A maddening blog title, I know.

Reminds me of something else.

Pills.  Prescriptions.  Advertisements.  Marketing.  Products.

Science isn’t bad.  I love science.  Science is WONDER.  That is the basis of all science.  Science is playful.  It has to be.

What happens before and after science, though, is something else.

In exercise, a lot of emphasis is placed on counting.  How many repetitions?  How much weight?  How often?  What kind of posture?  To what degree?

For the most part, these measurements are completely meaningless.

Sorry to break it to you.  You’d have the same if not better results if you just focused on how you were feeling while you were doing things.  Granted, you need to exercise some caution when throwing heavy things around.  You need to have a general idea of how your body works (though that can be entirely intuitive, and still be just as effective).  But once you have those things, you can just go for it.

It’s better if you do.

For one thing, you’ll be more likely to stick with it for a while.  You’ll also develop something called “somatic awareness” – an understanding of your body on an intuitive level…something you absolutely cannot develop when another person is constantly telling you what to pay attention to.

In diet, the counting goes to calories.  Equally as meaningless effort.  Follow a basic rule – eat plenty of food that comes out of the ground or eats something that comes out of the ground, in the purest form possible (i.e., organic, grass-fed, non-abused, unpackaged, not overcooked, etc.), and you can throw away your calorie counter.

Do the opposite, and you’ll develop a habit of being obsessive compulsive.  That’s how things work.  You do a behavior often enough, and it becomes habit.  Period.

I think that’s something that happens to cultures.  Part of the reason that cultures disintegrate eventually.  They begin to feed upon themselves, by definition.  They establish rules, and, at first, the rules are followed.  But eventually, the rules have been focused on for so long that they become the hangman’s noose of the culture.

I wrote about this in a different sense in a previous post. I guess it’s just crystallizing a bit more.

Watch out for your noose!!!  If you feel like you’re too obsessed, you probably are.  Our culture wants you to be.  That’s how it sells you things you don’t need.

Good night!