My business partner, Angelo, told me a story about his last visit to his grandmother in Crete a few years ago, just before her death in her late ’90’s. Early one morning, Angelo, a die-hard exercise enthusiast, decided to go for a run along the village streets. As he was putting on his running shoes and gear, his grandmother, already up at 5 AM and preparing food for the day, looked at him and asked, “Where are you going, Son?” Angelo replied that he was “going for a run”, to which she looked at him quizzically and repeated her question, “Yes, but where to?” This back and forth continued for some minutes as Angelo tried to explain that he was going running without a specific destination or purpose in mind, simply for “exercise”. Finally, it became obvious that she couldn’t grasp the concept of expending effort for its own sake, and he gave up, leaving her shaking her head and wondering if he had lost his marbles.
While this story may seem quaint and cute it highlights a basic dilemma within our “fat cat” Western lives, in that we need to do specific physical exercise in order to compensate for the fact that we are basically inert most of the rest of the time. To us it seems perfectly logical, yet, to probably 4/5ths of the rest of the world, Angelo’s grandmother’s attitude would actually be more typical. Angelo’s grandmother got up every morning at 5 AM, prepared the meals for the day, cleaned house, and then proceeded to walk 5-6 km to join her husband in their fields and olive groves. There she worked for 6-8 hours (with perhaps a 1-hour nap right after the midday meal), before walking home the 5-6 km again.
In 1975, after graduating from university, I went to Greece for 3 months. Within the first two I had dropped 50 lbs, while eating a very plentiful and unrestricted diet of Greek food drenched in olive oil most of time. The secret? Since I had nothing else to do, every day I walked the city streets for 6-8 hours, Nikon in hand, photographing anything that struck my fancy. The funny thing is: I had no awareness of having lost any weight as there were no scales around. In the mirror, I appeared to myself exactly as I had always been (that’s body-image for you). My only clue was when a friend from Canada visited me and couldn’t recognize me at the airport despite standing right in front of her.
Anyway, all these thoughts in the wake of my experiment with the Electra Amsterdam and the ongoing effort to become more active without exercise.