Aging is an art. Meet three modern masters

Aging is an art. Meet three modern masters

by Bruce Grierson Aging Essays Featured

 

From READER’S DIGEST, January 2015

Dr. Ephraim Engleman is often asked for his advice. The American rheumatologist, who sees patients when he’s not at the prestigious research centre he heads up at the University of California San Francisco, will turn 104 in the spring. A common query: “What’s the best way to stay as cheerfully, productively, healthily above ground as you?” “Choose your parents wisely,” he quips back.

Like many jokes, it contains a grain of truth. Genes matter. But they’re not the whole story, or even most of it. Scientists say longevity is around 30 per cent DNA and 70 per cent other factors, including lifestyle choices and psychological strategies.

We now have reams of data from longitudinal studies and twin studies and analyses of the super-seniors who inhabit the world’s so-called “blue zones” — pockets were healthy centenarians thrive. To boil down all the wisdom found therein to one word seems folly, but here goes:

Adaptation.

Humans need to be challenged. Continually. When we are, everything in us becomes a little more durable. You could say super-aging is about finding ways to grow, even into our advanced years, to offset the forces of nature trying to diminish us.

The principle applies in all dimensions of our lives, even the ones not easily measured by a heart test or a brain scan. Wisdom, character, spirit: whatever these qualities actually are, pretty clearly they anneal in the fire of “just-manageable difficulty,” no less than a marathoner’s cardiovascular system or a chess grandmaster’s frontal cortex. People who find ways to live on what poet Sam Keen called the “green, growing edge,” in all they do, are youthful — no matter what their birth certificate says.

*

Betty Jean “BJ” McHugh’s adaptation involved flipping the usual parent/child motivational paradigm on its head. We try to inspire our kids. But McHugh’s daughter inspired her. Jennifer was a swimming prodigy, a butterfly specialist who competed for Canada in the 1972 Munich Olympics at the age 15. When Jennifer announced she was done with competitive swimming three years later, her mom — who had quietly jogged on the seawall while her daughter churned laps in the pool — realized it was now her time to see how far she could go.

BJ is 87 years old. She is the fastest marathon runner on the planet in her age group by an astonishing margin: during the 2012 Honolulu marathon, she crossed the line in five hours, 12 minutes, smashing the old record by nearly half an hour. (Whereupon she did not light up a smoke to celebrate – as she had after her first marathon almost thirty years earlier. Instead she feasted with her son and granddaughter, who were also in the event.) Since her first road race at age 51, the sprite-like mother-of-four from West Vancouver has set more than 30 world records.

Aging runners are no rare sight in big-city marathons. But there comes an age point—around 80—where the numbers drop right off. Not coincidentally, it’s around the same point that human athletic performance craters. For reasons scientists can’t quite pinpoint, the body starts wearing down in double-time. Muscle mass falls sharply. Lungs lose their elasticity. Mitochondria—the tiny power plants in our cells—degrade. Bones thin. Balance falters. Old age clamps around us like a suit of armour. Anyone who has found a way to stay youthful in the face of this formidable headwind—the BJ McHughs of the world—seem mystical.

So what’s the secret?

For starters, the very exercise that becomes such a struggle when we age. The marathons McHugh runs now are far harder than the first one she ran 30 years ago, even though she’s slowed the pace significantly. Round about mile fifteen, “there’s a little war going on in my mind,” laughs BJ. It takes a mighty will not to stop and walk.

The good news: for most of us, walking is more than fine. National health associations in both Canada and the United States recommend 150 minutes brisk walking — or its equivalent — a week. While some studies maintain that working up a sweat delivers outsized benefits, the secret is finding an exercise you will actually continue to do, one that is pitched at a level that’s challenging but not overwhelming. Most sports-medicine experts recommend adding resistance training as we grow older — to strengthen bones, improve balance, and combat frailty.  After her morning run, McHugh will sometimes peel away from the tight company of her training group and pop into a yoga class. There is a level of productive restlessness about her — the same restlessness that got her into running in the first place, rather than wait in her car for her daughter to finish swimming. And that shark-like need for constant motion may be as important a key to longevity as the exercise training itself. 

McHugh doesn’t park her body for long stretches. She doesn’t sit for long without changing position. The television never comes on before the six o’clock news. She prefers walking to driving, even to her bridge games, which are five kilometres away.

Increasing evidence suggests we need to just move around as much as we need to exercise. Joan Vernikos, the former director of life sciences at NASA and godmother of “sedentary studies” suggests the single best exercise we can do, bang for buck, is standing up frequently. Again, it’s about challenging the body—in this case, with gravity. And standing up repeatedly maintains circulation by keeping blood-pressure sensors in tune. With moving comes energy, and with energy comes, well, if not eternal youthfulness, at least the mojo to be a powerful role model.

“One day out running I saw a truck pull over,” McHugh recalls. “This guy got out and said, ‘You’re BJ McHugh aren’t you?’” She recognized him. A couple of years previous, he had stopped her as she was finishing a long run. “How old are you?” he’d asked. He’d looked rough. But this time he was beaming. He said: “I’ve changed my whole life around and I’ve qualified for Boston.”

