Breathing the Pounds Away?

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I visit a few health and fitness-related networking sites, and I suddenly began seeing posts about products and programs promising to help you lose weight just by breathing. Two in particular came up in member discussion posts on Inspire (inspire.com): “Oxycise!” a DVD exercise program that promises permanent weight loss through breathing exercises, and “Breathslim,” a device that lets you “exhale your excess weight.”

I have looked at the websites in light of what I know about breathing and wellness, and I’m very skeptical of their claims and doubtful these gimmicky programs and devices offer you anything particularly special that’s worth the money. (Breathslim costs $49.95; the Oxycise! Advanced Workout Special DVD program is $79.95 or there’s $34.95 a starter kit)

I have not evaluated Oxycise! or Breathslim. If their makers would like to send them to me to test, I’ll be happy to give them an honest, objective trial and report the results. However, I perused both the Oxycise! and Breathslim websites, and I found more than a little hogwash. If you’re already doing these things and you’re getting healthier, good for you—keep it up. If not, you might want to reconsider spending your fitness dollars on this stuff.

I’ll start with Oxycise! Again, I haven’t looked at the DVDs. They may contain wonderful exercises, but the claims are more than a little overblown and based on shaky science, at best. To see the big clue to the fact that this is at least half a sham, go to the page that’s supposedly full of studies .

“Studies performed at several universities have explored the caloric expenditure and oxygen consumption of Oxycise!” it says. Okay, what universities? How were these studies performed? You would think if there were actually studies, the folks at Oxycise! would proudly publish them with documentation.

However, the articles actually reprinted have at most a very indirect relationship to the product.  The one study the site mentions that addresses Oxycise! directly doesn’t name the university involved. Also, look at these clues to the relative integrity of the study process: “This study did not explore all the ramifications of the Oxycise! program but was intended to indicate whether the caloric expenditure and oxygen consumption were comparable to exercise on a stationary bicycle…”

In other words, some portion of the Oxycise program was compared to and was found to be 40 percent better than “pedaling a stationary bike unloaded.” Great—doing next to nothing on a stationary bike is about 70 percent as effective as doing “something” from the Oxycise! program. Since they don’t go into detail about what part of their own program they studied, you might as well assume they compared the toughest exercise in the program against minimal exertion on a stationary bike. That’s not saying much.

The bigger clue to the scam, however, is on the homepage. “Now you can lose weight immediately without pills, powders, diets, gadgets, gyms, pain or discomfort…fat oxidizes into carbon dioxide…all I have to do is breathe to lose weight.” That’s a bit of a stretch. No, it’s a big stretch.

Similarly, the video on the Breathslim homepage says “oxygen burns fat” and implies that, consequently, the more oxygen you take in, the more fat you’ll burn. That’s pretty much backwards, but even to reverse it an over-simplification. Anyway, either the Oxycise and Breathslim promoters don’t understand how the body works or they’re hoping you don’t—banking on it, in fact.

Oxygen doesn’t burn fat. Oxygen doesn’t burn anything, but it is required for combustion. When you exercise, meaning you ask your body to do some work like lift a weight or go for a walk, you burn fuel that’s stored in various forms in your blood, muscles and fatty tissues. That combustion—burning the fuel to make the muscles move—requires oxygen and produces carbon dioxide. If you don’t get enough oxygen, you run out of energy. It’s like putting an inverted glass over a burning tea light; if deprived of oxygen, the fire goes out.

To say that breathing in oxygen turns fat into carbon dioxide, however, is inverting the principle. It’s more like the more fuel you burn, the more oxygen you need and the more CO2 you exhale. That’s why if you went out and ran a mile, you’d breathe faster than if you were just sitting at your desk. However, if you were to sit still in your chair and try to breathe as if you were running a mile, you wouldn’t burn a bunch of fat. There’s a term for breathing out more carbon dioxide than you’re producing: It’s called hyperventilation, and it can cause dizziness, numbness and fainting.

That said, breathing is important to your health. You’d think that would be obvious, but while teaching tai chi and meditation, I sometimes meet people who have difficulty with breathing because they’ve just never done anything that required them to be aware of their breath or do anything special with it.

