Exercises in Thought: Physical Health

Sweeney: Anecdote of the Inhaler

The other night I was doing one of my favorite things, dancing, or just flailing around really. I was flailing around to my friend’s band in the middle of the flail floor and I was incurring all the typical liabilities: sweat on the brow, further dampness along the curve of the spine. Shortness of breath. My soles ached from stamping. All this I was prepared to endure, but suddenly I took on a wound that was unexpected and acute: A stitch in my side. Just as the wacky waving inflatable tube man might be caught in a frost, so too was my motion halted. Flagging to the periphery, I held my hands at my knees. I wondered how I could be so bent out of shape as to sustain a stitch through flailing, and I remembered that I had gained 70 or so pounds.

Let me tell you the story of the time I gained 70 or so pounds.

I walked into Dr. Prost’s office. “Have a seat,” he told me, or he probably did anyway, because that’s the type of thing people say…

But no. That’s not the right way to tell a story. You can’t just make people say the expected thing in the expected place because you want the narrative to run smoothly. Either you remember what happened or you don’t, and if you don’t, you leave the gaps as they are and let the story that grows from the thin soil of memory bear its fate.

So: I walked into Dr. Prost’s office, from a door on the right. I sat down.

He said, “This is pretty devastating news.”

I said, “Yeah it is. I’ve been holding up alright, it is what it is.”

He said, “I think of my patients as being on a highway. Right now, you’re driving in the ditch. And you’ve been in the ditch for a long time. We need to get you back on the highway.”

I said, “Right.”

He said, “Now, the thing that might happen later is that you become more resistant. This is like squirrels in the wintertime. When winter approaches, squirrels gain body mass to become cold-resistant during hibernation. The same might happen to you. If this happens you’ll need to take more insulin with every meal.”

I shook his hand. My father shook his hand. He showed us his father’s Air Force bomber jacket, which he kept framed alongside a picture of his mother manning the gunner of the old fighter plane.

He was right, too. I was in the ditch. All of my clothes, my pants especially, slid off. After a month of lifting weights, I still hadn’t built enough muscle to do anything more than five-pound laterals. When I played beach volleyball I would fall down several times owing to my sheer weakness. Sometimes, when I got out of bed, a pressure would fill my eyes and my vision would go black for several seconds. Other times it would be the middle of the night, and I’d woken up because of the cicadas and because I needed to piss so badly.

Before I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, I did not think critically about my physical health. I lost 70 or so pounds over the course of maybe six months, with no change in my exercise or eating habits. I thought I was getting older. I hoped I was, anyway.

I still don’t think critically about my physical health. If you asked me what Type 1 diabetes is today I wouldn’t be able to tell you all that much.

What I could tell you is that untreated Type 1 diabetes makes you have to piss really badly. Your body has no other way of getting rid of all the sugar that isn’t being absorbed into your cells because your pancreas isn’t producing insulin — and the corollary of pissing so much, of course, is that you need to drink water all the time. That should have tipped me off. The last time in my life I had so thirsted for water was when I was in marching band, marching around in the blistering Texas heat. After marching band I thought I’d outgrown water; before I was diagnosed I figured I was growing back into it.

Oh high school band, what a time. I made the first of my high school’s five concert bands my freshman year, and I was so nervous to live up to expectations that I learned to breathe on a strict regimen. Every time I picked up my saxophone I had to hype myself up through little huffing inhales before I could puff out a single note.

This goes back to when everyone thought I was the second fastest kid in the whole school, after John Coutomanos. I wasn’t anywhere near the second fastest, as my lackluster finishes in the annual 5k well proved. But no one tried harder than I did. I racked up the second most miles of any kid during Running Club, which held its meetings biweekly.

I hated running. Every Tuesday and Thursday I was overcome by dread. To be equal to this dread I ran out the school doors, when the bell electronically chimed, and clamoring over the pavement I would pull my inhaler from my pocket, and I would inhale and the inhaler would make the sound I imagined an accordion would make and that’s how I told myself it was time to go.

Nowadays I don’t ever run. People know this. I walk around campus, and it is very beautiful. I like to hear the birds, the Smashing Pumpkins, the train. What I like to do most of all, though, is hear these things as if they were no sounds at all. I like to hear all these things as silence, and I like to imagine what the true sound coming out from them might sound like.

The silence of the mind tells me everything is possible. Whether I learned this from the dread or from the running I couldn’t tell you.

Or maybe it was from that other time, when I didn’t want to let go. My brother pulled the branch down and then I was supposed to hang from it so he could grab at the wild grapes but that didn’t happen. I shot up into the air and my brother told me to let go. I didn’t want to let go, and he told me to let go, and I didn’t let go until I heard the silence that wasn’t telling me to let go. “Try weighing more next time,” my brother said to me.