Ephraim Engleman isn’t taking on any new patients, and has begun to feel obliged to suggest to his regulars that “perhaps the time has come that you ought to think of getting another doctor.” No thanks, they say: they’ll stick with him. Experience and wisdom are things you can’t just Google.

Engleman, who is likely safe in his guess that he’s the oldest practicing physician in America, enjoys dispensing slow, dry witticisms, eyes twinkling under storks’-nest brows. He recently renewed his driver’s license (“so I’m good now until 105”), but in a nod to his family’s wishes, he sometimes lets a driver take him the 30 kilometres to work at the Arthritis Research Medical Center at UCSF, of which he is founding director. Once there, “Eph” answers correspondence, consults with colleagues, and just generally bucks the odds surrounding aging and cognition.

The chances of an individual getting dementia double every year beyond age 65. Of those lucky enough to reach 100, only 15 to 25 per cent arrive with all their marbles. The brain of the average 90-year-old is about the same size as the brain of the average three-year-old: typically the shrinkage zolpidem order diazepam comes in the frontal cortex and the hippocampus, headquarters of planning and memory filing, respectively.

Very old folks like Engleman whose wetware is still high-functioning owe much to what brain scientists call “cognitive reserve”—renovations that keep the brain humming even as senescence sets in.

Cognitive reserve is the key to aging very well from the neck up.

There are a few ways to build it.

You eat a heart-healthy diet, because fatty plaques affect both the heart and the brain. Which Engleman does.

You exercise, preferably vigorously. Which Engleman doesn’t. (“I don’t even do the walking I used to do,” he says, because of increasing back trouble that’s led to his hunched-over gait.)

You keep the brain continually challenged with reading, writing, blogging, puzzling, bridge-playing, travelling, language-learning, storytelling. The more interventions you pile on the better: the benefits seem to compound. “The principle of synergy — you know, one plus one equals three — has been shown time and time again” to forestall dementia, says Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “Having more brain activities is good for the backup system,” Isaacson says. When the brain encounters novelty it’s forced to adapt. Neurogenesis, the hatching of new grey-matter cells, has no known age limit. So not only can you teach an old dog new tricks, it’s essential if you want that dog to stay sharp. (Engleman, among other non-work-related diversions, emcees at a local social club, at writes his own material.)

You go to school: education levels correlate with brain density. Then you keep going to school, even when you’re out of school. “Lifetime intellectual enrichment” seems to delay the onset of cognitive impairment, notes Prashanthi Vemuri, the lead researcher of a new study out of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn, published in the journal JAMA Neurology. By how much? Three to six years, on average.

So far, so good for Ephraim Engleman. But he may have a secret weapon on his side as well: music.

Engleman is a former violin prodigy. He put himself through school in the 1930s partly by playing in vaudeville orchestras. He still jams with a chamber quartet once a week in his San Mateo, CA, home, where he lives with his 99-yearold wife, Jean. “Playing music,” he says “is a real stimulus—and very, very good for the soul.”

The science bears out his statement—the first part, at least. Playing music seems to challenge brain in ways that offer significant protection from cognitive impairment and dementia, studies suggest. Richard Isaacson, of Cornell, rattles off five studies that have helped build the case: In one of them, six weeks of “music therapy” increased the level of neurotransmitters in the bloodstream of Alzheimer’s patients. “Right there is the biological basis for music, in some ways,” he says. In general, “the deeper your relationship with music, the better the effect.” Indeed, Isaacson was so persuaded by the data that he picked up his guitar again—and now plays bass in a band of neuron scientists. They’re called The Regenerates.

*

In the French village of Trosly-Breuil, just north of Paris, 86-year-old Jean Vanier lives a simple life. Each day, he walks from his house to the group home he established 50 years ago, where he eats, laughs and prays with his adopted family. This is the first L’Arche community. Founded on Vanier’s vision, the organization is built around the idea that if adults with mental disabilities were settled in private homes alongside non-disabled people, the result would be a boon to both sides.

The son of former Canadian governor general Georges Vanier, he had once seemed destined for a different kind of life. Having written his PhD dissertation on Aristotle, he briefly taught philosophy at the University of Toronto. But there was a spiritual curiosity in Vanier that academia couldn’t satisfy, and he followed his mentor, a Dominican priest named Father Thomas Philippe, to France, taking on a life of voluntary poverty and daily challenge. It irks Vanier when people call him, as many are inclined to, a living saint. The sacrifice he made is no sacrifice at all, he insists, since the disabled offer us a great gift: they teach us how to become human. More generally, having to accommodate the wishes and quirks and demands of others tests our patience and, in the bargain, strengthens it. Would he be the person he is now had he remained on that earlier trajectory? “God knows,” Vanier says. “All I know is I’m here now. I have grown. I still have things to grow into—to have fewer barriers, to be more open to people. The story’s not finished. I’m 86, but the story goes on.”