Before reading any farther, try this: Close your eyes, and see if you can feel your breath. If not, put your hand on your belly and feel your diaphragm rising and falling, and then see if you can become aware of the internal movement of your breath in your belly, then lungs, throat and nostrils.

A lot of people, especially those who don’t exercise much, tend to take fairly shallow breaths and limit their breath mainly to the top of their chest. Consequently, some have trouble getting enough oxygen to fuel their exercise efforts, and they can be helped by working to develop their awareness of their breathing and perhaps even their lung capacity.

There are mental, physical and spiritual health programs that incorporate breathing exercises, and people who do them often report big benefits. The traditional Chinese practice of qigong (chi kung), for example, often includes meditations on the breath or exercises that sync breathing with physical movements. In yoga, breath exercises fall under the heading of “pranayama” and generally involve breathing in special ways designed to quiet the body and mind while strengthening the respiratory functions.

The words “qigong” and “pranayama” have very similar meanings. Qigong means “life-energy (qi) work (gong).” Pranayama is another compound word—“prana” means pretty much the same thing meant by “qi,” “yama” means “extension” or “control.” Qi or prana includes energy from the combustion that happens in the cells, which of course is fueled by the oxygen in the breath. Consequently, working with internal energy includes working with the breath.

If you study Buddhist meditation, you’ll sometimes see references to something called the “breath-body,” and you may learn how to meditate by concentrating on the breath and then expanding that concentration to include the awareness of breath in the body. This is a method of calming the mind and body, and it helps practitioners see and work with the physical effects of emotional states. Buddhist meditation practices along these lines have been adapted for healthcare settings and incorporated in techniques like Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which is used to manage psychological stress and physical pain.

If you go to the tai chi and qigong section of this website, you’ll see instructions for the Eight Brocades, a series of qigong exercises that are good for developing better breathing skills, and I’ve included some instructions below for a very basic pranayama practice.

To fully experience the benefits of tai chi, yoga, or any other fitness program, however, you should work with a teacher or trainer. No matter how good the instructions on a website, book or video might be, it can’t look at you and suggest adjustments you need to make in order to avoid injury or get the most out of the effort you exert.

By the way, if you think a gadget such as Breathslim might help you breathe better, consider talking to your doctor about using a spirometer. After my auto accident, the hospital sent one of those home with me so I could exercise my lungs—one had collapsed after being punctured with a broken rib, and the doctor wanted me to exercise my lungs to increase the capacity. When I studied powerlifting, strength coach Jim McCarty told me he had his clients use them to measure aspects of their fitness progress. A Voldyne spirometer like the one I got from the hospital is available at Amazon.com for $13.59.

Enjoy the breathing practices below.

Pranayama “Complete” Breath and Variations

In a sitting position or lying on your back, establish your awareness on your breath. You can close your eyes if you like. You’re going to practice breathing in from “bottom up” and breathing out from “top down.” Breathe slowly through this entire exercise to avoid hyperventilating.

On the in-breath, let your diaphragm expand and your belly rise; then let the lower lungs fill; finally fill the top of your lungs. As you exhale, imagine exhaling from top down, feeling the breath flow out of your upper lungs, then lower lungs, and then finally compressing your diaphragm to squeeze all the air out of your lungs.

You may also add breath retention to this exercise, breathing in on a four-count, for example, holding for a four-count, breathing out on a six-count, holding for four before inhaling again, etc.

Some yogis like to combine alternating-nostril breathing with this. If you want to try this, rest your right thumb against your right nostril and another finger against your left nostril. Hold your left nostril closed as you inhale through your right nostril. Close your right nostril and hold the breath, then open the left nostril for the exhalation. Close the left nostril and hold.

Now open the left nostril for the next inhalation; hold; breathe out through the right nostril; and so on. Alternate between breathing in through the right and out through the left, then reversing to breath in and out from left to right.

 

Letting go…

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So far during my Rains Retreat semi-monastic dietary regime (see the earlier post, “The Monks Diet” and visit Volusia Buddhist Fellowship here), I’ve lost about four pounds, but my lean weight has only dropped about a half-pound—it went from 23.1 percent down to 22 percent.

