Happiness Express

by Khurshed Batliwala

  Food should make you happy. The best silence is the hush that suddenly dawns at a dining table as everyone goes into a state of bliss enjoying every morsel of their food.

  Of all my research and experimentation with cooking and diets, the macrobiotic and the Ayurvedic ways stand out. Both are quite similar, as they focus on balance. A balanced, happy microbiome is going to make a balanced, happy you. Check the bibliography for books on these topics.

  As you make greener, healthier choices, the vibrant bouncy health you always wanted will be yours. The wooziness in your thinking will vanish and you will be able to take rational, intelligent decisions. The good bacteria in your gut will experience many happily ever-afters. Your face will glow and your eyes will twinkle. Your smile will widen and your laugh will be deeper. . . and you will wonder what you really saw in that horrible sugar-laden, full-of-white-flour doughnut that you were once addicted to.

  Chapter 5

  EXERCISE

  Jogi, a great friend, used to be a body builder par excellence. He had his bulges in all the right places. He’d shoot me knowing looks and tut-tut about my appearance whenever I complained of aches and pains. Unlike him, I was quite averse to exercise back then. I used to think, why spend time and effort on something as transient as the body? Isn’t it wiser to take care of the mind alone? After all, that’s what’s tagging along with me when I leave my body.

  Jogi would huff and puff in the gym; I would meditate. I should point out that Jogi was not disinclined towards spirituality. Quite the contrary. Even though he was huge, unlike most body builders, he had trained himself to be flexible as well. He did brilliant Yoga and was a regular meditator. He was fit, healthy and mostly happy. I was. . . happy ☺

  Jogi was brilliant at body work. I don’t meet him often these days and the memory of his massages fill me with nostalgia. One day, after he had managed to get rid of a particularly painful knot in my body, he insisted that I accompany him to the gym. He promised he won’t make me work out or anything. ‘Just come,’ he said.

  I knew where my next massage was coming from, so I didn’t argue much and went along. We reached the gym, and Jogi started his workout while I sat and watched. After about 10 minutes, he came up to me with two dumbbells of 2 kg each. He thrust them into my hands and said, ’Hold these.’ And he went back to his exercising. To humour him and not look completely out of place, I readily complied. All I had to do was hold them—how hard could that be?!

  I realised 2 kg can become very heavy, very quickly. After a few minutes, I went up to him and asked him if I could let go of the dumbbells. He airily replied, ‘Just hold them for a little longer.’ I did. Three minutes later, I felt as if I was holding 20 kg in each hand. I made some sad groaning noises. Without showing any sympathy, he sternly said, ‘C’mon, these are the smallest dumbbells in the gym. Hold them a little longer.’

  Another long minute passed, and he was standing beside me, ‘Hold them, hold them, hold them. You can do it.’ My hands were screaming in pain by now and I lost all track of time. After what seemed like eternity, he quietly said, ‘Ok, drop them.’

  The dumbbells crashed to the floor and I was quite angry with Jogi. My arms were in pain and I felt exhausted, defeated and stupid. Jogi looked me in the eye and gently said, ‘Bau, that’s just four kilos you held in your hands for less than 10 minutes. When you let go of them, did you notice how you felt?’ Then he put his arm around me and continued, ‘You are overweight by 5-6 kg. You are carrying this extra weight all the time. Imagine how you will feel if you manage to get rid of it. . .’

  His method was brutal, but effective. Reluctantly, but resolutely, I started my workouts the next day.

  Initially, I would loathe going to the gym. But as I continued with my workouts, I started feeling good. I enjoyed my time there. My resistance to illness improved. I had a lot more energy and didn’t get tired as quickly as I used to. I could do so much more with my body. Life just seemed to get easier.

  Exercising is now a part of my life.