Unlike physical and cognitive aging, there is no identifiable point where people start to break down spiritually—and no reliable prescription if it happens. Studies have found that those who attend religious ceremonies live longer, although who can say for sure if the active ingredient is the spiritual part and not, say, the routine, or the power of social networks, or the fibre in the little wafers (okay, we can probably rule that one out).

We tend to think of spirituality in terms of meditation or perhaps prayer, a private inward journey. To Vanier, that is only half the story. A second current nudges us in the opposite direction, out of ourselves and into meaningful contact with others. In effect, at a phase of life when many people start closing themselves off, Vanier counsels opening up. Instead of spending our later years cementing our own comfort within tiny tribes, we should be reaching out. In what one could call an adaptation response of the soul, empathy begets empathy.

In his famous Grant Study, which began in 1938 and followed a group of male undergraduates from Harvard for the rest of their lives, psychiatrist George Vaillant found that the ones who thrived into old age were the ones who, among other things, figured out how to love and be loved. If there is a reliable prescription for aging well cordially—from the heart—it’s this: the company of people you care about, and who care about you.

*

It’s not quite fair to prop up B.J. McHugh, Ephraim Engleman and Jean Vanier in their respective shop windows as models of brilliant aging of the body, brain, and soul. The ways in which people age brilliantly aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed, these three —as with spectacularly robust old men and women of all stripes — have a fair bit in common.

All have a strong sense of purpose that pops them out of bed every morning. And while all are extraordinarily conscientious, the drive is directed outward—all three were drawn to helping professions (McHugh is a retired nurse). When Howard Friedman, a psychologist at University of California, Riverside, was crunching the data for the famous Longevity Project—a study that was published in book form in 2011 and followed more than 1,000 American children to their dotage or their grave—he discovered a pattern. The hardest workers had the longest lives.

And so we return to the old formula: strive, adapt, live on. The kites that remain in the sky the longest are pinned there by resistance.

 

 

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The Runaway Body

The Runaway Body

by Bruce Grierson Featured Psychology

When a couple tackles their weight issues together, things get complicated.

From READER’S DIGEST, JAN 2014

The first thing you notice about Andrew Mclane is the tattoo on his left bicep. It’s densely inked, like the designs on partially shrunken balloons. The tattoo is half the size it used to be because the arm is. The arm dropped eight inches in circumference in a year.

Andrew, a 28-year-old realtor, stands six-foot one. He’s wearing a T-shirt that shows off his pantherish physique. Next to him in the restaurant booth here in sleepy Parksville, on Vancouver Island, sits his wife, Dani, a doe-eyed brunette who teaches elementary school in nearby Port Alberni.

Three years ago, the couple vowed to make 2011 their “Year of Health.” They weren’t kidding. Together they shed more than 300 pounds in twelve months. Dani lost 60. Andrew lost 250.

Sounds like a simple story, but it’s not. Partly, because weight issues are never simple—they are a tricky brew of self-image anxieties, cultural cues, and the vagaries of human physiology. And partly because couple issues are never simple either.

*

Andrew doesn’t really know why his weight issues began, only when. It was around age 15, about the time he unexpectedly got cut from the baseball team. Absorbing that sting, and with time suddenly on his hands, he took a part-time job at Parksville’s Japanese restaurant, working in the kitchen amid the smell of tempura and cleavered jewels of sushi. By age 18 he was approaching 280 pounds.

The local men’s store had a Big and Tall section and the next year Andrew bought his first suit there, to launch his career. (He would become, at 19, Canada’s youngest realtor.) He looked sharp and had a swaggering confidence. That’s what caught Dani’s attention when Andrew’s profile popped up on an Internet dating site, in response to her own ad.

She was striking. (She’d been a sporty kid like him, though by now was carrying a little extra weight, too.) His profile was cryptic. “If you like Will Ferrell movies, we’ll probably get along,” it said. Dani drew him out in subsequent correspondences, and the two felt a certain comfort with each other when they finally arranged a face-to-face date.

“I wasn’t shocked when I met him,” Dani says, even though Andrew had posted only head-and-shoulders photos, which concealed his now 350-pound girth. “I didn’t feel like he’d misrepresented himself.” She saw great eyes, a great smile. An easy energy came off of him, the kind endemic to people who go places and get stuff done. Andrew took her to the restaurant at the swanky Ti-na-mara resort on the oceanfront. She was too nervous to touch her pasta. The next day she called her grandmother and said, “Grandma, I met him. I met him.”

Meanwhile, Andrew says, “I called my sister and told her the same thing: ‘I’ve met the future Mrs. Mclane.’” Six and a half months later they were married, on the beach at her parents’ place. They were both 23.

*

People who love food so much that it’s an issue have a certain private bond, solidarity in a culture where almost all social life revolves around eating. Drinks and dinner were Andrew’s idea of quality time. Whatever restaurant served the most scrumptious food—best pint, best burger, best steak—that was where he was headed. Back then, “full” was not the nirvana he was looking for. “Stuffed” was. “The feeling of being so full that you can’t move,” he says, “that was bliss.”

