Jungian Psychoanalyst and Pilates elder, Mary Bowen, joined us on March 14th to share her wisdom and joy of 82 years. Listen to the entire show or enjoy a few of the quotes from the show below.
That’s what I have always told everyone. Even when I’ve seen therapists, the therapist asks: “Do you or have you ever had an eating disorder?” I answer in the positive with the usual caveat: “Yes, but it wasn’t serious. It was just a way for me to control my weight when I was dancing. Once I stopped dancing I stopped the disorder.”
Then today I saw an article about new health guidelines for models being presented this week in New York City at Fashion Week. The article on CNN Health calls eating disorders “an illness that has the highest mortality rate of any other mental illness,” –Lynn Grefe, president and CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association.
Wait? What? This is the first time I have ever heard eating disorder and mental illness used in the same sentence. Which explains why they are treated at psychiatric hospitals. Okay, I’m a little slow… but was I mentally ill? I wasn’t. I was dancing. I was keeping my weight where it needed to be. Except…
I remember the time I took too many diuretics and blacked out and almost collapsed. Somehow I remained conscious as the world went black. And I also remember the time I had a heart attack at age 19. Also because of the eating disorder. You know, the whole electrolyte imbalance thing. Hm.
So was it a bigger deal than I thought? And like anyone who has a mental illness, unless it is healed or managed do you (did I?) move on to just another way of practicing mental illness? Too scary to think about. Let me wrap my head around this one first.
In the meantime, I guess it is time to start talking about that experience as more than a ‘weight loss method’. Maybe talking about it in terms that “Beauty should equal Health”. That’s another quote from the CNN article. But truly. When someone is healthy we intuitively know that and are drawn to him/her like magnets. The healthiest people, physically and mentally, have droves of people who want to be near them, who want to try to get a piece of that, who are aspiring towards a different way of living and being in this world.
That would be my aspiration. Not to draw people to me for what I appear to lack but to draw people toward me because I am healthy. Healthy people have a lot to share: their passions, their joy, their dreams. And that’s contagious. One happy person can infect a room much more quickly and effectively and certainly more positively, than one sick person.
I saw these kiddos practicing on the beach about a week ago. Actually, I see them every weekend. They pull tires, jump cones and just generally kick up a LOT of sand. Every time I see them, I think of the study that physical therapist, Andre Labbé, relayed in a continuing education course last August. Labbé teaches at Tulane University and he and his colleagues looked at the performance of varsity football teams from 5 local high schools. Four schools were from wealthy areas and one was not. They measured performance in terms of two categories. The first was a measurement of how much weight can these kids lift, how fast can they run, etc. The second measurement was a measurement of function. How quickly can they change direction, recover from a fall, rebound or avoid a tackle, etc. So, to me, the non-football player it seems the second measurement would be much more important to how the team actually plays. Who cares how much weight you can lift if you can’t scoot around a tackle and get the touchdown?
The wealthy schools excelled in the first measurement. They had all the fancy gym equipment at their schools and they used it. The kids were strong. They were fast.
The kids from the poor school didn’t fare so well on the first measurement but knocked the socks off the other schools when it came to function. Labbé spoke to the coach: “How are you doing it?” Labbé and his team expected the first measurement to correlate directly to the second measurement and it did not. Lifting more weight did not mean better performance on the field. So how were the kids that didn’t have any special equipment excel on the field? Here’s the coach’s answer:
I train the kids on the beach. First they run in the hard sand by the water’s edge, then they get moved to the soft dry sand. After that, they do drills an ankle deep in water, then knee deep.
Makes sense why these kids aren’t toppling as easily when they are getting pushed around by linebackers. They are used to it. The sea, as anyone from New Orleans will tell you, is unpredictable and won’t flinch because you might look tough.
Labbé went on to talk about the importance of working all of our post-rehabilitation clients on unstable surfaces. He even had a sandbox in his clinic for a period of time. My next studio? It’ll be on the beach. Best therapy in more ways than I had ever thought.
This post could have been titled: How to heal back pain with a back pack. And no, I’m
My back was crying today but I had a 6-mile hike planned. Hence, the 12-pound back pack
not talking about filling it with muscle relaxants to get you through the day. I’m talking about the work of Stuart McGill, PhD. He is a kinesiologist out of the Univeristy of Waterloo and has done extensive research on the best ways to heal back pain.
One of this methods includes wearing a back pack with 15-25 pounds in it. Sounds crazy, huh? The theory behind it is that if the weight is placed low in the back pack, it aids the spine extension muscles, so it helps to keep you upright. If you are bent over your spine muscles aren’t really working they are in a holding pattern; it is more like they are holding on for dear life to keep you from going nose-first into the dirt instead of acting to give strength and mobility to the spine.
Dr. McGill’s recommendation is that you wear the pack and walk on uneven terrain. Hiking a dirt path would be great. The small subtle changes in the terrain force your spine to accommodate forward and back, side to side twisting and side to side bending.
