Restoring Muscle Mass and Going with the Flow

Four more days until food and counting. I've still not felt the least pangs of hunger, but I'm ready to put food in my body to overcome the cruddy feeling and taste in my mouth and the intestinal distress. Nineteen pounds down the drain and more to go - probably down to 118 by Thursday morning when I eat. I don't think there's a thimble full of fat left on my body.

A couple of days ago, I got clarification on the muscle "loss" that I'm experiencing. Actually no muscle cells themselves are lost. They shrink as nutrients are drawn from them to build fuel for the body's energy needs. When I return to a regular eating pattern and adequate exercise, I'll regain about two pounds of muscle mass per week with almost no fat. Since I'll settle in around 138, it'll take at least 10 weeks of exercise three times a week to get the muscles back in shape. That will be a big challenge when I get home.

The Type II diabetic's son has become a convert. He has been skeptical about his mother being here and doing what she is doing. Nonetheless he has reluctantly supported her. When he heard that she will never have to take insulin or any of the other multiple drugs she has been taking for seventeen miserable years, he reconsidered. He now says he may soon be another one of Fuhrman's patients!

One of my pastimes has been watching the Wimbledon highlights on HBO. I'm struck by the critical nature of focus in the present on the outcome of each player's progress. For me the ideal state for a player is being in the "intuitive flow" or "in the zone" as some athletes express it when they've had a good outing. There was a news item in USA Today titled "Bryant clears mind to lead Western." The article pointed out how his game has improved since he focused more on the moment.

Athletic competition would be an excellent arena to study the intuitive state of being. The outcome measure in terms of relative performance is so clear and measured on a universally accepted scale of standing in the rankings. With a carefully formulated set of Likert scale questions about the player's mental and physical "state" before each performance, I hypothesize strong positive correlations between what I consider to be markers of intuitive being and placing in the standings.

Such a study would give clear performance validated credence to key mental and physical state variables. I think we would then find that executives who are considered top performers by their colleagues would exhibit the same characteristics. Here a commensurable outcome measure would be more difficult to estimate.

But having already demonstrated the case with athletes, the case would be more convincing. I wonder if the narrow minded NSF would fund such a study? Since men are the major decision makers, their sports mindedness might carry the day! "On the Nature of Intuitive Being in the Performance of Top Athletes and Successful Executives."