  In time, me being me, I wanted to find out what exactly about exercise made me feel the way I felt. A lot of research, reading and picking the brains of bodybuilder and doctor friends ensued. I learned a few surprising facts about exercise which I believe everyone should know. I hope I can inspire you to start your fitness journey through these words—otherwise there are always 2 kg dumbbells. Hold them for 10 minutes and then let go of them. You, too, will feel exactly how Jogi made me feel all those years ago. Hopefully, like me, you too will begin exercising, and eventually start enjoying it.

  Move

  Imagine a big, comfortable chair. Picture a few things lying on it. A bottle of booze, whiskey, brandy, vodka, whatever. A pack of cigarettes. A double cheese burger with fries. A large piece of cake, full of icing and loaded with sugar.

  In this picture, if you had to pick one thing that was most hazardous to your health in the long run, what would it be?

  Some will choose alcohol. It can cause liver degeneration, deprive you of sleep, make you depressed, compromise the immune system, reduce your sex drive, and possibly result in a few types of cancer.

  Others insist that it’s smoking. Implicated in lung cancer, hacking coughs, premature death, coronary heart disease, stroke, among other things.

  Few will choose the burger or the cake. . . all that white flour and trans-fat are known causes of obesity, poor quality of life and related problems.

  All would be wrong.

  The most insidious threat to your health in the long run, far worse than all the others is, incredibly: The Chair!

  Let me explain.

  As our bodies evolved, we mainly did two things. Either we were running after something we wanted to eat, or we were running away from something that wanted to eat us. As hunters and gatherers, we were constantly moving.

  In the more recent past, we learned agriculture. As farmers we settled down in one place and civilisation happened. There was still tremendous physical activity. We had to till the land, sow seeds, water and care for the fledgling plants, and harvest them. All this involved movement.

  Thousands and thousands of years of evolution imprinted the need to move into our genetics.

  It’s 2018. We hardly move at all. We wake up. We sit and have breakfast. We sit and drive to work. We sit and work. We sit and have lunch. We sit and drive back home. We sit and have dinner. We sit and watch TV. We even sit to shop online. Finally, we sleep. These days, people sit for an average of 7.7 hours a day.

  This is completely opposed to our genetics which scream for movement. Dr James Levine, former director, Mayo Clinic, Arizona State University, an authority on this subject, coined the term ‘The Sitting Disease.’ All the sitting that we do is wreaking havoc on our bodies. Dr Levine says, ‘Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, has killed more people than HIV and is more treacherous than parachuting!’

  Sitting too much has been implicated in quite a few diseases: various types of cancer, heart diseases, obesity (of course), compromises in the musculo-skeletal system, depression, anxiety and even type 2 diabetes.

  Sitting is the new smoking and has reached epidemic proportions.

  Solution: Get up and about. Move!

  After every 44 minutes of sitting, get up and walk for around 15 minutes. Your brain works better and you become more productive and creative, as we saw in the Brain 101 chapter. The simple act of standing can improve muscle tone, boost your metabolism, lower your stress levels, improve your mood and reduce minor aches and pains.

  A little bit of movement, and your brain rewards you for your efforts—it releases the feel-good hormones, dopamine and endorphins, into your blood. That’s the reason people who exercise regularly typically feel wonderful about life. Exercise is the elixir of life.

  Movement is good. Movement is life. Move more.

  Neurogenesis

  The microscopic equivalent of an electrical lightning storm happens in the brain every few seconds. I guess wit
h all that electricity zzzizzing around, a few neurons are bound to get fried every day. That’s not such a big deal. Millions of cells in our bodies die and get replaced all the time. The problem is that neurons are incapable of division. Now that’s a big deal.

  We lose around 3000 neurons a day. We start off with a billion neurons in our brain. And 3000 is a tiny number compared to a billion. But tiny numbers multiplied by tiny numbers rapidly become huge numbers. As people grow older, we often hear them complain that their brain is not what it used to be. They feel they are not sharp enough, can’t remember things and so on. That’s mostly the result of all those fried neurons.