Dani battled some of the same temptations — the crazymaking “food noise” that crescendoed when she came in range of certain treats —though she didn’t indulge herself the same degree. She’d actually been starting to turn her health habits around when she met Andrew. But at this stage, food issues were a conflict they didn’t need. They were a team. And for awhile, they just raised the white flag and had fun.

They honeymooned in Vegas, land of limitless choices and supersized portions. Back home in Parksville, down-time revolved around meals out and parties in. They lived large, within a growing circle of friends. In the Parksville Christmas parade, they were the guests of honour: Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus. “I didn’t need a pillow,” Andrew says.

They loved each other for who they were right now, not for who they might become. When they looked at each other they did not see potential, the way realtors sometimes tout an undervalued property with “good bones.” They each were invested in the person in front of their eyes. Still, they had to wonder. Was this who they were going to be, forever? Dani had never thought so; she imagined they’d one day reclaim their sporty youthful ways and live a different kind of life, one less constrained by gravity.

Andrew wasn’t so sure. Within two years of their wedding, he had packed on another 100 pounds. He was now crowding 450. Even the Big and Tall section had nothing for him now. He had to order his size-60 jackets online.

“When we held hands, we weren’t totally together,” recalls Dani. When she hugged him, it was like hugging a tree. She couldn’t get her hands all the way around.

At the end of a day of showing two-storey homes, Andrew felt as if he’d run a marathon.

One evening, he went to Vancouver to treat himself to a Canucks game, which he describes as “60 minutes of pain.” The cup-holders carved into his hips. He thought, Forget playing sports, I can’t even watch sports.

One night he came into the TV room while Dani was watching The Biggest Loser—a reality show about people who compete to drop the most weight. “Do I look like that?” he asked.

Dani shook her head no. “Because to me he didn’t,” she says. “Love is blind, I guess.”

But Andrew knew. He wasn’t as big as those folks on TV. He was bigger. “I weighed more than every single person on that show,” he says.

In the fall of 2010 Andrew started on diet shakes and dropped a few pounds, then round about Dani’s birthday in October he fell off the wagon. “I went back to my old habits,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m dragging her down.’”

*

“Sizeism,” it’s sometimes said, is the last acceptable form of prejudice. It seemed, for Andrew, that public humiliation lurked around every corner. When you’re that large, it’s not just little kids who stare. Dani, feeling for him, started soaking up his worries

—about whether the stairs on this walk-up, or the chairs in this restaurant, would hold him. “I didn’t want to travel, knowing how anxious it made him,” she says.

Things came to a head around Christmas of 2010. “We’re really worried about Andrew,” Dani’s friends told her. Some kind of intervention seemed imminent. It didn’t help that Dani was feeling discouraged about her own weight — 240 pounds on a five-foot-four-inch frame. A couple of days earlier, as she cheered the kids from the sidelines at her school’s annual “Run for Fun,” a man walking by said, “You might think about joining them.”

Enough was enough. The issue of children had been coming up — Andrew wanted them — and somehow it was the springboard for everything she now needed to say. She sat Andrew down. “ I don’t want to have kids with someone who’s gonna die before he’s 40,” she said. “I don’t want to be a single mom.”

She upped the ante. “You’re ruining us,” she told him.

“It was a day I wouldn’t wish upon anybody,” Andrew says now. “I realized, my wife’s going to leave me, and I’m going to be sitting there feeling sorry for myself.”

*

Beth Alden, a no-nonsense and almost evangelically inspiring trainer, runs boot-camp style weight-loss classes based on close support and mutual accountability.

Dani had found Beth online and urged her to take the two of them on as clients. Beth had remembered running into Andrew in Parksville years before. He was a big personality, she recalled, so headstrong she wasn’t sure he was coachable. But this time when she met him something had changed. “He wasn’t the same person,” Beth says. “I looked in his eyes and I saw desperation. This was rock bottom.” Plus, what she learned of his family made her hopeful. His sister was a dancer. His dad was not a heavy man. “I told him, ‘You’re not a big-boned guy,’ Beth says. “You shouldn’t be this size.’”

Dani had signed up for Beth’s 12-week-long “Biggest Loser” program. But “at 460 pounds, you don’t want to work out around anybody,” Andrew says. He opted for personal training twice a week.

And so they started their journey at the gym on parallel paths — she in the group setting she preferred, and he on his own trajectory. They started very slowly, a tactic guaranteed to produce “small wins” that would leave them feeling good about themselves, then gradually ramped it up. Beth believes in high-impact interval training—revving the heart and resting it, over and over. The idea is to throw as much productive confusion at the body as possible, with a variety of resistance training and straight cardio and stretching routines. Counting his runs, his gym work with free weights, and his cardio sessions in the garage on an elliptical machine he and Dani had purchased, he was soon working out six or seven days a week.

