Give In To The Moment

by Jason Campagna, M.D., Ph.D.

Fitness is about many things– and can mean different things to different people. I have a suggestion: whatever it means to you, live in the moment and enjoy the journey. Fitness is a process, not a destination. The prevailing way of living in our Western societies is to plan out our lives, both for the long term and on a day-to-day basis. We have planners and digital calendars that map out our lives, sometimes to the minute. We feel we’re in control, with plans like this.

But it’s an illusion.

We cannot control our lives to this degree, no matter how we try. Things will always come up to spoil the best-laid plans, and the more detailed our plans the more of a guarantee that something will go wrong.

And what happens when the plans go wrong? We are stressed out, because things get out of our control and don’t live up to our expectations. This is one of the greatest sources of stress for most people, actually.

Think about how often your days actually go according to plan, exactly — it’s pretty rare, because we have no way of predicting the future. No matter how hard we try. There’s always an email that will disrupt things, a last-minute meeting, cancellations and postponements, emergencies and fires to put out.

So if plans will almost always go wrong, and when they do we get stressed out, isn’t all the time we spend creating the plans a bit of a waste?

But what’s the alternative? Giving yourself to the moment. This will not work for everyone, I’ll admit: there are those who will have a hard time giving up the illusion of control, and others who are controlled by their bosses or peers and cannot work or live this way.

Still, it’s something worth considering. Here’s how to do it — starting with the don’ts:

1. Don’t plan. Planning is an attempt to control the world around us, but it’s a futile attempt. Throw out your plans, for now at least until you’ve decided this method isn’t for you. What do you do instead? More on this below. For now, just stop planning.
2. Don’t worry about the future. Will something bad happen? Are there things coming up that we must anticipate and prepare for? Of course, if there’s a massive hurricane headed your way, you should probably get ready. But otherwise, just realize that the future is unpredictable, and worrying about it is a waste of time. Focus on right now, and you’ll always be able to handle what comes.
3. Don’t have expectations. If you expect people to act a certain way, or hope that things will turn out a certain way, you’ll always run into problems. Forget about outcomes for now. Go into things without expectations, and they will always turn out perfectly (if a bit messy).
4. Don’t get annoyed when others act a certain way. Don’t expect people to act any way other than how they actually act. They are exactly the way they should be — even if that’s selfish or weird or aggressive. Those are their problems. Your problem is figuring out how you should act. I’d also advise you to try to understand others — why do they act the way they do?
5. Don’t overreact. This is a major problem when people plan and things go wrong — they overreact, and get upset and emotional and blow things out of proportion. Stay calm, because if things “go wrong”, they didn’t actually go wrong — they just happened. More on how to react below.
6. Don’t try to be proactive. This is a common prescription (being proactive) in management and business literature. And while I think the general idea is fine — do something to prevent problems from recurring rather than just fixing them after they happen — one of the problems this creates is always worrying about what might happen. And creating solutions before there are problems — if there never is a problem, you’ve wasted a lot of time creating the solution, and a lot of energy worrying about the future.

And now for the dos:

1. Do be open. What would it be like to go into each day without a plan, but just to see what happens? A bit scary, because of the lack of security and control, a bit chaotic perhaps, a bit like we’re a piece of driftwood floating in the middle of a churning sea. But in truth, this is what it’s like to go into each day *with* a plan — it’s just that we normally fool ourselves about the amount of control we have. So start the day with no plan, and be open to what emerges in each moment.
2. Do what you love. So what should you do, now that you have no plan? Do what you’re passionate about, do what excites you right now. Create something amazing. Pour yourself energetically into a project. Build something new. And what you think you’re creating might turn out to be completely different from what emerges, but you’ll have fun doing it and something even better might be revealed.
3. Do act, in the moment. Giving yourself to the moment doesn’t mean being passive and just letting life happen. It means acting, but doing what is best at this moment, what you are excited about right now, what needs to be done, in the present.
4. Do respond appropriately. Life happens, and we must respond. But instead of overreacting, we can respond calmly and appropriately. We can take the action that’s required, fix the problem, do what’s necessary to prevent it from happening again, and move on without it ruining our day.
5. Do accept. Accept what happens. It might not be what you considered ideal, but it’s what life has given you, what has resulted from your actions in an unpredicatable world. Accept it, respond, act, move on. Don’t get caught up in things not going your way, but accept that’s what has happened.

