Links for Friday, August 11, 2017: AMBUCS, Pink Slime, Wellness over weight loss, and congestion-free transit

That time the Wichita AMBUCS stepped up to replace a disabled kid's trike.

Has the term "pink slime" run its course?

I'll be honest. I didn't even know this was controversial. 

The CDC in on board with the "Wellness" movement.

Although I'm told that "wellness" is being replaced by "well-being" in the worksite lexicon.

Should we call public transit congestion-free to attract more riders?

Problem: public transportation is associated with improved health outcomes, but in places like Wichita, the least-congested city in America, it's a tough sell.

Wichita has a bike share!

Bike Share ICT is official. Errr...was official on May 4. But since I've been out of town in sunny San Diego (stay classy), I haven't had a chance to post on it.

That speaker is Becky Tuttle of Health ICT (and who's soon *sniff* leaving for the YMCA), who was the driving force behind getting this done. 

Did you know...

That Bike Share ICT is using no (as in zero) taxpayer funds? Check out the sponsors on the homepage.

That bike shares are associated with a reduction in traffic congestion, even when car lanes are converted to bike lanes?

That bike share users are far less likely to be injured than people riding their own bikes?

That bike lanes and bike share are associated with an increase in life expectancy, even for people who don't use them, presumably because of reduced air pollution?

The reason I'm excited about bike share is that my body was made for movement. When we see people in motorized wheelchairs, we feel bad for them. When that fancy motorized wheelchair says "BMW" on the hood, we envy them. That's dumb.

I need one of two things in a commute: Either make it fast, or make it slow. That is, I want it done and over with quickly, like when I ride my bike to my local grocery store (~1 mile away), or I want it to last long enough for me to get something done, like the guy Cal Newport writes about it Deep Work who bought a round-trip ticket to Tokyo so he'd have undistracted time to finish a book (thus giving it the biggest carbon footprint of any book, ever).

Driving a car usually accomplishes neither. Most people can maintain a 10 mph average on their bikes without killing themselves, at least after some practice. So 10 miles takes an hour, 5 miles takes thirty minutes, 1 mile takes six minutes, etc. You can start using this to budget your time. The library's 2.5 miles away (15 minutes). The grocery store is one mile away (6 minutes). It saves me less than three minutes on that ride to the grocery store. The amazing thing is that the times are so short. In my car clown days, I was accustomed to allowing 15 minutes wherever I went, short trip or long trip. Commuting by bike makes me more thoughtful. But even when I tell you it takes me 45 minutes to commute one-way by bike to work some days, does that sound like a lot of time to you? What if I told you that the average American spends three hours a day on social media? What if I told you the average American spends five hours and four minutes of each day watching TV? What if I told you that 79% of Americans don't meet the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which encourage 2.5 hours a week of vigorous activity? 

What if I told you that, if you would only ride your bike to work, none of that would matter?

Yeah, you'll sweat a little on your Bike Share bike. On hot days, you'll sweat a lot. Trust me: if the Olympics awarded medals for sweating, I'd be in the running for the gold, year-in and year-out.

I'm the Usain Bolt of perspiration.

If there's an eightfold difference in sweating between people, I'm so far on the "eight" end of that spectrum that I'm practically a "nine."

But that little hint of sweat you carry around: that's your reminder that you've done something with your day. While everyone else was phone-droning for three hours or watching five hours of TV, you were at least getting something done. You were getting your body to and from work, or the grocery store, or the post office, at the same time that you were making yourself healthier and making the planet *this much* healthier. And you saved money, too.

My March WAMPO presentations

I was thrilled to get to speak to the Wichita Area Metropolitan Planning Organization about health effects of active transportation infrastructure. It was a great, receptive crowd. They gave me reason to hope for the future of a transportation system in which cars are a peripheral accessory and not the primary feature. 

Aaaaand I look a little like a wild-haired madman in the video, which I like. 