Beth would have him haul sandbags equivalent to the weight he’d lost so far, so he’d understand what he had been carrying, and feel the joy of sudden freedom when he dropped it to the floor. She prepared him the way a Jedi master prepares an apprentice—coaxing him to anticipate challenges he might face.

“Friends are going to call and say, Hey, you look great, just come out for a drink with us?” she’d tell Andrew. “What are you gonna do? You’re going to have to say goodbye to some of those people who don’t want you to be skinny because they’re not.”

Failure, Beth told Andrew, was not an option. “Here it is. You were a successful athlete in high school. You’re a successful realtor. And you have bombed with health and fitness. We’re gonna succeed here.”

Dani, meanwhile, already nosing below 200 pounds—down more than 40 pounds from that Black Friday of the ultimatum. She was taking three classes a week, plus The Biggest Loser sessions on Wednesdays, when Beth sometimes led the group on field trips to do cardio in the woods or on the beach.

Beth took them both shopping, to get them in the habit of buying from the perimeter of the grocery store and avoiding the inner isles where the process food lurks. She encouraged them to carefully read labels. (“Do you understand what those ingredients are? If not, put that back.”) They made a pact to purge junk food from the house.

The experiment was working — for both of them. But it was obvious that something different was happening to Andrew. Something profound.

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“The only way I can explain it,” says Dani, “is you know how when you’re taxiing in a plane and the pilot suddenly hits the throttle? It was like, Hold on.”

That first month Andrew dropped 35 pounds, and began tweaking his routine. He figured out that he lost more weight if he trained at night. He vowed no eating past six p.m., He packed healthy bag lunches every day.

After the second month he’d lost another 30 pounds. A kind of upheaval was taking place inside his body as it adjusted to the different fuel, the different activity levels. He had listened to what Beth said and internalized it. As the management gurus say, he had committed not to a goal but to a system.

At the end of each month his clothes no longer fit. “At first I took them in to get hemmed, thinking maybe it’s cheaper,” he says. “But by the time they finished the hemming I’d shrunk so much that they were too big again, so I’d just end up throwing them out.”

By summer he’d lost 100 pounds. Fat was melting away. It felt amazing. The same brain reward circuits that used to light up when he gorged on pizza were now being activated by the exercise. “I traded a food addiction for an endorphin high,” Andrew says.

The 150-pound mark happened to fall around his 26th birthday. But Andrew kept it quiet. “Even losing 150 pounds, I still weighed 310—it wasn’t enough,” he says. He stayed under cover—no photos on Facebook, no clues of the transformation-in-progress. He pledged to be totally metamorphosed before the big reveal. “I didn’t want to disappoint people.”

By New Year’s Eve, 2011, he was down 200. “People wanted me to celebrate. But I could not turn it off.” Like a nerd at a high-school bush party, he drank water out of beer bottles.

Identitywise, “it was a very confusing time,” Andrew says. Occasionally, he’d prop up a picture of his old, enormous self next to a mirror, then look back and forth between the two. “You don’t know which you are,.”

Indeed, it’s hard to believe Andrew 1.0 and Andrew 2.0 are the same person, when you diagram the differences before and after.

From 460 pounds to as little as 193.

From size XXXXXXL to size medium.

From no chance at a push-up to handstand pushups.

He came down five hat sizes. His fingers, once as thick as tailgate-party smokies, are now as slender as votive tapers. He can wear his wedding ring again. His hands feel totally different now, Dani says, when she holds them. When she gives him a hug now she can feel his bones.

He lost 3 ½ pounds of skin.

His feet, he has noticed, are incongruously flat. They got squashed, the arches fallen, from carrying all that weight, and they remained kind of compressed, even though they don’t have that load to bear any more.

*

As his miraculous transformation unfolded, Dani’s pride in her husband was tempered by the reactions of everybody around them. She and Andrew had left the starting line together, but the difference in their pace of progress was lost on no one.

At the gym, “I was making friends, feeling great about it all,” she says. “But then it was like, Oh, are you still working out? And I’d think, Yes. Yes, I am! I’m trying so hard! But now there was a different standard. People were measuring me against him.”

In May of 2012, on the one-year anniversary of the project, Andrew ran the BMO half-marathon in Vancouver, crossing the line triumphantly in around two hours. “The thing is, that was Dani’s one-year anniversary too,” Andrew says. She had dropped 60 pounds! But no one mentioned it.

“I cried the whole day,” she says softly.

As her husband was riding his runaway weight-loss train, Dani had decided to return to school to pursue her master’s degree in education. “She was working till three or four in the morning and then going to work, day after day,” Andrew says. “People don’t see that. But there’s 200 pounds less of me, and that’s hard to miss.”

There is a phrase you sometimes hear coaches and teachers preach: “Results, not excuses.” It’s a tough law to follow, especially when legitimate excuses are dangling low on the tree.