I did learn something interesting, though—pancakes and hash browns in large quantities are still fattening, even if you don’t eat dinner. Sunday morning, my wife and I both had a hankering for pancakes and hash browns, for some reason, so we stoked up at the IHOP. I love those harvest grain and nut pancakes, but that brunch put the brakes on the weight drop for about two days.

Generally, this way of eating doesn’t seem much different, in terms of weight loss, than the normally prescribed five or six small meals per day. However, I went through a period when my energy level in the afternoon would plummet for a while—I even had to stop in the afternoon for naps. That seems to have passed.

Other things, too, have passed.

More than anything, I’m learning about the mechanisms of habit and craving. It’s very interesting to watch the habitual urges rise, and then watch them pass as, instead of latching onto them, I let them go. Every time it happens, the habit begins to extinguish and the craving diminishes.

I was looking through a magazine the other day, one of those natural foods things you get at the health food store, and there was a piece about “detoxification” plans and the relative merits of doing some body-wracking process of juice fasting, supplementation and sweating in a sauna. Truth be told, probably the best way to detoxify your body is to get some exercise, eat a balanced diet and drink enough liquids.

However, I thought, what about detoxifying the mind? That’s where the cravings are—and what better way to rid oneself of the urges to eat junk food or habitually snack than to set aside a period of your life to just let those things go?

Just a short update…

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So far, I’d say the “new wisdom” that it’s not about how often you eat but about what you eat in a 24-hour period seems to hold true. “Eating like a monk” has had about the same effect my usual weight control methods have—I’ve lost about the expected amount of weight, without any serious negative effects on other aspects of my health and fitness.

In fact, in the three days since I started weighing and taking body fat measurements (with a not-very-accurate Omron monitor) I’ve lost a pound overall, but gained a pound of muscle. I won’t rely on that lean weight gain figure, but it’s possible. Since back pain kept me from working out much last week, I may have pumped up just by getting back to the Y regularly.

I did do an hour of bike riding yesterday before breakfast, though, and that wasn’t a good idea. I hit the wall way before I normally would have, so the lesson I guess is to at least have a banana and some peanut butter before a morning workout.

You know, the Thai monks—the ones actually living in Thailand, that is—go on an alms round every morning. Some of them live in big monasteries in urban areas, where they get a lot of food just by walking out into the city. Others live at small forest monasteries or little temples in rural areas and have to walk down to the nearest village for food.

It’s a slow walk—not a cardio workout, by any means—and they do it barefoot. Typically, they have to return to the monastery to eat, although some monastic orders aren’t that strict, and sometimes you’ll see monks being served in restaurants.

These days, people tend to package the food they put into the alms bowls, so the monks get plastic containers full of rice or leftovers from last night’s main dish, that sort of thing. Even at small monasteries, most of the monks get a variety of food, but it wasn’t that long ago that monks just got spoonfuls of rice and maybe a ladle-full of vegetables or meat, all dropped in the same bowl.

The expectation is that they’ll eat whatever they’re given without preference for the taste of the food—it’s fuel, not entertainment. There’s even a chant they do in the morning:

Considering it thoughtfully, I use alms food,

Not playfully, nor for intoxication, nor for putting on bulk, nor for beautification,

But simply for the survival and continuance of this body, for ending its afflictions, for the support of the holy life,

Thus will I destroy old feelings of hunger and not create new feelings from overeating.

I will maintain myself, be blameless, and live in comfort.

A monastic life is not for everyone, of course. But think about how much less obesity there would be in America if we ate “not playfully nor for intoxication” but for survival and the ending of the body’s afflictions.

If you want more on the spiritual side of my temporary not-quite-monastic lifestyle, visit the Volusia Buddhist Fellowship website here.

 

Building from a Baseline

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Than Chaokhun visits the temple in Thailand where he spent his novice years.

I guess when most people think of Buddhist monks, they assume they sit around meditating and otherwise “being spiritual” all the time. In fact, some of the monks I know are very busy, very active people. Somehow, despite eating only two meals a day (or in some cases only one) they manage to be very energetic people.

