Cameron Diaz's The Body Book

The same day that I wrote the first draft of my introductory post for DragonflyKoru, I bought Cameron Diaz's "The Body Book: the Law of Hunger, the Science of Strength, and Other Ways to Love Your Amazing Body". Before reading her book, I was feeling some trepidation about publishing my posts. But once I started the first chapter, Cameron's book reassured me that my quest for energy was a worthwhile focus and sharing that with others was maybe a good idea too.

If you've watched "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" do you remember that scene at the beginning where Cameron Diaz is dancing and Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu join in? Man! When I watched that I thought to myself, "Wow Cameron Diaz has a STRONG body! You can't dance with that much ENERGY unless you have amazing STRENGTH! I wish I could move like that!" Not surprisingly, Cameron writes that training with a Kung Fu master for Charlie's Angels changed her life.

I love it when celebrities (who have ridiculous amounts of power and influence that our culture bestows on them) actually use their power and influence to do something good in the world. I think Cameron has done something very good in writing this book.

In the introduction she writes: "Here's what this book is not: It is not a diet book. It is not a workout regimen. It is not a manual to becoming a different person. Here's what it is: a guide to becoming yourself." And by that she means the healthiest strongest version of yourself. And it's not about form, it's about function. What she has been able to DO because of her strong healthy body and what we can DO with a strong and healthy body. It's a book filled with information. Because as her introduction states, "Knowledge is power."

Cameron did a lot of research and interviewed many experts in their fields to get the information in this book. She writes that she "...got all CSI about the body..." So that the end result is almost like a collection of several little textbooks: anatomy and physiology, nutrition, biology, chemistry, behavioral psychology...but the presentation is fun, accessible, and understandable. And it echoes what I have learned from the HBO documentary "Weight of the Nation" and what's on the USDA website.

I really really like Cameron's definition of health. As she points out the word "health" gets thrown around a lot these days. Here's what she means when she talks about health. "...I'm talking about having a body that is working at its optimum, a body that has the energy to go all day without crashing, a body that can fight off illness and keep you strong. I'm talking about feeling amazing in your skin...I'm talking about having a mind that can be clear productive, thoughtful and happy." Wow, now that's the kind of health I want!!

I learned from this book that Cameron has always been skinny. She could always eat whatever she wanted and didn't gain weight. But something even more interesting than that is what she wanted to eat. And it wasn't sugar. In chapter 7 she confesses that she doesn't like sugar. And she's not kidding: she stir-fries zucchini to put on her morning oatmeal, just so she can get heart-health oatmeal into her diet. I find Cameron's aversion to sugar incredibly interesting because maybe a large part of why Cameron is "naturally" skinny is because she doesn't like and therefore doesn't eat much sugar.

In my 20's I drank a LOT of mochas. Sometimes fattening but always sugary mochas. Then sometime in my early 30's, one day I didn't like the taste of mochas any more. Just out of the blue, chocolate in coffee tasted yucky to me. At that same time, I worked to lose 40lbs. And I've never gained it back. I have a strong suspicion that eliminating those sugar- laden mochas from my diet has a LOT to do with maintaining that weight loss. And it's why now I'm rigorously cutting out sugar whenever and wherever I can.

"The Body Book" has 3 sections: Nutrition, Fitness, and Mind. Nutrition is the first and largest section. I agree that it's the best place to start. Before I got Lupus, I seriously never thought about eating food for FUEL. It was always just about taste. Then when I was in my huge Lupus flare, I noticed that certain foods caused me a LOT of pain. Carbohydrates. Sugar.

Even the lactose in milk increased my inflammation and my pain so I started drinking soymilk that had only 2g of sugar per serving. Getting Lupus really motivated me to understand what was going on INSIDE my body and I tried to read Stephen's college Anatomy and Physiology textbooks. But they were just too difficult. My science background is pretty weak. But this book that Cameron has written is a great primer, a good place to start. The more I learn the more I want to know. It's really so very interesting. Understanding how things work is really a motivator for me. The knowledge of how nutrient-rich foods FUEL my body and how nutrient poor foods DESTROY my body, is causing a fundamental shift in my thinking about food. When only one month ago I thought I HAD to have delicious tasting food ALL the time. Now I find it's pretty easy to give up half and half in my coffee and turn down donuts! Whoa!

How many of you have heard, "Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels" ? Well I always thought, "Yeah, right." But if I change that phrase to be, "Nothing tastes as good as being FULL of ENERGY feels" now that I can really agree with. If eating nutrient-rich foods gives me the energy to do the work I want to do, then those are the foods I want to put in my body, and taste is secondary.

I've already mentioned here and in my other blog that cardio is something that's easy for me to do. I love to run, ride my bike, do aerobics, swim, play tennis...so Cameron's encouragement to sweat everyday was for me, "oh yeah, no problem." But she reminded me again how sitting, being sedentary, is really really harmful to my health. And so I'm trying to work more movement into my day. I don't get any credit on the Supertracker for "standing in the kitchen while cooking" but I know that any time I break up my sitting time, I'm doing something healthy for myself.

The last section of the book, Mind, has more good information.  One of the topics she talks about is discipline. I've applied discipline to several areas in my life: piano practice, cardio workouts, going to work every day, being on time consistently to my clients' houses for piano lessons...Now I'm applying discipline to my health. Cameron acknowledges it "isn't easy" to make changes and by "isn't easy" she means, "can be really super-freaking hard." She reminds us to be kinder to ourselves and practice, practice, practice.

When I think of the word "practice" I think about piano practice. Practice isn't performance. In practice I am working out how to make a passage fast and smooth or bring out a voice in one hand over the other, and I experiment with different ways to achieve that objective. It doesn't work in the beginning, it often sounds awful and NOTHING like the beautiful performance I've heard. So in piano practice, I had to learn to go very slowly and repeat, repeat, repeat. I had to have patience in the speed with which I improved. I had to be consistent and go every day to the practice room and just put in the time. And I had to have faith that my consistent focused practice would eventually pay off and I would be able to play the piece the way it was meant to be played. Another very important lesson I learned from my piano practice was that the more I went to the practice room, the easier everything got and the more rewarding each session was. But if for whatever reason I missed a few practice days, how easily it all fell off the rails and felt hard and frustrating.

Last week I took a short trip and I stopped practicing good health for a few days. And it hasn't been easy to get back to good practice. But just like I used to start with scales on the piano (because they were easy for me) I started with going to the gym (because cardio is easy for me).

There is a term in physics that seems helpful here: inertia. My husband understands physics and so he explained it to me. The more inertia something has the more difficult it is to get it moving (think heavy boulder). And once it is moving, if it's not going very fast, then it's relatively easy to stop. But once something with a lot of inertia gains speed, it's very difficult to stop. The concept goes even further. What if you don't want to just stop that high inertia object, you want to send it in the OPPOSITE direction? First it will take a lot of effort to stop it and then even more effort to get it going in the new direction.

I can see how this concept applies to me. And that I have a lot of inertia. Over the course of my life I've picked up a lot of speed in my energy draining habits. And now I want to stop going that direction and go in the opposite direction. I want my habits to be energizing, not energy depleting.

Growth and transformation. It's work baby! Hard work. So I'm really glad to have found some useful tools for tackling that hard work in Cameron Diaz's "The Body Book".