The fact is, women really do have a harder time shedding weight than men do, as a rule. A 2010 Syracuse University study had both male and female test subjects walk and run a mile on a treadmill at the same speed; doing the same work, the men burned between 12 and 18 percent more calories than the women — chiefly because men tend to have greater muscle mass, and muscle metabolism more than fat does. Men and women also process food differently. When weight loss is the goal, women’s kryptonite tends to be fatty foods, while men’s kryptonite tends to be carbs. Which means that those rich meals Andrew and Dani so loved to eat may have cost her disproportionately more.

But Dani would not take that easy out. “I think that’s b.s., mister!” she replied, when Andrew blamed physiology for the difference in their results. “The bottom line is, you were more committed.”

Working on her masters degree “deflected attention” from her weight-loss goals, Dani admits, and the pounds she had so painstakingly whittled away started creeping back. Her fantastic efforts in the gym were being sabotaged by equally committed eating binges. If she stopped exercising for even a few days, a kind of vicious circle emerged. She lost exercising’s stressbusting effects. Awash in anxiety, she would “self-medicate” with food.

*

Dani began seeing a counselor, who helped her put a lot of this wild ride in perspective.

Imagine the two of you are in a dark cave, the counselor told her. There is a path out of the cave. Your path. It’s right there. But you can’t see it, because instead of looking down, you’re looking up into Andrew’s light. Trying to navigate by her husband’s light, instead of her own, would always spell trouble, she decided. They share much, yes, but they are utterly distinct: an apple and an orange.

For instance, Dani realized, she just doesn’t like exercising as much as Andrew does — probably never will. She doesn’t get the same payoff from it. Could be she’s just wired differently. “I wanted to love running but I just don’t,” she says — “not the way Andrew does.” And while she needed a community around her to motivate her to exercise, Andrew preferred to retreat into his bubble.

“Think of a marriage as a mobile, the kind you see hanging from the ceiling in a baby’s room,” suggested her therapist. When one piece moves, the whole system is set in motion.

No matter what the world may see, fundamentally Andrew has not changed, and she herself has not changed, Dani believes. But “what has changed is the dynamic of the relationship—learning how to be together in a new way.” Bottom line: They had entered this project together, and they needed to be there for each other now, too. “You have to be a team,” says Dani. “You have no choice. You can’t do it yourself.”

“If you think about love, long term—and it’s hard to, because we live in the moment most of the time—we just gel,” Andrew says. “Dani’s my best friend.”

For Andrew, the Year of Health was “a selfish time.” It had to be, both agree. He was utterly focused on saving his own life.

But now he has done it. He is down 260 pounds. His plan has simplified to staying the course. It won’t be easy: People who lose that much weight that quickly are often saddled with a side effect called “metabolic adaptation” (basically, the greater the percentage of your weight you lose, the more your metabolism slows). But he has several things on his side, including his youth, and his love of weight training, and the ferocious ongoing support of his wife — which it may now be his turn to reciprocate.

In mid-November, Andrew is scheduled for a final round of reduction surgery: a small eave of flesh that hung beneath his chest will be excised. After that, “there’s about a five-week recovery period where I’m not allowed to work out,” he says.

Dani is looking forward to it. The last time a similar procedure was done – on his stomach – Andrew and Dani went for strolls every day during the weeks and weeks of his rehab. Just walking, like in the old days, when a slow walk was all they could manage.

The difference is, this time it’s a choice.

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From the archives: Fishing for Madeline

From the archives: Fishing for Madeline

by Bruce Grierson Essays Featured Kids Published Stories Archive

 

From READER’S DIGEST, Dec. 2010 – Quinton Gordon photograph

Today was a big day, I’d reminded my daughter. Right after kindergarten we had a date. “Rick’s taking us fishing. He’ll teach us about fish.”

Madeline, who is five, looked unmoved.

“I already know everything about fish,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yup.”

“What do you know about fish?”

“They need to eat to stay strong, and they need to be wet to stay alive. They swim with their mouth open so they never get thirsty.”

It wasn’t a bad start.

“Rick” is Rick Hansen, the renowned wheelchair athlete who, outside of his charity work, happens to know everything — or close to everything — about one particular fish. Hansen is director of the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society. And as he loomed into view through a misty rain, from the deck of his boat bobbing at the public wharf in Steveston, B.C., she recognized him as the “man in motion” guy in one of her kids’ books.

Madeline had never really been fishing. Oh, I’d taken her to the Father’s Day derby at nearby Rice Lake, where about a million little kids lily-dip their lines in hopes of snagging one of the timid little trout in there. But this was something else. White sturgeon are a species so big and old and storied that catching one is almost as much of a life-changing experience as tagging it and putting it back—even for adults. The sturgeon that swim in the Fraser today are evolutionarily unchanged from the ones that swam before the ice age before the last ice age. No joke: we were going fishing for dinosaurs.

