The theme of Week 4 – Release is to “check-in” with yourself and ask honest questions about your feelings now that you have completed half of the “Six Weeks of Healing” course. Dr. Lipman notes that your body may feel better, more energized, perhaps you feel slimmer if you lost weight or your blood-pressure and pulse may even be lower.
Whatever your body is feeling, it is important to note that your mind may still be very busy with day to day events, cluttered with thoughts and just a bit exhausted. This is to be expected because the mind is the “hardest part of the body to adjust” according to yoga experts. He recommends that we avoid over-exertion at this time and just take more time to enjoy random unstructured activities and even take a day off from the daily beats. Part of this relaxation process also includes laughing at ourselves, laughing with others and not taking ourselves too seriously because we are mere mortals.
Daily Beat 25 – Fight Chair Body was enlightening because it helps us understand the excessive trauma or stress we put on our muscles and bone structure – such as hip, back and neck joints – when we sit all day. It clearly creates tension, muscle aches and imbalance to our body. This chapter notes the importance of physical movement to counter-balance the muscle-joint fatigue that sets in. The former Chief Medical Officer for the Lumenos health plans, Dr. Mike Parkinson, would fully agree with these recommendations and I can recall him stating that any kind of activity or movement is just as important as structured exercise.
The NEAT study (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) at the Mayo Clinic showed that your daily movements and walking around was equal to or better exercise than working out at the gym for an hour. I have included the following excerpt from Dr. Levine’s web site http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/levine_lab/ at the Mayo Clinic:
You can expend calories in one of two ways. One is to go to the gym and the other is through all the activities of daily living called NEAT (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis). It appears that NEAT is far more important for calorie-burning than exercise in nearly everyone.
Even lean individuals store at least two to three months of their energy needs in adipose tissue whereas obese persons can carry a year's worth of their energy needs. It is the cumulative impact of energy imbalance over months and years that results in the development of obesity or undernutrition.
Daily Beat 27 – Eat Seasonally, is also very interesting to see how Dr. Lipman relates our natural eating patterns and the availability of seasonal foods to our genetic evolution as hunters and gatherers. He notes that our bodies had to adjust to seasonal foods because of long periods of famine. Researchers have actually proposed the “thrifty gene theory” to show how our bodies would store energy in fat tissue as a very efficient way to withstand long periods of famine. Our innate and natural rhythms seem to do better when we seek seasonal fruits and vegetables just like our evolutionary ancestors did.
As you read Chapter 4 – Release, make sure to take some time to laugh, get up off your chair and find some local seasonal fruits. Next week we’ll discuss Week 5 – Balance.
Dr. Tony Linares