My teacher in the Thai tradition, Than Chaokhun Sunan Prah Vijitrdhammapani, eats breakfast every morning at 7:00 and finishes lunch before noon. He gets up around 4:30 a.m. and is in the meditation hall at 6 a.m. for chanting and meditation. There’s more chanting and meditation at 7 p.m., but there’s also a monastery to run, special services to perform, monks to train, dharma talks to prepare, and so on. I have been at the monastery during retreats and during my time as a monk, and he seems to work tirelessly until about 11 each night.

Phra Auditep looks on as Elizabeth, Charla, Candace, Martina and Radek (with me in the center) make merit by releasing caged birds at Wat Phra Haripunchai.

Several of his Western friends, including me, three other Americans, and a couple from the Czech Republic, spent two weeks visiting Thailand with Than Chaokhun, who is in his 50s. Again, he seemed tireless, even when we were staying at a monastery where the monks only got one meal per day instead of his usual two. Yet even the 20-somethings and 30-somethings in our group ran out of steam before he did—and we not only got breakfast, we got to eat dinner!

I’m very curious how my energy level is going to respond to eating more like a monk, and to what effect it will have on my weight, so I thought I should establish a baseline.

This morning, I weighed in at 204.0, with about 23 percent body fat. That’s 20-30 pounds up from where I’d like to be, by the way. I’ve been trying to stay under 190 for a long time, but I let things creep up, and after I pulled my back out of whack (doing one too many dead lifts at the Y, I think) I spent too much time sitting around snacking. You know what that leads to, right?

However, I have mixed feelings about it. It’s nice to have some extra weight to lose during these three months.

My practice of mild austerity isn’t really aimed at weight loss—the objective is really the spiritual adventure, which is going better than expected. However, I have been curious about what happens when I try to cram a day’s worth of calories and nutrients into two meals (and maybe a post-workout protein shake) instead of the usual 5-6 meals/snacks the fitness experts suggest.

Buddhist monks, by the way, eat whatever gets put in their alms bowl or brought to the monastery for them. The diet tends to be high on rice and vegetables, with some meat. Of course, I have a lot more control over what I eat.

I won’t go into detail about my daily menu, but yesterday’s meal plan included a egg whites-feta-olives omelet, a sweet potato, ravioli with roasted peppers (a frozen dinner), salad, and a big pile of broccoli with a bottled Thai peanut sauce, along with the aforementioned post-workout protein shake. I worked out in the morning—rode my bike to the Y and did some chest/shoulders work—and aside from a little lingering stiffness in my back, it went fine. My energy level seemed pretty normal.

Today’s meal plan is similar, and probably every other day’s menu will be more of the same—at least five servings of fruits/vegetables and enough non-meat protein to recover from my workouts, along with mostly whole grains. I won’t do bite-by-bite reporting, but I’ll let you know if I change anything significant.

So there’s the baseline, and I’ll do progress reports when there’s progress to report. If you want to follow the spiritual side of this program, go here.

The Monk’s Diet

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If you’ve read much at this site, you’ve figured out that I’m a Buddhist. During the next few months, my spiritual practice is going to focus around a key Buddhist principle that many Western lay Buddhists avoid—the benefits of renunciation.

In India, there’s a rainy season that lasts roughly from mid-July to mid-October. When the Buddha was alive, his monks would spend the “rains” period, Vassa, with him, receiving teachings and practicing the dharma, and then disperse again when the rains ended. In the centuries since, this Vassa period became a time of special observation and a time to focus on the teaching of renunciation.

If you want to know more about this from the spiritual side, you can read about it at the Volusia Buddhist Fellowship website (here). On this site, however, I’m going to post updates now and then about the physical effects of following a semi-monastic lifestyle—which is why I chose the (tongue-in-cheek) title for this post, “The Monk’s Diet.”

For years, trainers have been telling us eating small, frequent meals boosts the metabolism and speeds up weight loss. However, studies haven’t supported that, and some recent studies have actually contradicted that bit of common knowledge.

