjoy the endless pondering!

In spite of all the options of how to interpret our reality; in the end we come back to the idea that one course of action is as good as another.
We are just an experiment.
This isn't a serious thing. This whole thing is more akin to a game or a dream or a piece of music than something that is purposeful and utilitarian.

We don't need to do anything in particular.

So then, we eventually liberate ourselves from the fallacy that we NEED to do something.
With this comes the freedom to choose to do something we enjoy. We can take a far more light hearted approach to life.

If I didn't enjoy training you would not  find me in a gym every night. If I found reading interesting things unfulfilling i would not read.
We all have the freedom to be involved with what we happen to enjoy and to avoid what we don't enjoy.

Avoiding certain types of food is neither bad nor good it's just someone who dislikes it keeping away from it. The implications are also neither here nor there, simply the echoes of different choices.
Should we exercise every day?
Should we do what everyone else does?
Do your parents know best?
Is it okay to gorge on so called unhealthy food?
Should we all be monogamous?


These questions all appear to have moral implications and one might build up a picture of a person simply from their answers to these questions.

Yet in time and through deep thought we all eventually come to realise that different choices are just different ways. Facing any choice in life we may want to consider that both regret/unhappiness and fulfilment/joy will be present either way. So don't take things so seriously! 

Through experiments I have found a way of living that I find quite enjoyable. I have discovered that although it's not easy, it is  in my best interests to keep my body in good condition, and to learn about how it works, which is also interesting to me.

If you feel the deep visceral need to change your situation because you are unhappy, hard work is necessary, but in your zeal to transfer to a different situation that is more preferable to you (not 'improved' or 'better', these descriptions are subjective) remain light hearted and open, to ideas, love and joy.

It is quite plausible that we are all dreaming. It is also quite plausible that we were created by a higher being who suffered a 7 day burst of creativity, who smiled after his 7 says of work and said 'it was good'.

Most importantly be open to the fact that everything you believe may be completely incorrect.

All we can do after all these deep thoughts about the meaning of life, the universe and consciousness is laugh.

Because we have arrived at a conclusion we were unconsciously aware of all along! But only after these conversations with ourselves and others can we consciously appreciate it. 

'Its cool being alive and shit and I enjoy being conscious, aware and confused' 

Going with this underlying 'non-serious' approach to life, surely it makes sense to enjoy your time here? Bringing it back to the title of this post; does it not make sense that having chosen our belief or at least having established a vague personal idea about life, we should at the very least enjoy ourselves? 
The only options out of the thousands before you that are definitely immoral are those that involve hurting other participants in this game.
Anything beyond this is cool, do whatever takes your fancy. And if you want something in particular, put the effort in and its yours.

'I have a good job, I am well payed, I have a big house, full of the latest technology, I have a good retirement plan, a car that inspires envy, my job gives me financial security, I can support my family'

All aspects of a successful fellow correct? Perhaps, but only as long as he is happy when he wakes up on Monday morning and smiles at the week ahead of him. Life should be less of a balence between work and play, and more of a fun game that at different times yields happiness and strife, but mostly happiness.
So stress less and and enjoy more.

Bad times are needed to appreciate the good