Again, this way of living won’t be for everybody. Some don’t have the freedom to live this way, and others just won’t give up control. Some will think this is a passive way of living, but it really isn’t: it’s just a way of living in the moment without being caught up in the future (or the past) so much.

And when we live in the moment, we’re really living life to the fullest. This is the gift of the present.

This entry was written by jcampagna, posted on November 5, 2009 at 9:16 pm, filed under Fitness, Life is Fitness, Lifestyle and Spa, Santa Barbara and tagged Fitness, jason campagna, Lifestyle, SOMA GET FIT. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Q and A, with Dr. Jason Campagna, Soma Get Fit Medical Director

Q and A,

By Jason Campagna, M.D., P.h.D.

Medical Director Soma Get Fit

Q:  “I’d like to speak with a health expert (e.g. a doctor, registered dietitian or similar source) who can answer the following: If someone is heading to a social occasion where they expect to have several alcoholic drinks, is there anything they should do — or avoid doing — beforehand to minimize the chances of becoming drunk? What steps will help reduce the post-party after-effects (e.g. a hangover or general feeling of exhaustion)? This is for a health piece in a Canadian consumer women’s magazine.”

A:  In general, there is nothing that anyone can do prior to consuming alcohol which can reliably prevent or diminish the chances of becoming ‘drunk’. The basic mechanics of alcohol consumption and the bodies response to it are fairly straight forward. All alcoholic beverages have some amount of actual alcohol in them (the proof designation). This is the dose of the alcohol. Once consumed, that dose of alcohol is broken down by pathways which are to some degree effected by how much one normally drinks. A heavy drinker can break down more alcohol per hour than a light drinker. So, in short, if someone is normally a light drinker but engages in heavy drinking, they are setting themselves up to be quite drunk in short order. The pathways that break the alcohol down in the body do this breaking down in a specific way: they ‘consume’ some constant amount of the dose each hour. Lets say you drink 100 units of alcohol in a single glass of wine. Lets also say that your body can consume about 200 units of alcohol per hour. As long as you do not exceed 200 units of alcohol per hour, you will not become drunk. Heavy drinkers can break down more units per hour, which explains why they can drink more. If a glass of wine has 100 units, but a shot of vodka has 180, then in an hour we are talking 2 glasses of wine or one shot of vodka before problems begin. This much is pretty simple and true for everyone. The major factor for any one person is how much of the dose of alcohol in a drink actually makes it into your bloodstream. Sticking with the 100 units per glass of wine for the moment. It turns out that if you have not eaten a meal in some number of hours, almost all of that dose gets taken right into the blood. So, drink 100 units, get 100 units in your blood. But, food in the stomach stops much of that absorption so that perhaps you only get 40 or 50 units into the bloodstream. In short, if you eat and drink you get less dose into the blood and can drink more.

The problems come in three ways. One was mentioned above. Someone is normally a light drinker but drinks heavily that night. Second, someone eats dinner and drinks wine but feels no effect from the wine, so keeps drinking at that pace after the meal. That person will go from absorbing 40 units of 100 (40%) to something approaching 90 units or so (90%) pretty quickly. If that person does not “slow down”, lots of alcohol hits the bloodstream and even though you may have felt okay over dinner, that changes pretty fast. The last issue comes from the dehydrating effects of alcohol. Drinking makes you urinate. This is called the diuretic effect of alcohol. The dehydration that comes from drinking can really cause someone to get drunk much faster (100 units in your blood seems like much more to the body when you lose lots of volume by urinating all night long). So, drinking even at a pace that seems okay for you, can be too much after a few hours.

