By Paul Salmon, Ph.D., M.S.
There's a popular column in The New York Times food and cooking section called “The Minimalist.” It's all about getting down to the basics of cooking with bare essentials, kind of a reaction to the high tech, over-the-top approach to cooking you find almost everywhere.
One column a few months ago focused on making bread with very little yeast and few other ingredients. We tried it; the dough was very moist, took 18 hours to rise, and baked in a pre-heated iron pot that converted the moisture to steam and gave the bread a wonderful crust. It tasted great, and showed how you really can do a lot with a little when it comes to cooking; why not health, fitness and most other aspects of everyday life? A great book on meditation called “Instructions to the Cook” by Bernard Glassman makes this point in a slightly different way. I keep the following quote close at hand as a reminder that many of us have all we need, despite our continual pursuit of something — anything, so long as it's new and different — that will make us more content, better adjusted, healthier, and ultimately, happier.
Here's what Glassman has to say: “So the first principle of the Zen cook is that we already have everything we need. If we look closely at our lives, we will find that we have all the ingredients we need to prepare the supreme meal. At every moment, we simply take the ingredients at hand and make the best meal we can. It doesn't matter how much or how little we have. The Zen cook just looks at what is available and starts with that.” Let's apply this to health and fitness. The basic idea — that you have at hand all the ingredients to cook a great meal, or do anything else — involves taking stock of your situation, figuring out what you have to work with. You may be out of shape, overweight, injured, sick, overworked or overstressed. It doesn't matter; if that's where you are, then that's where you start. This is like being a cook with some water, a couple of over-ripe tomatoes, and maybe a few spices — hardly the makings of a gourmet meal. But with imagination, a thorough understanding of the fundamental properties of these ingredients, and a skilled hand, wonderful things can happen. So taking stock of yourself and your situation is the first step to health and fitness, according to this view of things. Evaluate your capabilities and limits as a way of imaginatively figuring out safe, interesting, and productive ways to get and stay healthy. If running appeals to you, but joint problems limit you to walking, then just walk. Or when the weather improves, pull out your old bike and recapture some of the excitement you probably felt as a kid by riding around the neighborhood without stressing your joints. Both walking and biking will elevate your heart rate, get your outdoors, and make you feel better, which from a health-protective angle, is a good thing.
Would running somehow be “better?” In reality, probably not, because any gains in fitness would be more than offset by the likelihood of further injury. But it doesn't matter either way, because it's not something that works for you right now. This would be like deciding not to cook anything at all and going hungry because you're not willing to work with what you have on hand, wishing that you had something else.
