THE LIMERICK PEDESTRIAN DIET AND EXERCISE PLAN
Patty Limerick
Center of the American West
Pedestrian:
1) going or done on foot; walking;
2) lacking interest or imagination; prosaic; dull, as a literary style, etc.
Even with rather limited brains, caterpillars who have turned into butterflies must be momentarily stunned when crawling is replaced by flying.
I have–a bit in the manner of the caterpillar’s exhilarating transition–gone from trudging to striding, and acquiring in the process a pretty dramatically different form. I have had more than my share of the satisfaction, exuberance, and astonishment that becoming physically reconfigured can deliver.
And, with this essay, I would like to issue an invitation to other caterpillars, now moving slowly over the earth, to consider sharing in this fun.
Over the course of six months, I lost forty pounds, about one-quarter of my initial body weight. Contrary to what the laws of physics might predict, the force of gravity seemed to surrender half its usual power over me. At age fifty–five, I feel physically better than I’ve felt since I was a kid. The program I followed eliminates most of the irritations and pitfalls that can make a diet into a burden that inspires the dieter to yearn for the whole ordeal to end as soon as possible.
No one should start this diet, though, the way I did.
My husband, at age 56, died of a sudden stroke. We had been together for 32 years. I lost the first five or six pounds simply because food was not appealing or interesting or even relevant. But then the process of losing weight became chosen and intentional, and altogether a remarkable experience in proving that I had a capacity to conduct myself with purpose and discipline. Grief was the beginning of the diet, but at least partial recovery from grief was one of the outcomes.
So what I recommend here is the Patty Limerick Pedestrian Diet and Exercise Plan, or what I did after the initial weeks of intense grief after my husband’s death. The diet meets the definition of “pedestrian,” quoted above, though I must say that definition #2 (“lacking interest or imagination; prosaic; dull”) is a little wounding, even if it is also pretty accurate. But too many diets are not pedestrian enough: they are high-falutin’ and complicated; they require special equipment or special food; they require you to measure this, that, and the other in your intake, and to flee in horror from the temptation posed by forbidden food or drink. In other words, these non-pedestrian diets force you away from normal life in a manner rather reminiscent of jailers and wardens incarcerating a criminal, leaving you to look yearningly at normal life through the bars of your prison cell of a diet.
No wonder it’s hard to stay on these non-pedestrian diets.
So what’s the alternative?
Part One: Walk as much as you can.
Part Two: Eat all the time. Never go hungry on the Pedestrian Diet.
PART ONE
Walk as Much as You Can
On one day three months into my widowhood, I set off to walk across campus to give a lecture in a friend’s class. I had left my office a little too late, and as I trudged along, I said to myself, “Well, for heaven’s sake, you are late. So why don’t you try walking faster?”
Well, what a concept! I gave it a try. The sensation was interesting and novel. I thought I might try to keep it up.
When I was invited to breakfast, lunch, or dinner somewhere in town, I walked. Since I had never been much of a pedestrian before, on nearly all of these walks, I was on my “maiden run” (“maiden walk” doesn’t sound exactly right, though at age 55, it is wonderful to be associated with the word “maiden” in any phrasing), so I had no idea how long it would take to get from Point A to Point B. This uncertainty reinforced the intent to walk faster, since the desire to get to the destination and not leave a friend sitting alone looking at her or his watch effectively picked up my pace.
“Destination walking” is definitely the way to start (the authorities call this “integrative exercise”). It spares you the sorrow and burden of exercising for the sake of exercise. But at a certain point, a gear located somewhere in the self (the brain? the muscles? the soul?) kicks over, and walking becomes something you want to do, something you must do, and at that point, heading off to arrive at a particular destination at a particular time becomes unnecessary as a motivation. After the transition, if you don’t walk, you feel restless, uneasy, and more than a little batty; denying yourself the right to walk can resemble trying to persuade a mountain lion to curl up peacefully on a lap and watch TV or listen to soft rock music. This compulsion to walk evidently indicates an addiction to the body’s most pleasant chemical, endorphins. But there’s no reason to think technically about this, since this internally generated chemical provides one of the world’s healthiest and happiest ways of getting high. It did not surprise me when I learned that the excellent walking shoes I had acquired carried the “honesty in advertising” name, Addiction Walkers. One indication of the fact that you have crossed over occurs in parking lots: when you find a parking place close to the store or restaurant you are going to, you feel disappointed that you will have so little distance to walk.
Combined with the change in eating I am about to describe, walking is simply a miraculous force for weight loss. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I’m not sure if I would have believed that walking could be so sufficient and effective as the key element of an exercise plan. I believe I walk two to five miles a day, but as you’ll see soon, measuring and calibrating–and, especially, scolding or reproaching yourself if you do not measure up to some tedious, quantified standard–are not a part of this particular program.