His folded wheelchair tucked between the seats, face flush with the pleasure of being out of the office, Hansen throttled up and we nosed out of port. The wind, here in the estuary, carried the tang of sea salt. The working river was doing double-time – seiners schlepping their heavy nets, tugs towing barges of sawdust, a crane lowering a tankerload of cars from Asia onto the dock. None of this interested Madeline much. Look, there were two TVs on board! When it became sadly clear that neither was going to pick up Babar, she tuned in to Rick’s explanation. One screen mapped where we were. The other was a fishfinder. “In the old days you used to be able to say, well the fish just weren’t around,” Rick said. “Now you have to admit, we just weren’t smart enough to catch them.”

Madeline sat on my lap. I could feel the warmth of her right through the yellow rubber rain pants. It was kind of blissful. To busy parents of little kids, life too often seems like a string of teachable moments squandered. By the time we realize what we should have said to help decode their wonder and give it a name, the door has slammed shut. But a day spent fishing for sturgeon is one long master-class in pretty much everything that’s important to know. The teaching goes both ways. Adults make fishing complicated, but a kid’s appreciation of it—as of most things—is big-picture simple. Today we would learn not how different a prehistoric fish is from a five-year-old girl, but how similar.

“What do you think sturgeon like to eat?” I’d queried on the drive south through Vancouver. “Worms,” Madeline said, definitively. Turned out she was right: many a novice fisherman casually dangling an earthwormed hook into the Fraser has had a near heart attack when a sturgeon the size of a dancer’s leg takes that bait. But there are things a sturgeon likes even more. Fred Helmer, a veteran BC fishing guide who was along with us, had prepared four rods—including one for Madeline and one for me. And now as we dropped anchor in Rick’s secret favorite spot near the Alex Fraser Bridge, he cast the hooks in and they sank without bubbles. On the menu today was choice pink-salmon parts and —the special of the day — a syrupy clump of skein roe that Fred called “magic bait.” These are protein-rich eggs harvested from a mama pink salmon just preparing to spawn: superpremium catnip.

Fred held his hands a foot or so apart. “How big is the fish you’re going to catch?” Madeline shook her head. He went wider. “This big?” Madeline knew exactly how big. In her kid logic, a successful fishing outing is one in which you land a fish that would fit your clothes. Madeline’s sturgeon, by that reasoning, was going to be 109 centimetres long– three foot seven. Mine would be 175 centimetres—five foot nine.

What’s cool about sturgeon fishing, though, is that it’s not about size. Every fish has equal merit. Nobody would be taking a sturgeon home for dinner tonight. Earlier this century they were fished almost to extinction—twice—and while their numbers recover, the white sturgeon of the Lower Fraser are protected. But this is more than a catch-and-release enterprise: it’s catch-and-tag-and-release. Sturgeon fisherman are tracking the population: where they’re going, how they’re growing, how many of them are out there — and data on the juveniles is just as valuable as data on the old soldiers. To fish for sturgeon is to be an adjunct scientist. Everyone who catches a sturgeon becomes part of the conservation effort, and in this sense a five-year-old’s contribution is as valuable as any biologist’s.

 

An hour of fishing under the bridge yielded but one tiny sculpin, which Madeline took great joy in setting free. But now the tide had turned. The rising sea was pushing boats upriver, giving the Fraser the appearance that it was running backwards. We were entering a dreamscape where the normal laws of physics were suspended.

The scent of that gorgeous bait was carrying on the current. For the fish, the wind had just picked up outside a bakery.

Madeline’s rod-tip twitched, subtly. Rick took the rod gently, reefed up hard on it, once, then handed it to me. A fish was on.

 

It felt big. Or at least mad. I struggled to keep too much line from peeling off the reel. “So, Rick has a couple of rules,” Fred said. “You cannot let go of the rod no matter what. If you do go over the side, hang on to the rod and we will come and get you.”

For some long minutes the tug-of-war continued. Then out of the brackish depths of the Fraser it came, Madeline’s sturgeon, tigerish stripes on its back visible first, then the sharklike head and the flicking tail defining the two ends, establishing its size. I had been trying to stay strong for Madeline—the great stoic hunter little girls expect their dads to be—but my arms were blasted. I was shaking and frankly not too far from tears.

“What’s the most humane thing to do with this fella?” I croaked as we brought him alongside.

“Just keep him in the water, relaxed,” Rick said. “We have to set up.”

The fish was still. “Is he dead?” Madeline asked.

“No, Sweetie. He’s had better days. But he’ll be fine.”

Fred guided Madeline’s sturgeon into a hammock-like sling in the water, which Rick then winched up into the boat. Madeline put on gloves. She came up to her fish. It seemed less like a fish than some kind of farm animal with body armour. Something in a medieval petting zoo. We watched the gills opening and closing, flashes of crimson beneath. Was it suffering?

“Sturgeon aren’t like some other fish, where after five minutes out of the water they’re done,” Rick said. “They are incredibly hardy.”

“Back in the day when you could catch and keep sturgeon, my dad would store them on the lawn, for three or four days, with the sprinkler on them – and then go sell them in Chinatown,” Fred said.