  For a long time, it was believed that once you lost a neuron, it was gone forever. We had to make do with what was left.

  Enter Neurogenesis.

  Neurogenesis proved that new neurons are indeed birthed in the brain.

  Guess what helps create an impetus for the creation of new neurons?

  Yup. It’s Exercise.

  Exercise is definitely the key to a stronger, fitter, great-looking body. Amazingly, it helps make your brain function better, by keeping it from ageing. That’s how deeply encoded movement and exercise are in our genetics.

  Exercise regularly. Your body will be healthier and your brain will become younger.

  Mind the Body

  The grossest aspect of the mind is the body. The subtlest aspect of the body is the mind. The body will never go where the mind doesn’t want it to. The first rule of exercising is deciding to do it. If the mind has not agreed, it’s not going to happen. Read all of the above once more. Google the various benefits of exercising if you feel you would like to know more before you actually take the plunge. Convince yourself.

  Once that’s done, the rest is all about technique, consistency and honouring what you are doing.

  By the way, this is how you start any new habit. Figuring out and strengthening the ‘why’ automatically makes you committed, and grants you the resilience to overcome any obstacle that might come.

  To boil water, you need to have water, something to put the water in like a vessel, and a source of heat. To get the water to boil, you pour it into the vessel, put the vessel on the heat source and wait. Once the water starts boiling, there is no need to continue with the heat. You remove the water from the heat. You have achieved what you wanted.

  Exercising is similar to boiling water.

  Many people over-train. They do too much. This is like leaving the water on the boil. You don’t end up with hot water, you end up with steam—two very different things. Rule of the thumb? Never exercise for more than an hour. Your bones, ligaments and muscles become progressively weaker as you stress them out with exercise, and you may risk injury if you go beyond an hour.

  There is a theory which I agree with. When men begin exercising, their testosterone levels increase, which helps build muscle. After about an hour of exercise, the testosterone levels rapidly fall and cortisol levels begin to rise. Cortisol is the stress hormone and can cause excessive soreness, difficulty in recovering from workouts, compromise sleep quality and can lead to loss in performance and strength. With testosterone levels plummeting and cortisol levels rising, doing any more exercise becomes futile. And you will only end up harming yourself.

  Women are built quite differently. They start with about half as much total muscle mass and have a tiny amount of testosterone as compared to men. However, their bodies have lots of oestrogen. Oestrogen gives many muscle-building advantages including the stimulation of the growth hormone, speeding up post-workout recovery and increasing metabolism. Women also produce more growth hormone throughout the day, which is a significant advantage to gaining muscle.

  Women shouldn’t exercise for more than an hour either. Cortisol will rise after an hour of exercising and will create the same problems as men.

  Some people haphazardly go through their workout. They pay no attention to the correctness of their form. They will never achieve the desired results. Worse, there is serious risk of injury. This is akin to leaving a vessel full of water not on the heat source, but next to it. The water might become warm but would never come to a boil.

  Yet others are not consistent. They do their exercise in spurts. Every few days, they take a break for a few days. The water is not going to boil if you keep removing it from the heat source and putting it back again and again and again. You need to exercise at least 4-5 days a week and rest for 1-3 days.

  Our minds are supremely powerful. A thought can weaken and drain us of energy. Another can make us stronger than steel. Remember this while exercising. If we think tired, we will be tired. This is especially true when we finish a set. Your belief that you are exhausted as you do the last rep will make you feel exactly that. Do that last rep with enthusiasm and vigour, like a warrior tasting his first moment of victory. Finish strong. Then you feel fantastic.

  Ever seen a person devoutly performing a pooja? Everything has to be just right. There is great attention to detail. When we consider something sacred, it is natural that we get totally involved and our actions are smooth and graceful with a lot of focus. Lalit is a dear friend and a personal trainer. When he enters the gym, he bows down to the equipment with reverence before he starts his workout. The honour that he gives to his practice pays great dividends. He is supremely mindful about what he does and how he does it because he considers it sacred. Obviously when there is such focus, results come super fast.