But here is the key dimension of success: you do not need to acquire special equipment (except some version of “Addiction Walker” shoes), and you do not need to get in a car and drive a few miles to a place to exercise. Here is the really good news: the surface of the earth is continuous (well, yes, there are oceans, but they only restrict movement in one direction, and if you are facing the ocean and are stymied on how to proceed, just turn right or left, and rediscover that there is no better turf for walking than a beach), and it extends to your front door. And you will not need to hire a trainer or coach to teach you how to walk. Your parents, as well as your own desire for independence, covered that base quite a few years ago.
We will debate, into eternity, the degree to which human beings should dominate the earth and its resources, but the basic fact of life on this planet is that the earth is there for us to walk on. No need to resolve to go to the gym, and then reproach yourself for letting that resolution drift. Just walk out your door, and the endorphins are gearing up, preparing to deliver you a treat.
PART TWO
Eat All the Time
Never go hungry. Eat whenever the impulse strikes. Eat everything you can find in the way of apples, bananas, oranges, grapefruit, strawberries, blueberries, grapes, watermelon, cantaloupe, peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, pineapple, and I have probably left out several fun and appealing fruits. Reduce the obstacles presented by the seeming hassle of preparation: every day or two, put ten minutes into cutting apples in quarters, washing grapes and strawberries, etc., and storing them in the refrigerator for easy access, so that not a second will pass between feeling hungry–and eating! Nothing can count as “forbidden fruit” on the Limerick Pedestrian Diet. On the contrary, as you settle into these new habits, fruit will become more and more astonishing in its power to knock your taste buds for a loop, almost overpowering the unleashing of endorphins as a good time.
Same for vegetables: asparagus, broccoli, or zucchini with feta cheese can taste like a gourmet meal. Eat enough salads well-stocked with cucumbers, celery, bell peppers, carrots, mushrooms, lettuce, and arrgula, and you are well-installed on the high-ground. Thus you are free to indulge in any salad supplement like olives, avocado, artichoke hearts, anchovies, smoked salmon, slices of roast turkey or beef. You do not, in other words, have to become a vegetarian (although it is always an interesting fact to contemplate, that it takes seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat). Perhaps most important, do not hold back on the salad dressing. Dump it on. Do not ask for the dressing to be brought on the side, and do not dribble out a drop or two on an otherwise graceless salad. Once again, dump it on. If you are eating a salad, you have made the fundamental commitment to eating a plate filled with lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, carrots, etc. (really, when you think about the make-up of these items, you are lunching on a big bowl of water with a little fiber thrown in), and no one (not even you yourself) has any right to punish you by withholding the salad dressing.
Now, of course, if you never cared much for salad dressing, that’s a different situation. The key to the success of the Limerick Pedestrian Diet is this: identify the foods or beverages that you really like, and do not give them up. If, for instance, you share with me an affection for half-and-half in coffee, keep dumping the half-and-half into your coffee. Skim milk in coffee is a horror, and I knew that if I tried to go that route, I would be pissed off on a regular, daily basis, and this anger and irritation would eventually–actually, rather quickly–deep-six the diet. When it comes to ordering lattes, I have taken a more “Las Vegas gambling” approach: I order the latte; if the person goes ahead and gives me a whole-milk latte, I welcome that happy development; and if the person asks which kind I want, I sigh and ask for skim milk. I am happy to say that mostly the default latte is a whole-milk latte, which is immeasurably more enjoyable. I also never went abstemious when it came to wine and beer; I suppose I could have lost 50 or 60 pounds and ended up looking gaunt, scrawny, and shrunken, if I had given up these sources of calories. Here, again, is the key: identify the personal comfort foods that prevent you from rescue you from the feeling that you are living in an irritable state of deprivation.
And now we reach the delicate matter of limits, constraints, and prohibitions. A diet plan that focuses on what you cannot and should not eat is a diet plan that is headed for breakdown; the harsher the prohibition, the more desperate the desire for the prohibited item. So, yes, there are some foods–French fries, potato chips, dishes with heavy sauces, over-size hamburgers smothered in cheese, and a multiplicity of cakes and pies–that will prevent the Limerick Pedestrian Exercise Plan from having its desired effect. Rather than outright prohibition, I advocate an alternative gluttony: eat so much in the way of fruit and vegetables that, by the time you contemplate these temptations, you are too full to do much beyond contemplating.
