Entropy. It’s the law.
I don’t like it.
Entropy. You know what that is? It’s when you finally get all the laundry done. “I finished all the laundry!” What a laugh. It’s like “the kitchen is cleeeeeeean!”
Ha! And it will stay that way until the teenager gets out the ice cream, leaves it on the counter along with his bowl and the three milk-encrusted glasses that he thoughtfully, finally brought in from his bedroom, and there’s the pot soaking in the sink and did the cat bring this in? And am I the only one who rinses out the cans and puts them in the recycling?
I remember arguing with my mother about making my bed. Why should I? I’m just going to get back in it again in 16 hours.
The fact is that as soon as the laundry is done or the dishes are done, we just mess them up again.
Last year, I left a pot of chicken bones and water on the stove for a few hours more than was advisable. As a result, we learned a new phrase. “Protein burn.” That’s what happens when your house fills up with oily smoke and you move out for five weeks while a disaster restoration team cleans, restores, or replaces every single thing in your house, right down to the paint on the walls. It was inconvenient living in a motel room with a kitchenette but boy, did our house sparkle when we moved back in!
Sixteen months later, it’s not sparkling anymore. Entropy increased. Dang! I had to start cleaning it again.
Same thing happened with my car. Bought a 2000 Toyota Echo, my dream car because it gets 40 mpg city, 50 mpg highway. Laid on new brakes, new tires, new transmission, even popped for the new stereo system. Am I done yet? Apparently not, because the gas mileage has dropped by 10 miles per gallon. Maybe it has something to do with those little postcards that keep coming in the mail, reminding me that I’m overdue for an oil change, the 10,000 mile service, and oh yes, I said I would replace the thing-a-ma-whadjit when it got to the point where I really couldn’t ignore it anymore.
And my husband insists on putting $50 away each month for a new roof. We just replaced the roof, I say. Yes, but in 15 years we’ll need a new one and this way we’ll have the money, he says reasonably.
This is just so irritating. Why can’t anything just STAY the way it is? Why isn’t everything just self-healing? Wouldn’t it be cool if I could drive the car hard and it got more efficient, forgot about composting and just grew stuff in the garden and the ground got more and more fertile? If the house could re-roof and re-paint itself?
But here’s a thought. I do own one really priceless thing that heals itself. It even gets stronger when I subject it to stressors.
That would be my body.
I push it to learn how to walk four miles at a stretch and it does. I lift heavier and heavier weights and it responds by making new muscle. I can even teach it to run better on different fuel, try that with your Honda! More fiber, less fat – it responds by running more efficiently and with a longer burn.
Cool.
Where I get into trouble is when I forget that my body needs ongoing attention, just like my car or house or garden. I can’t rebuild the engine in my car and then blow off the next dozen oil changes. I can’t re-roof the house and then forget to budget for repairs. Well, I can. But the car stops running so well and the roof leaks.
So if I quit eating well and stop working out, of course I’ll gain the fat back and lose that nice definition in my arms and stop feeling as good. Then if I say, “Look! The diet didn’t work and exercise didn’t work!” that’s kind of like saying that I don’t believe in entropy anymore. The clothes will never get dirty again and the kitchen will keep itself clean.
This is why we need a new concept, and maybe even new vocabulary, for what happens when we change our fitness levels and subsequently, our fat levels and pants sizes. You rebuild the engine of your body. Nice! Shiny! Then you have to maintain it. I like to think of my body as a project car, like that old VW camper we had for awhile or the legendary MG my husband had. Nothing stays new. You have to keep tinkering with things.
Maybe “maintenance” is not the happy word. I know I should maintain my car and my house. When you don’t, that’s called “deferred maintenance,” -- this is how you refer to putting off replacing the roof for ten years and then it costs more to fix than if you’d kept it in repair or replaced it when it started to leak in the first place.
When applied to my health (by this I usually mean my weight, even though I know better), “maintenance” always felt a bit like “backsliding,” or “constant struggle,” and when I applied it to keeping to a steady fitness level or fat-to-lean ratio, it felt more like a “losing battle”.
But I don’t want to defer maintenance on my body. It can get pretty expensive. I was looking at knee replacement surgery and medication for chronic high blood pressure, plus the health risks that go along with insulin resistance. Changing the exercise and diet was a lot cheaper.
But “maintain”? Isn’t that what we used to do when we came home late from a date and Mom was waiting up for us and we had to act normal even though we had maybe imbibed a bit too much?
So. For me, not a helpful word. I need a better way to think about it.
Three years ago, I changed the way my body worked by changing my daily life. I lost a lot of weight and changed my fitness level drastically. But to make that change permanent, I have to make my new life feel just as comfortable, routine, and unconscious as the life I used to have. I don’t want to think all the time about what to buy, how to cook, and what my daily activities are. I want to create a way to live that feels normal for the rest of my life. You know, keep up with the oil changes.
In some ways, I’ve done pretty well. Those 10,000 steps are embedded into my day. I’ve got breakfast dialed in – hot cereal, skim milk, fruit and coffee – and my family and I cook and enjoy food that routinely is lower on the fat continuum and consists of lots more vegetables, fruits and beans than we used to eat. We don’t think about it anymore. It’s what happens, just like we pay our bills and put the socks away.
But…I have a confession to make. Nine months ago, I got good and tired of going to the gym. And I got good and tired of counting calories. I’m sure I’m not overeating! I know what I’m doing! So I stopped paying attention to how many little treats I had in a day. And I stopped the cardio and weight training three times a week. I planned to walk in the mornings, ride my bike everywhere and garden and that would replace those gym sessions. Well, I didn’t ride my bike everywhere because I fell off my bike twice, so there went the replacement for the interval training. I raked a lot of leaves this fall and shoveled two yards of compost and gravel. But if I was hoping that this would replace the weight workouts, I’d have to admit that I didn’t do heavy-duty yard work three times a week. I like walking, and I like talking to my friend Sally even better, and this is a good thing because if we hadn’t been walking for an hour every morning, my latest body comp would have been even worse. Yes, I finally got brave and had a (way overdue) body comp test done.
After nine months of the “I don’t need to go to the gym anymore” theory, I have lost five pounds of muscle and gained 15 pounds of fat.
Did the diet not work? Of course it did. Did the exercise work? Of course it did, and thank goodness I’ve kept to a pretty active lifestyle or I’d be real blimpy again by now.
What didn’t work was me indulging in the idea that my body somehow isn’t governed by the same laws that rule the rest of the physical universe. I thought that, somehow, I could stop with the weight resistance and cardio and my muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness level would stay the same. But, “ye canna change the laws of Physics, Cap’n!” Entropy must increase.
Take the body back to the shop for another overhaul. I estimate that six months of building fitness and losing the fat will get me back to where I want to be, and then I guess I’ll have to keep on paying attention to – maintaining? -- my own health.
Just do the laundry, just do the dishes. Eat the good food, not too much, and go to the gym.
And give thanks for my self-healing body that gets stronger and more efficient when I ask more of it.
Now if I could just get the car to do the same thing.
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