Healthy Brain, Happy Life (13 page)

CHUNKY NO MORE:
Reconnecting My Brain with My Body and Spirit

T
here is often a defining moment in people’s lives that makes them decide to change their habits and routines and get fit. A health scare, a class reunion, a particularly unflattering picture—any of these things might do the trick. I was sick and tired of being overweight, but I had only ever made half-hearted attempts to change my sedentary, foodie ways. It wasn’t until I was on a white-water rafting trip in South America that I had the realization that gave me the motivation I needed to start the process of getting in shape.

A RIVER-RAFTING WAKE-UP CALL

It was in July 2002, and we were at the end of another gorgeous day on the mighty Cotahuasi River in central Peru. Mark, our fearless guide, was steering our raft. I was part of a group of fun-loving fellow adventure travelers, including a bunch of triathletes from northern California, a father–daughter pair, a river-loving husband-and-wife team, and Cea Higgins, a super-cool surfer and mother of two who became my rafting partner for the trip. I had come on this trip on my own searching for a little adventure and to get away from the relentless grind of science. We were all whizzing down the class-five river in the deepest canyon in the world surrounded by steep cliffs full of craggy gray rock formations. This trip was the latest in a series of adventure travel vacations that I had taken over the past few years, including a kayaking trip in Crete and another river-rafting trip down the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe the year before. I might have been living the life of a cloistered lab rat in New York City, but I made a point once a year to indulge the world traveler in me and let my hair down as far away from the hustle and bustle of New York City as I could. For me, white-water river rafting or kayaking in exotic places did the trick.

Even before we got on the river, this Peruvian adventure started with a six-hour bus trip from the airport at Arequipa, Peru, to the tiny town where we stayed overnight in a very rustic hotel before what was described to us as a “brutal” ten-hour hike on the actual Inca trail to where our boats were moored on the Cotahuasi River. I will never forget the ice-cold shower (adventure travel vacations don’t always come with hot water it seems) I took the morning before we all set out, mules in tow, on the hike. It was a bright and glorious day, and with our constant chitchatting as we got to know each other, even the long hike was over before we knew it. We were all tired by the end but were happy to have found our way to our floating caravan of rafts securely tied to the bank of the river. I remember thinking that the way those rafts were bouncing up and down on the water, it looked as if they were as eager as we were to finally explore the river.

Each evening after a long day of rafting, our guides chose a campsite somewhere on the banks of the river. Each night in camp, our first job was to get all the camping equipment and all our personal bags up from the supply rafts to the campsite. To do this, we formed a human “fire line” and handed each bag or piece of equipment from one person to the next until it reached camp. Our fire line sometimes went up a steep incline from the river’s edge.

It was that first night, standing somewhere in the middle of the line, that I received my personal, undisputed, loud and clear fitness wake-up call. Why? Because that night in the fire line was when I appreciated how truly pitiful my upper body strength was. At that time, I had several years of regular yoga under my belt that had shifted my totally inflexible body into a somewhat less inflexible body, but I had done virtually no strength or aerobic training and it showed. I now found myself the weakest link in our human chain. Not only was the sixteen-year-old girl there with her father much stronger than I was but there were sixty-five-plus-year-olds who blew me out of the water in terms of strength. Of course, my fellow river rafters never let the large packs being passed up to camp crush me like a bug. Instead, two fellow rafters got on either side of me and essentially passed the heaviest packs to each other while making it look like I was helping, thankfully allowing me to save face.

I was mortified. I literally could not pull my own weight.

That fact drove home a searing kind of shame: I was young, healthy, and able. Why could I not keep up with my fellow adventure travelers?

It was that night in the fire line that I made myself a promise: I was going to get in shape—get strong and healthy, nimble and quick—as soon as I got back to New York.

FIT, FAT, AND FEARFUL

True to my promise to myself on the river, two days after I returned from my rafting adventure, I marched myself down to a brand-new Equinox Fitness club that had opened up not too far from my lab. This gym was beautiful and had everything—a big facility with yoga and Pilates studios, workout rooms, personal trainers, fancy locker rooms, a sauna, and a pool. And it was only a fifteen-minute walk from work. It was perfect! I signed up immediately. The membership adviser sold me on trying out a personal trainer because a free training session came with my new membership package. I was determined to do this right so I marched straight up to the board on the wall with all the trainer profiles and carefully tried to choose the one who looked like he or she could get me into shape the fastest. Five days later, I had my first session with my new personal trainer, Carrie Newport.

Carrie was a relatively new trainer at the gym looking to build up her clientele. Turns out, she was the perfect trainer for me. Always bubbling over with information from the latest personal training seminar, she was enthusiastic, knowledgeable, creative in her workout design, and well organized. It was so much fun to train with her two to three times a week. The best part was that I quickly started to see results in both the increased weights I could handle and the higher number of reps I was able to complete in our sessions as well as in the shape of my body. Muscle mass grows if you work out regularly and if you push yourself hard. To supplement my training sessions with Carrie, I started taking advantage of the great fitness classes at the gym too. They had especially good dance teachers (there are so many fantastic dancers in New York and we get them as teachers in the gyms), and I also enjoyed the cardio, strength-training, and step aerobics classes. I tried them all!