“Here’s the mouth—see how leathery it is? Look how it comes out – like a vacuum hose. And these things on its nose are chemical sensors for detecting prey.”

Rick turned in his chair. “They have the ability to locate food that’s way more sophisticated than ours, using vibrations,” he said. Madeline, who sometimes has trouble locating the snacks in her backpack, stroked her sturgeon, its sandpapery skin, incredibly gently.

 

I picked her up and held her, lengthwise, over top of her sturgeon. It was her size. A measurement confirmed it – within a centimeter. It was probably a few years older. Fred produced an instrument, like the little retail-store gun that scans the barcode tags, and passed it over the fish. BEEP! A microchip under the fish’s skin sent a signal, and a number popped up in the scanner viewscreen.

The fish had been caught once before – on November 22, 2006. Since that day, we would learn, the fish had grown nine centimeters in length but only one in girth – taller but not much fatter. Like Madeline herself. I had a flashback to St. Paul’s hospital, our daughter emerging grey-pink and slimy and a doctor moving her under a warm light and producing a tape measure. Madeline stuck out beyond the last mark, off the charts. “Our child cannot be measured by science!”)

“You can check on your fish once a year,” Rick told Madeline. Thousands of BC schoolkids, from grade two to grade seven, are monitoring the sturgeon stocks by following the stories of individual fish like this one.

As Madeline’s fish rested in the sling, a second sturgeon was brought aboard. This time the scan was beepless. So: a new capture. This fish had never been above water. Fred loaded a little glass tag the size of a grain of rice into what looked like a hypodermic needle.

“I’ll try not to get this needle in my hand—that has happened before,” Fred said. “Now, Madeline, we put the tag right under the surface of his skin, so when the fish grows the tag can move around in his body.”

We tipped both fish toward the river and they slipped in, headfirst. I thought, romantically, that Madeline’s fish might look back at her before swimming away, but it didn’t. Madeline asked to be picked up. She was dead weight. I had the notion that she was drained of energy in sympathy with her exhausted fish.  (Or, less likely, in sympathy with her exhausted dad.) Probably it was just a perfect storm of a couple of late nights, fresh air and a glucose crash from the nut bars.

But clearly, this was all almost too much for her to process. She didn’t have the language for it.

I wondered what new fears we had introduced on this trip. The idea of a whole teeming subsurface world: monsters under the bed. Her fish had been brought up gasping into the air. It looked bad, but it really wasn’t, we insisted. Did she buy it? (You could see her searching for the right analogy and later she found it. “How would you like to be holded under water?”) A million mind-blowing factoids swirled: Dinosaurs are real. Dads are weaker than they let on. And the people we read about in books might one day step out of those books and take us fishing.

She had been a motormouth on the car ride over. From the back seat issued strong opinions on how Beethoven lived in China, how things were better in the days when dads like me weren’t underfoot and moms played with kids and gave them treats. (Also: could she have a horse?) But now she was silent. I looked down at her in my arms. She was asleep.

 

You can guess how the rest of the story goes. Kid logic prevailed. The sun broke through. Soon after my own fishing rod twitched with a bite. After a monumental struggle that ensured I’d be sleeping with a heating pad for days, I brought this last fish in. Madeline was awake now, saucer-eyed, trying to get close without getting in the way. Fred’s hand got raked by the pointy scutes and was trailing blood as he scanned it.

This fish was monstrous. It measured 93 centimetres around, its belly probably full of pink salmon. It was between sixty and eighty years old – the age of grandpas and grandmas. Now it was going back. With great luck it will still be here a generation from now, and maybe Madeline will catch it again with her own five-year-old son or daughter on a fine fall day like this one.

But there was one thing that didn’t square. Madeline’s fish was Madeline-sized. Mine was supposed to be my dad-sized: that was what she’d ordered. We measured it. From its nose to the tip of its tail it was around 215 centimetres. Madeline leaned close.

“That’s you?” she said.

I shook my head. “It’s taller.”

Then it clicked.

“That’s you on my shoulders.”Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Kids Gone Wild

Kids Gone Wild

by Bruce Grierson Essays Featured Kids Psychology

There’s a new movement out there to get children into nature

from EXPLORE MAGAZINE, August 2009

A huge—and I mean huge—black bear walked right past the car as I was loading my infant daughter into the back seat. It was in no particular hurry. It had emerged from the forest and was cutting through our driveway en route to the dumpster near the elementary school, where it would poke around and then hang a left back into the wild. We both watched it recede. At 300 feet it still looked pretty big. Lila was curious but not frightened: it occurred to me that buy xanax 0.25 mg living among bears—not to mention coyotes and the odd cougar—is normal for her now. And that’s a good thing, I think.

“You know why I like it here?” my wife explained to someone not long after we’d moved to this little townhouse complex, high on the flank of Vancouver’s North Shore mountains. “Because the only predators you have to worry about have four legs. And I’ll take those over the two-legged kind any day.”

Read the whole story here:

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