I got too many stitches in my side from running, so in fifth grade I quit. Not John Coutomanos, but the fat kid became a track star in high school, and in the meantime I became a man. And so that’s the story of the time I gained 70 or so pounds.

Carroll: Physical Health, Structural Violence

I’m sorry. Yet again, you’ve been hoodwinked. Just as the love article was really about patriotism and how the mental health article was really about spiritual health, the physical health article is really about mental health.

I do love the life of the mind. But it is not noble to spend all of one’s time reading, writing, and thinking. Actually, it’s unbalanced. Just as you wouldn’t (ideally) spend all of your waking hours moving, running, or straining, you shouldn’t do the same for sitting and contemplating.

Allow me to make an obnoxious move to ancient philosophy. In “The Republic,” Plato posits a tripartite division of the human soul between appetite, spirit, and reason. At risk of oversimplification, each part can be said to correspond to our qualities as living organisms, emotional animals, and rational beings. In analogizing each part of the soul to the classes of a hypothetical city, he claims that the productive class of merchants and workers corresponds to appetite, the guardian class of soldiers corresponds to spirit, and the philosopher rulers correspond to reason. Each class has its corresponding virtue: the productive class of moderation, the guardian class of courage, and the philosopher class of wisdom. The productive class should moderate its appetite so as not to over consume, the guardian class must be courageous in spirit to fearlessly defend the city, and the philosopher class must be wise to judge how to best rule over the union of the whole city.

Say what you will about Plato’s political project as a whole, but he elaborated a compelling view of a balanced human soul. With reference to this division, I’ll claim that spending all of our time absorbed in our thoughts is an unbalanced way of life. We are, first, animals that need to move our muscles, and second, emotional blobs that need to feel ourselves putting sustained physical force into a thing. Doing so keeps our biology healthy and cultivates courage — or mental endurance as Plato describes it: holding fast to a belief or course of action in the face of fear — and other virtues like initiative. Serious physical training, be it yoga, running, weightlifting, or any other endeavor, tangibly demonstrates to its practitioner the possibility of overcoming one’s limitations through sustained struggle at the edge of one’s capabilities. But even if you don’t believe all that, at its simplest, balance is found in movement and bodiliness being a complement for stillness and rationality.

And it is quite evident, separate from all the metaphysical nonsense of the soul and virtue and vice, that exercise is good for us as animal organisms. Exercise increases production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which plays a key role in the creation of new neurons and all other aspects of brain health. Overwhelming consensus establishes that exercise reduces the risk of all-cause mortality (so, you know, you can live longer to read more books). But more generally, if there is anything to be learned from belabored invocations of evolutionary biology, is it apparent that we evolved to sit and look at words on a page or screen about two feet away from us for our whole days, rather than running tens of miles just to get by? Is it also apparent that we evolved to crave nutrients which are recombobulated into “edible food-like substances” produced by corporations to make a profit off our appetite instead of nourishing us? Or is it apparent that we evolved to eat four meals a day, three desserts, or really just however much we desire in the moment? If all that’s too much to consider, just note the relationship between physical activity and mental health, that may exist for all sorts of reasons but is nonetheless strikingly unidirectional.

Considering the powerful scientific evidence of the relationship between physical health and mental health, as well as the character-building moral ideals of physical health, it is surprising that the college, when it is purportedly attempting to improve our mental health and build our characters, is instead funding ice cream trucks. There is, of course, legitimate value in such events for social connection as well having a little treat. But what if we imagined an expansion of the fitness infrastructure on campus as a mental health initiative? How many lives would we transform with an expanded weight room with more deliberate structures to get non-varsity athletes, especially those who are intimidated by the weight room as it is, into the gym?

I have never understood why pizza and cookies are the go-to “study snack” provision during finals. Who feels excited to dive into their research paper after a greasy slice? While the mental health crisis is complicated, we aren’t doing ourselves any favors by providing precisely the things which make us feel terrible as a resource. And last fall, the gym literally closed during the later part of finals. That was outrageous.

Thankfully, college is great because you have autonomy over your time. You can exercise however you like and eat mindfully even though the structure you inhabit makes it harder. The tragic thing is that since college must provide us the freedom to eat whenever we need to structure our schedule, we are robbed of our freedom from our desire to resist grabbing a brownie at 3 p.m. when it might not be the best thing for us to do. What I wish to emphasize is that if we understand societal problems through structural lenses — perhaps you’ve discussed in your cutesy liberal arts seminars how crime can be understood as a result of structural factors rather than individual responsibility — why not apply this structural lens to mental (physical) health outcomes at Amherst at the level of the college’s actions?

I hope I don’t make anyone feel bad by writing any of this. I’m not dissing you if you aren’t “physically healthy.” I want you to improve. I want the college to make it easier for you to improve. What do the gym rats say? It’s okay to be weak, but it’s not okay to stay weak.