Stuff I was wrong about

Wow, where do I begin? :p I’ve been wrong about a lot in my life, but the thought that prompts this blog entry is nutrition and exercise.

Here are the two prevailing thoughts I had growing up regarding nutrition and exercise:

• Diets are inherently unhealthy. Only people with poor self-image and potential eating disorders went on diets.
• Exercising is stupid. I don’t want to fake moving stuff around (resistance exercises) or pretend to go somewhere (running, swimming, stair climbing, etc.). People should be fit by actually doing stuff.

Now, I realize how wrong I was. I was blessed as a kid (and now, to a large extent) with a good metabolism, and I loved to run around and play. As I got older, I ran around less, but due to walking everywhere I went, taking public transit, and being busy with work, I didn’t really put on weight and had a good amount of healthy muscle.

I had a lot of classmates in school (both high school and college) who seemed overly concerned with their perfectly healthy bodies, always worried that they were fat. This led me to form a false association in my head between diets and poor self-esteem, rather than forming the correct idea that a diet is simply being cognizant of what you are eating and attempting to make good decisions about food.

I sit at home, I sit in the car, then I sit at work. I’m no longer the walk-everywhere girl who had strong legs and didn’t mind walking a mile and a half or more to where I wanted to go. My metabolism has slowed down — not a whole lot yet, but it’s definitely caught me off-guard in the last few years.

As I look forward to the rest of my life, I’ve seen that I have to make active, conscious choices to get and stay healthy. I’ve read enough literature now that I know that changing my diet simply means that I’ll be giving my body better fuel to operate for years to come, not trying to starve myself for some shallow purpose. I know that exercising means that I’ll make my body stronger, so that I can live a longer, more fulfilling life.

I’ve learned some interesting things about nutrition too. I’ve learned that good fats are really important and that there isn’t just a small difference between the good and bad fats — there is a HUGE world of a difference in their roles in the body. “Good” and “bad” isn’t being used in a relative sense here, but in an absolute sense.

I’ve learned the importance of fiber to overall health, why it’s good for the heart as well as being correlated to decreased chances of various kinds of cancers.

I’ve learned what role various types of vitamins play in the body.

I’ve also learned that some of what I learned about nutrition when I was younger was waaaaay off. For instance, complex carbs are not all good; white potato is technically a complex carb, but it has almost nil nutritional value and is almost equivalent to just eating sugar. I learned that milk is not necessarily good for you and isn’t necessarily the best calcium delivery agent, despite what the dairy marketing machine will tell you. I learned that eggs are much better for you than believed during the ’90s.

I learned that when I think of the Food Pyramid, I have to keep in mind that it was produced by the United States Department of Agriculture, not a medical or health association, after much lobbying by various bodies within it.

I’ve been eating better for the last month and week, and it’s really nice. I am eating a bigger variety of vegetables in different colors, I’m eating less meat high in saturated fat, and I’m still eating pretty much everything I love, but in smaller quantities with fruits and vegetables taking up the void that would have been second helpings of meat or pasta or rice. I’ve been trying to have a piece of fruit or vegetable at every meal.

I haven’t had the mid-afternoon, post-lunch blahs all year, except once when I had a lot of rice. It’s a nice change. 🙂

The latest book I’ve read on nutrition was Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating.

I highly recommend it.

Unreasonable fears

I’m not talking about phobias that totally break people down. I have some random fears, not without roots, but they are still unreasonable at my place in life.

One of my greatest fears is calling strangers on the phone, whether it is customer service or a store to ask questions or what. I’ve largely gotten over it and can make myself call, but my throat gets dry and my head feels woozy whenever I do.

I know why. When I was younger, my older bro, my sister, and I often had to call up people and places on behalf of my parents, due to the language barrier. But it’s not easy being a kid and calling adults, expecting them to take you seriously, especially when you are talking about things you don’t know.

Imagine you are at your job. And some kid calls you, says they are calling on behalf of their parent or parents. The kid sounds young, maybe 10 years old. You think you are being jerked around, but try to be nice. The kid asks some questions, making you wait while talking to someone off the phone (is it an adult? or is it another kid prompting them on this prank?), then gets off the phone. The phone rings again, and it’s the same kid. She’s asking you the same questions. Or different ones. Whatever. It’s getting annoying, and you are busy. You speak curtly, but you are willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. By the time she calls again, you are pissed off. You curse out the 10 year old, annoyed to keep getting these crank calls, which, by this time, you are sure it is. You scream at her and tell that bitch to never call back and some creative things she can do with her “parents”.

Well, I was that kid. And I wasn’t making crank calls. And I didn’t want to bother them and call them over and over again, but there it is. Most immigrants’ kids will tell you that they had to do this everyday for something or another.

The person on the phone yells at you for wasting their time. Randomly, and more frequently than you might imagine, they’ll get personal and say something about my background, like, “Go back to China, you stupid ching-chong,” especially if they’ve heard you talking to your parents. The parents at home yell at you for not getting the information correctly the first time, maybe even for making the person on the line mad. But you don’t even know what words to use for what they want to talk about. The concepts are hard for a kid.

The other, lesser component of this is having to give them my name. It’s almost always an ordeal. Some people have asked me, “Don’t you have an ‘American’ name?” or, more politely, “Do you have a nickname you go by?” Ignoring the inherent xenophobia of the first question (if I am American, and that’s my name, what is un-American about my name? Ah, you mean a name of Western origins. That’s not the same as being American.) it’s not like I wouldn’t rather I had a name that people could easily understand and say. And it’s not like I haven’t tried to fit them on for size and see how they feel. I know a lot of people who have changed their names for precisely this reason. But nothing else fits me. I’ve been this name for so long. I’ve tried and tried again. I just live with it because it’s me, and I’m used to people not getting the name right. It’s ok, as long as they put in an effort. It’s rude if they don’t put in an effort, but not getting it right the first few times is not a crime. I even tell people it’s ok to ask me again later, so they aren’t embarrassed to ask.

Anyway… I can call people now. I rehearse what I will say and get to the point quickly but politely, so I don’t waste their time. I know to always say, “Let me spell it for you,” when having people looking up my account. I know what I’m calling about. I know how to assert myself if someone is insulting to me. I know how to respond nicely when I am speaking with a person who is trying to help. I know I’m in control. (Well, unless I’m trying to cancel AOL, I suppose.)

But always, in the pit of my stomach, there is a painful pit lodged right between my ribs, fear that someone will scream at me and curse me out and tell me to go back to where I came from, and being unable to avoid the situation in the future, being out of control of my circumstances.

It hasn’t happened in years. But there it is.

What’s your unreasonable fear?