And then there’s the easy matter of giving up boring foods. Every now and then, a loaf of bread is a transcendent creation, and it is a crime not to have a slice. Mostly, though, bread is boring, and giving it up for a time is a matter involving no particular hardship or sorrow. Same for rice, potatoes, and pasta–these can, in some preparations, be astounding and great, but mostly they just sit there as a light-colored accumulation of matter on a plate, and passing up something so tedious is no sacrifice at all. (Do not refer to these items as “carbs,” if you can avoid it; in the early twenty-first century, that label will make them into forbidden items and increase their allure and appeal.)
And now we get to the part about forbearance and forgiveness. If, say, you go to someone’s birthday party, and you are passed a slice of birthday cake, eat it. The importance of celebrating the birth and life of a friend transcends any persnickety-ness you might have developed about the empty calories of cake. But beyond birthdays, the point of this whole diet and exercise program is its pedestrianness: if you fall off the program, you don’t have far to fall. If you lose your wits and have a moment of intense fun with a dessert or, say, some intensely fried food, you can in the next instant get yourself back on track, with no recriminations and no loss of momentum.
One very important part of the plan is to spare yourself a starting date or starting weight. If you skip the part of designating a date as the “start” of your diet, you will spare yourself the burdens of thinking, “Oh no, I am only two weeks into a fifteen-week diet. I wonder if I can keep it up!” Skip the starting date, and you have freed yourself from a march of endurance and tested patience to the ending date. (True to my rule here, I did not know for a fact that I had lost 40 pounds until I checked the records of my previous physical exam at my doctor’s office.)
So, when the Limerick Pedestrian Diet is in full swing, you get to eat all the time, and often you eat more than anybody else in your company. It is hard to work up much in the way of a sense of deprivation when your plate has a lot more on it than the plates of your companions. And it is utterly astonishing–how much you can eat, and still end up consuming comparatively few calories. Again, the appearance of the word “calories” requires another declaration of the fact that you are not to count, calibrate, or measure anything–calories, carbohydrates, miles you have or have not walked, hours between when you last ate and when you will eat again. All that information is simply “noise.” The only thing that counts is that you are eating a lot of great-tasting food, which is not adding up to much in the way of calories, and you are moving around the planet with energy, purpose, and a sense of achievement.
The customs of diet and exercise I followed produced a great outcome: I am treated, every day, to sensations of physical well-being, vigor, cheer, and confidence, sensations that steadily rescue and redeem me from my widow’s grief. After my husband died, I felt for a time that the only two things I controlled in life were 1) what I ate and 2) how much I walked. I actually controlled quite a few more matters than that, but at least I had those two completely in hand. The sense of being fit and lively became a great comfort to me. It seems entirely possible that lots of people who think that life is beyond bearing would reach a much happier conclusion if they followed the Limerick Pedestrian Program and thereby came to recognize themselves as people of determination, courage, and confidence.
And then there is the fact that we read, these days, one set of frequent newspaper stories about the American people’s struggle with obesity, and another set of frequent newspaper stories about the American people’s vexation with foreign oil dependence and rising gasoline prices. In a manner that is admittedly miniscule in its global impact, my changed life ties these two problems together: my new habits reduced my weight and my cholesterol, and they reduced the frequency of my visits to the gas pump. I should think that many Americans would welcome this paired set of improvements.
And now a word to my fellow workaholics. Yes, you are absolutely right; walking takes time that you think you don’t have. You have to be writing and taking action and holding meetings. You have no time to walk.
I know this drill very thoroughly and very intimately. Following this line of thought (or what tries to pass as thought) gave me my first and singularly effective line of defense against vigor and health in my “intellectual couch potato” days.
So how to counter that?
As you set out for a walk, choose a problem that has you stymied in your work. Devote the walk to thinking about that problem. Move it around in your mind. Approach it, and then retreat from it, and then come around from behind at it. Here is a very likely outcome: in the course of the walk, the problem that simply sat in your path, blocking your motion and your progress, will submit to solution, or sometimes even to a reconceptualization that makes it into more of an opportunity than a problem. By taking the walk, you will have actually saved time and increased your efficiency at work. The act of walking will, in very down-to-earth ways, set you (and your imagination and your problem-solving capacity) free. Exercise can focus and unleash the mind in a manner unmatched by no other conscious act. In truth, if the measure of performance is true problem-solving and solution-finding, a whole array of professionals and consultants should be able to allocate their exercise time as “billable hours”!
I return to my opening invitation:
Fellow earth-bound caterpillars, consider the fun you will have as butterflies. Walk as much as you can. Eat a great deal. Tell gravity to back off. Solve your problems as you move energetically over your planet. Rather than fighting human nature, acknowledge and accept our flaws and frailties as mortals, while also acknowledging the extraordinary will to better behavior stored within all of us.
Welcome to the Limerick Pedestrian Diet and Exercise Plan.
I am proud to have your company.