Things you can control right now

There are a lot of things you can't control: the weather, the stock market, your neighbor's loud music. But many, many things are under your control, as pointed out by Lori Deschene. And how well you do at seizing control makes a huge difference in your health and happiness:

Right now, you can control:

1. How many times you smile today.

7. When you pull out your wallet for luxuries.

11. How often you notice and appreciate small acts of kindness.

17. The type of food you eat.

21. How much exercise you get.

22. How many times you swear in traffic. [I'd amend this to say that you can control how often you're in traffic at all. If you're swearing at traffic, chances are you are the traffic.]

27. The attention you give to your loved ones when you see them.

28. How much you enjoy the things you have right now.

41. Whether you formulate a new plan or act on your existing one. [this is my favorite]

44. Whether you smoke or drink. [unless you’re an alcoholic, in which case you are in control of whether or not you seek help from a qualified practitioner]

50. How much rest you get at night.

40 minutes

Who is the maniac posting here the last few days? 

What the hell is Double Arrow Metabolism? Doctors always think they know everything. And I don't like the looks of this guy. He was probably born skinny, and here he is trying to judge the rest of us for driving cars, smoking, eating processed foods, spending our money on whatever we want, and spending our free time on social media. Sure, maybe you can be healthy if you've got a good set of genes and luck into a doctor who's not a quack. But it's a roll of the dice. Life is hard, and this guy acts like we can all just "choose" to be healthy. Some of us have obligations! Kids at home, a mortgage to pay. So we get a little stressed out and watch some TV and maybe have a beer or two. Live a little for a change. So what? 

Yet some people live happily and healthily into their 90s, while the overall life expectancy is going down. Is it all just genetics, or is there something we can do to live longer and happier? Let's examine the thin grey line between being healthy and happy and being sick and depressed.

How thin is the line? How about 40 minutes a day?

Let's say you are holding your own, health-wise. On the Double Arrow Metabolism Wellness Index, you're a solid two or three. Then you decide that lying on your side for thirty minutes in bed each night flipping through your Facebook feed is more important to you than moving through space like you were designed to do. All the light from the screen blasting into your retinas throws off your sleep cycle, so you wake up in the middle of every night for ten minutes and raid the fridge to the tune of 200 highly-processed calories.

Then, since you couldn't sleep the night before, you wake up twenty minutes late and decide that you don't have time to make a sensible, non-cake-based breakfast at home.

Let's assume that you commute less than five miles to work, as a solid plurality of
Americans do. You're in a hurry and instead of biking, walking, or busing to work, you swing your fancy gas-powered wheelchair through McDonald’s on your way there and spend $5 on a meal that should have cost you less than $2. Let's be generous and say that this breakfast was no better and no worse than what you would've had at home (a generous assumption indeed). Say this routine (self-inflicted bad sleep, sedentary commuting, breakfast of processed crap, repeat) becomes a habit.

So that 40 minutes a day: 30 minutes of Gay French King scrolling Twitter or Facebook, then 10 minutes of late-night insomnia binging, all at the sacrifice of a more meaningful breakfast and commute, leads to this: 1400 extra highly-processed calories a week in food intake, 1148 fewer calories per week burned by missing your average 19.2 minute one-way cycling commute, $21 a week spent on food you didn't need and shouldn't have bought, and, at the current Federal rate of $0.52 per mile, $30 a week from gas-powered wheelchair driving. And, for the sake of being fair, let's say your fancy gas-powered wheelchair is a sensible car and not a gas-guzzling adult Tonka Toy:

Goodbye, one year's salary. I'll miss you.

If that's what you drive, these numbers would be far, far worse.

End result? One year later, if you started out at 150 lbs, you're now almost 60 pounds heavier. The extra $1440 you spent on your habit in that year, had you just put it in an indexed fund, would now be worth $1541.

And ten years later, if you really fell into a rut, that 40 minutes would have cost you $10,791! Your weight would eventually level out--we all hit our genetic max for obesity at some point--but you'd almost certainly have complications, like diabetes, heart disease, or sleep apnea.

And all this assumes you didn't even take on any credit card debt to pay for this, and assumes that the bad sleep you were getting didn't make your metabolic issues worse, and doesn't even take into account the $1184/year that your new diagnosis of diabetes cost you.

40 minutes a day to stay out of this swirling vortex. 40 minutes.