The hangover part is well understood, but a real nightmare to make better! For every hangover recipe or formula we know of, there are hundreds that people of tried over the years and have faded away. The breakdown product of the alcohol in your blood is actually a toxin. This toxin also gets broken down by the body. But, at a much, much slower rate that the alcohol. The hangover effects of the alcohol are due to this toxin in the blood. In fact, the alcohol abuse drugs we prescribe to people actually just inhibit the pathways that break down that toxin so that after a few sips of alcohol, the effects of the toxin are immediate. People just feel hungover immediately! So, less drink equals better morning. Keeping hydrated is the most important thing other than limiting intake that anyone can do. Drink lots of water as you drink alcohol and drink water before going to bed. Dehydration makes the toxins effects much, much worse. So, in short, there are no good prevention steps but slowing down drinking as the night wears on and staying hydrated are absolutely required to even have a fighting chance of feeling well the next day!

This entry was written by scrawford, posted on October 21, 2009 at 12:20 pm, filed under Fitness, Food, Nutrition and tagged alcohol, health, jason campagna, SOMA GET FIT. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

The Illusory Nature of Fitness

If you are reading this column in the SOMA Get Fit blog, it is almost certainly because you are working with Scott and our team in an attempt to get more fit–a noble and important goal, without a doubt. It is, however, a dangerous one in that it can, and often does, consume huge swaths of time and energy. The goal of fitness is not by itself the culprit. Rather, it is that our modern culture and lifestyles imbue us with a mindset that problems can be tackled by setting “goals.” These goals are rarely prioritized, often scheduled into a day that is already full, and, in the end, often not fully realized. For every New Year’s resolution that has gone unmet, there are dozens more “goals” that have met their demise on the pyre of our modern, over-worked, over-scheduled lives. At SOMA, we want to let you in on a little secret: this kind of goal setting is useless and demoralizing. It will serve no useful purpose in your life, but instead will only magnify the deficiencies that you already feel and have brought you to us in the first place.

Fitness as a goal is no goal at all–it is an illusion, no different than setting up a goal of “world peace,” or a “safer city,” or a “greener planet.” What does any of this mean? How do we get these things? In the same way that a politician can offer up working solutions for maintaining the peace, making your city safer, or sustaining a greener planet, SOMA offers you a viable way to get more fit. All of this, however, spares you from having to make the hard choices of what such things mean to you. As a physician and a neuro-scientist, I can state with near certainty that every individual’s definition of fitness and one’s actual abilities to reach their fitness ideal will change as they age. Not only aging in the chronological sense but in an emotional sense too. For instance, there is certainly no major physiological limitation that says a 50-year-old could not keep muscle mass like that of a 20-year-old. A more relevant question, however, is this: would a 50-year-old want that? This is the moving target of fitness–it means different things to different people at different times of their lives.

The challenge in getting fit, and staying fit, critically depends on your ability to flesh out what it is you want from your training and what it is you do not want. If your definition of fitness is having those sculpted hips and legs of a 20-year-old figure skater, and you just hit your 40th birthday, I think I can advise you that you are in for some disappointment. Can you “get there”? Sure you can, but not without making major sacrifices in the rest of your life. Family, friends, work, sleep–something will have to give. At 20, these things may have been less important to you, so you would not have had to make the hard choices. At 40, your priorities are likely to have changed, and these things are probably highly important to you. Goal-setting involves prioritizing. The most crucial part of fitness lies in determining how you will accommodate your training into your life without ruining one or the other, or both.

SOMA is more than a mechanism to realize physical improvement. We pride ourselves on recognizing the shifting nature of fitness and our bodies, and on our ability to help you define clearly and precisely what fitness means to you. Nearly anyone today can provide you a place to sweat and run through some exercises. Months later, and perhaps with a lighter wallet, you might wake up and realize that you maybe look thinner, or perhaps can run a bit further, or even both; but you also realize that you are unfulfilled and do not feel any better, any younger, any faster, or any stronger. And therein lie the paradox and the challenge: working out brings your weaknesses front and center, weaknesses that were not there when you started your fitness program. Part of getting fit is recognizing that overcoming those weaknesses makes us stronger, makes us healthier.