  Mind the body as you exercise and you will be stunned by what you become capable of doing. Both in the gym and outside it.

  Pain

  There is no nice way to say this: when you start exercising, there is going to be pain. Parts of your body you didn’t even know existed will howl in agony. You will have to make friends with pain. Do not confuse this pain with the pain you feel when you bang into something hard. This pain has a different flavour. It’s a healthy sort of a pain. A sweet pain.

  Your body doesn’t trust you to take care of it. If you injure some part of it in some way, that part grows back stronger and more resilient. It’s like the body is protecting itself from your carelessness.

  When you exercise, you are literally tearing your muscle fibres apart. It’s controlled injury. Your body responds by making these fibres tougher and more robust—that’s how your body gets ‘built’.

  When you hurt yourself, it pains.

  Exercise is willingly and methodically hurting yourself. This is going to pain, though this pain is the other kind of pain. As your body grows stronger and stronger, you will start to enjoy the taste of this mellow pain. The pain that magically transforms into power, as you continue to relentlessly push through it.

  Your mantras for Exercising:

  Muscle: No pain, no gain. Use it or lose it.

  Fat: No pain, no loss. Use it to lose it.

  Setback

  For more than a year, I had been conscientiously following my exercise routine. I had shed a lot of excess weight and was feeling great about myself. My tummy had flattened; I was winning the battle of the bulge. I had decided to devote 2018 to start putting on some muscle. It was not to be.

  Dinesh and I had been to London in late 2017. It was a fabulous trip, but I caught a cold. A cold that refused to leave me as I coughed and coughed for more than a month. After having tried all sorts of alternative medicines, eventually, I had to take antibiotics to get over it. I was very weakened by the entire experience. The constant coughing meant that I had no energy to exercise. I had not worked out in over two months and was feeling quite awful.

  When we returned from London, I was in pretty bad shape. The cough, coupled with the long-distance flight and jet-lag, left me drained and washed out. I needed rest. My body begged for it. Instead of respecting my body and taking it easy for a while, I went on a hectic teaching tour over the next couple of weeks. You can imagine how my physical condition would have been when I finally got back home.

  One fateful evening, a few days after all this, our
bike hit a particularly nasty bump on the road and I felt something bust in my lower back. I had slipped a disc.

  A month of severe pain and complete bed rest followed. Walking, climbing stairs, showering, pooing, shaving—just normal day-to-day activities were miserably restricted by the horrible pain. The good news was that I recovered fast. This was largely possible because of the osteopathic and craniosacral therapy given to me by my good friends Dr Ankita Dhelia, Dr Stanley Rosenberg, Thor, Dr Sanket Agrawal, Rashmi Bhatia and Jim Stone. What expedited it even further was the exercise routine I had diligently followed for over two years. This had infused my body with strength and helped it respond remarkably well to these treatments.

  After so many weeks of agony, finally being able to walk down the stairs with just a few twinges of pain made me feel incredibly happy!

  As I write these words, I can do almost all the normal stuff that I used to, but I still can’t exercise without aggravating the pain. I can’t move my body the way I used to just a few months ago. I have strictly controlled my diet and put on just a few kilos of weight during this time, yet I am confident I will be able to burn them off soon.

  I learned a crucial lesson from this episode.

  There were times in my past when I would be too lazy to hit the gym. ‘Not today,’ I would tell Lalit, ‘I just want to relax.’ But now, I have resolved to skip the excuses. I had taken for granted the beautiful ways in which my body could move. I will not do that ever again.

  Move while you can. Life is unexpectedly fragile, and what you can do today, you may not be able to do tomorrow. This is not just about exercise. It’s about saying I love you, or Thank You, or spending time with people who matter. Don’t take life, love or friendship for granted. It’s the biggest mistake you will ever make.