When I look back on this time, I realize how many old habits I broke and how many new habits I established in one fell swoop as soon as I got back from that trip to Peru. All the books on breaking habits say it’s so difficult to do because habitual behavior is ingrained and unconscious and therefore very difficult to change. But my sudden change from non–gym goer to regular gym goer didn’t seem hard to me at all. Why? The first key factor was that I really had a profound revelation that night on the banks of the Cotahuasi River. That realization opened my eyes for the first time about my fitness level, and I was determined not to again be the weakest one on any future trip, which completely shifted my motivation to work out. The second key factor that was critical is that on top of the expensive gym membership, I hired a regular trainer to work with me one on one two or three times a week. I like to get my money’s worth, and that kept me extra motivated to get the most out of each personal training session. It was really Carrie who got me over the hump and helped jump-start my new habit of going to the gym on a regular basis. Her style of combining copious amounts of positive feedback and encouragement with fun and varied workouts along with a bubbly personality made the workouts so enjoyable—I loved them. The last key factor during the first year or year and a half after Peru was that I quickly started to see the fruits of my labor in terms of clear increases in my strength and changes in my body. That motivation alone was powerful enough to keep me going to my regular sessions with Carrie with no problem at all.

After the initial eighteen months of weight training and cardio with Carrie, I had reached my first fitness goal. I was much stronger and was ready to haul huge pieces of equipment on any fire line I might be asked to join. I had a much higher aerobic capacity and was ready to take any cardio fitness test Carrie could throw at me. I had also become a regular and enthusiastic gym goer; you could set your watch by my regular visits to the club, and I was on my way to becoming a bona fide gym rat.

But, despite all these positive changes, that still did not mean I was totally fit. While I was significantly stronger in 2004 than I had been in 2002, the truth was that I was still overweight and had even started to gain more weight in 2004. There were two main reasons for that. The first obvious reason was my eating habits. I was still indulging in great restaurants and the best take-out I could find in the city. My regular visits to the vending machine on the first floor of the building (better to hide my terrible habit from the people in my lab and in my department who had their offices on the eighth and eleventh floors), where I indulged in a Twix bar, my very favorite candy bar, before most every workout. That combination of chewy caramel together with a crunchy cookie on the bottom all covered in chocolate was irresistible and made me feel like I was gathering my strength and energy for my upcoming workout with Carrie. So while I was much stronger and firmer, I was still carrying too much weight on my five-foot, four-inch frame.

I started to realize that I needed to pay attention to what and how much I ate even beyond my Twix bar habit. It was the height of the Atkins and South Beach diet crazes, and this got me thinking about how many carbs I consumed every day—in fact at all meals, all day long. For example, I loved to make my own waffles for breakfast in the morning and eat those freshly made waffles with butter and syrup. Not just Sunday mornings, but every morning. I could make the fastest and most delicious fresh homemade waffles in the city, and they immediately went from my plate to my hips. When I got tired of waffles, I would go out and find a wonderful hunk of peasant, walnut, or date bread and toast and butter that for breakfast. You can’t imagine the number of amazing bakeries in New York, with bread so much better than any bread I ever had in California or Washington, D.C. Yum! Lunch was often a sandwich on good bread, and dinner came from a fantastic array of restaurants (lots of pasta included) or take-out in my Greenwich Village neighborhood. One of my very favorite meals was bulgogi, a Korean barbecued beef dish with noodles from a fantastic pan-Asian restaurant in Soho. The dish could have easily fed two or three people. I ate the whole thing myself for dinner with a side serving of rice to sop up all that delicious sauce—heavenly! With this kind of eating lifestyle, it was no wonder I ended up at least twenty pounds overweight despite my regular gym habit.

Fit, fat, and fearful. Those were the three words that best described Wendy Suzuki in 2004. The “fearful” part was mainly due to another major factor affecting my life at that point. I was smack dab in the middle of that inevitable trial by fire for academics: winning tenure. Here is a Cliffs Notes version for the uninitiated. First, you are lucky enough to be hired by a big fancy research university that gives you a shiny new lab and a pot of money that is just big enough to get your groundbreaking neuroscience research going but not enough to sustain it for more than a couple of years at the most. This happened in 1998 for me. As soon as you arrive in your new home, you immediately start setting up your brand-new lab and at the same time you start madly writing as many grants as you possibly can to increase your chance of being funded so your lab doesn’t fold after just a couple of years when your startup funds run out. Oh, and at the same time you also have to start teaching classes, mentoring graduate students, and hiring technical staff, most of which you have not done much of before because you were too busy doing the science experiments that got you the job.

From the time you are hired, you typically have six years to show your stuff in terms of hard-core research publications in peer-reviewed journals, teaching, and mentorship, though at major research institutions it’s the research productivity measured in terms of high-profile publications that your senior colleagues (the ones who vote on your tenure) are really interested in. That means you have only six years to fund your lab (using hard-to-get big-government grants for which you are competing with Nobel Prize winners), get your experiments working, and find something really earth-shatteringly interesting to publish to great acclaim. Sometimes it takes years to simply set up a lab, depending on the kind of experiments you plan to do. Of course, mine were the kind that needed a lot of setup.

If that pressure doesn’t sound intense enough, the worst part of the process is that no matter how many papers you publish or great classes you teach, you are never 100 percent sure if you have done enough to earn that lofty status of tenure. Inevitably you start hearing about the exceptions. As in, this superstar neuroscientist from a prestigious university who mysteriously did not get tenure and nobody quite knows why. You’ll hear, “He was clearly an exception; you will do fine.” And you immediately think, “What if I’m one of those exceptions too?”