I had a chance to test his advice three years ago after back surgery. I stayed at about 10 pounds in a fanny back and it worked really well. I was able to go about 30% farther with the pack then without it. I had another “opportunity” to test it today. My back decided to get super-angry after mountain biking this morning and my friend and I still had a 6 mile hike planned for the afternoon. I was hurting. Big-time.
So I let my friend wrangle both dogs, I threw a lot of water bottles in the bottom of a pack and gingerly started making my way along the trail. Ow. Ouch. Holy be-geezus… But it got better. It loosened up. And I did the 6 miles. Tonight, I can feel my back. I iced and I’m getting ready to take some Aleve but it’s good. We are planning another hike tomorrow and my back pack is ready.
It’s funny how certain types of problems show up in the studio in waves. My most recent wave has been severe muscular degeneration in the form of multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. With both scenarios it was, first, important for me to explain to my clients that exercise is not going to return strength to the muscles that have been affected by the disease. What we can do is strengthen the muscles that are not affected and increase coordination in those muscles as well.
And the coordination will be key. Coordination in the small musculature so that the body’s muscles can work together synergistically and effectively is a component that is lost whenever there is an injury. To return coordination to some of those small muscles in the case of severe muscular degeneration will be even more valuable.
Here’s the video with one of my favorite exercises for muscle loss. Let me know if you have any questions. Karena
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Dan Holtz of the Beverly Hills Rejuvenation Center on bio-identical hormones, and
Bernie Nelson, founder of the Pilates Round Table, on choosing health. It’s worth fighting for.
A quick synopsis for you…
Dan, super-interesting guy… At 38 years old, he owned a construction company and was a fitness fanatic when he noticed that he couldn’t build muscle as easily anymore; he was gaining fat around his middle; his joints ached… Yes, it sounded to me too like he was just simply aging. But, instead of accepting his body’s changes as normal, he chose to have doctors run tests and see what exactly was going on inside his body. After years of research and dedication he was teamed up with physicians to help all of us understand the changes in our own bodies and using bio-identical hormones to help us be the best we can. No more weight gain, low libido, hair loss, depression, memory loss or insomnia.
Bernie joined us at the end of the show to share his insight in the world of fitness. A former college athlete (football), Bernie has struggled with the aches and pains of the choices of his youth but has found a way to stay active and keep the weight off. Listen to Bernie’s discussion about the importance of addressing obesity in our population as well as taking the step towards choosing health. You have to want to fight for it!
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Fact: Anytime your body takes an action, muscularly or neurologically, there is an electric current causing that change.
An idea unaccepted by science at the beginning of the 20th century, but an idea so accepted now that we measure the body’s electricity to diagnosis and heal. Ever had an electrocardiogram or ECG? The ECG measures the heart’s electric pulses to determine if there is a problem. Ever had electric stimulation in physical therapy? That’s an electric charge used to stimulate activity to an area of the body where the electric pulse may have become quiet due to injury. Restore the electric current and you restore health.
Fact: Anyplace there is an electric current, physiologically there is a resultant magnetic field.
A bit of science that has MEG’s (magnetoencephalograms) being used in place of EEG’s to study the brain’s magnetic fields. Interestingly, the magnetic fields are able to pass through the tissue of the brain to the outside of the body undistorted for easier analysis, not the case when using the brain’s electrical current for diagnosis. In other magnetics, have you heard of an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging)?
So what?
Yeah, I heard you. Big words. Little meaning. Not so fast, Cowboy. The results of this work have implication in everything you do, especially healing. If the body’s magnetic fields are :
Arriving outside your body undisturbed, and
We can see where a physical or neurological problem is through the analysis of those fields, then
Healing becomes a matter of manipulating those magnetic fields to create health.
Doctors prescribe magnet therapy for injuries that won’t heal (pulsed electric magnetic field therapy), for example. But what about in terms of all forms of alternative therapy? If the goal is to manipulate the magnetic field then there becomes more than one way to do that. James Oschman, PhD, has found the same magnetic field manipulation possible with many forms of healing; it doesn’t matter if it is massage, acupuncture, surgery, physical therapy or Pilates . All are manipulating the magnetic field.
Poses the question of which therapy is most effective? Well, it would be the one, that for you, creates the most change in the magnetic field.
I’ll leave you with this thought: The heart has the strongest electric current/field in the body and therefore the strongest magnetic field reaching outside the body. While the electric field cannot be measured away from the body, the magnetic field can. The heart’s magnetic field can be measured up to 15 feet away. Scientists assume that when their instruments become more sensitive that it will be considerably farther than that. Ever wonder why you can feel someone across a room? Across a city? A country? Ever wonder why coincidences can be so strong? Yeah, I think that might be why.
I was scribbling notes, but can we listen again?”–@DianeMulholland