In the end, that is what fitness truly is: challenging ourselves, our bodies, and our minds to do better, to do more, to do something more effectively. These challenges and journeys to improve ourselves should bring us joy. And we ought to recognize that at any age it is always a worthy goal to learn about ourselves and our limitations and to challenge them. Perhaps this is the secret to fitness, and it is certainly something that we at SOMA hope to help you to experience.

By Jason Campagna, M.D., PH.D.

Medical Director

This entry was written by scrawford, posted on October 11, 2009 at 10:42 pm, filed under Fitness, Life is Fitness, Santa Barbara and tagged Blog, Fitness, jason campagna, Medical Director, Santa Barbara, SOMA GET FIT. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Fitness as Life

by Jason Campagna

I write this column as I sit on a long-haul, late-night flight from Philadelphia to LA. I peck out the words on the keyboard of my new Macbook Air, my iPhone pipes my private melody selections into my brain, and I just finished reading on my Amazon Kindle e-book reader. In the midst of all of this technology, all these toys designed to aid me in the pursuit of whatever I deem worthy of chasing, I am lamenting my two days in a hotel room, some big meals, some fast food, the one-too-many famous Philly cheesesteaks, and my all around sense of lethargy. You would think I had been exiled from my life for weeks or months given the level of “flabbiness” I feel at this moment. To make matters worse, the article I read in Esquire has informed me that many of the celebrity women with whom I have had some passing infatuation with over the years—Rachel Hunter, Cate Blanchett, Gwen Stefani, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ellen Pompeo, Jennifer Aniston, to name a few—they all turn 39 this year! One year older than myself, mind you.

So here I am now, sitting confined within a tube, contemplating this newly discovered problem: How can I possibly be the male equivalent of Rachel Hunter for my 39th year if I cannot even manage a two-day trip East without falling into emotional and physical ruin?! I mean how can I be surrounded by all this technology and not get time for the hotel gym?

After some continued brooding and further reading, I come across an article where Paul Walker (from Fast and the Furious fame and local Santa Barbara resident) is claiming that he eschews gyms and technology and just uses his body to exercise. Did I read that right? He shuns technology in his quest for fitness? I read on to discover that he exercises with the intention of using his body for some sport or activity: martial arts, surfing, soccer, what have you. It then occurs to me that Mr. Walker has just reminded me, for the cost of a magazine purchase, of our mission here at SOMA Get Fit.

Soma is Latin for “body.” We chose our name specifically to convey both the purpose and focus of our efforts. I now realize that, in fact, it is also the tool that we use. We use our bodies to augment our body’s performance, and the end goal of our effort is that the body is better able to do what we ask of it. Fitness and its results lie in what we ask of our bodies, of our “somas,” to do for us.

Fitness is not external to us. And just as Paul Walker’s approach to fitness rests with his simple and elegant goal of using his body for the purposes for which it was designed—specific goal-driven activities—my fitness, everyone’s fitness, should start and end with my body in motion. My emotion, my angst, my technologies and toys—all are, at best, supplemental aids to my body as it assists me in reaching my goals. To mistakenly imbue these other things with some holy status takes the focus away from where it needs to be: understanding the body as your path, your goal, and your primary tool.

I will no doubt fully recover from my lethargy, my fitness funk, as soon as I land, stretch my legs, and get some sleep. But after this not-so-small revelation, which I have received while cramped into a small seat inside a small tube hurtling me back home, I am already on my way to recovery. This is because the next time I travel, I will remind myself that those mile-long city walks I took from my hotel to the meeting place, those peaceful moments of sipping orange juice as the sun came up this morning, that these too are the rewards of a life spent in pursuit of an integrated, fully responsive “soma.” My body did not betray me because I failed to challenge it with chin-ups or wall squats, regardless of what my harsh mood or harsher judgment is telling me at the moment. My soma is still right here with me—and it’s vital as ever, waiting patiently for me to regain my footing, ready to respond in kind to the next series of challenges I ask it to take on.

This entry was written by scrawford, posted on at 10:36 pm, filed under Fitness, Life is Fitness, Santa Barbara and tagged Fitness, jason campagna, SOMA GET FIT. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.