Buddhist monks are generally not permitted to eat after noon, and many eat only one meal per day. Having taking the Eight Precepts for Vassa, I will follow suit. I’m going to eat breakfast, but also one other meal each day which will be completed before noon.

In the meantime, I’ll do my usual workouts, and of course my usual job, which involves a lot of sitting at a desk. I’ll let you know how things go, and hopefully come up with something from my spiritual laboratory experience that you can use in your own fitness program.

Astro-Fit: Getting into Spaceship-Shape

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Not long after she returned to earth from the International Space Station, I got to interview astronaut Nicole Stott. We talked about a lot of things, including outer-space fitness—while on the ISS, she’d had the chance to check out the new space-gym, including a treadmill named “COLBERT.”

In the gravity-less environment, Stott had to be bungeed down to the treadmill, which got its name from Stephen “The Colbert Report” Colbert. However, Stott says, the bungees weren’t a problem for her—everything about space travel “exceeded expectations.”

“Even things I thought wouldn’t be all that great, like running on a treadmill with a harness,” she says. “I loved it!”

 

Bungee-running in space is more than just a fun thing to do, however. Lori Ploutz-Snyder, project scientist and lab manager for exercise physiology and countermeasure development at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, told me micro-gravity presents some special challenges for the human body.

Exercise is a key component of getting through long periods in space with minimal damage to one’s health and bone mass. With help from Stott and other astronauts, scientists are gathering information not only on how to survive a trip to outer space, but how to be healthier here on earth.

In the early days of space travel, astronauts had to be among the fittest people on earth. That’s not quite as much the case now. “Astronauts come from all walks of life now,” Ploutz-Snyder says. “They’re selected more for their credentials in science, engineering or medicine than for their fitness.”

Ploutz-Snyder came to her current job after studying the prevention and rehabilitation of muscle function following prolonged periods of disuse and doing research related to dehydration and skeletal muscle. To maintain fitness during a long period of space flight requires exercises for cardiovascular fitness, muscle strength and bone health.

“There are other health consequences, like dizziness, we also have to deal with,” Ploutz-Snyder says. “But from the point of view of exercise, we target those three things—basically the same things you would on the ground.”

While on the ISS, each astronaut has a customized exercise program based on their age and level of fitness. On average, there’s about 2 ½ hours per day set aside in their schedule for exercise, which includes the time it takes to get into their exercise clothes and get their gear set up.

Astronauts do progressive resistance training—like weight training—plus cardio training six days per week. “As unglamorous as that sounds, they’re doing programs about like most people on earth should do,” Ploutz-Snyder laughs. “But the equipment is totally different.”

In space, floating off the exercise equipment “is a big issue,” she says. Imagine trying to do squats on a trampoline, and that gives you an idea what it’s like to lift weights in space. Along with the COLBERT, however, Stott and company got to work out on the ARED—Advanced Resistive Exercise Device—which allows astronauts “lift” up to 600 pounds in 29 different exercises.

Some of the ARED exercises mimic basic powerlifting-style free-weight movements which target large muscle groups, while others isolate smaller areas. The large-group exercises like squats, deadlifts and bench presses engage more of the body per exercise and thus help strengthen both muscle and bone.

Whether preflight or in space, an astronaut’s schedule is pretty busy. Ploutz-Snyder and her team are researching how to get the most out of the available time.

“We’re working now to optimize the exercise prescription on the ISS,” she says. “We hope to figure out what the most important exercises are and the minimal amount of time required for the results we want.”

For example, future research will compare the effects of aerobic exercise versus interval training. Aerobic exercise is done at moderate intensity over a relatively long period of time, where interval training involves working at a more intense level for short periods with rest breaks. Both are effective ways of improving fitness, but some research suggests interval training may accomplish more in less time.

“Some of our new research will explore the addition of aerobics intervals,” Ploutz-Snyder says. “They’ll be working some intervals into their programs on the space station.”

“It would be a lot easier if we had 100 people go up, so we could try different things and see which is best,” she says. “Unfortunately, not many people fly into space, so we have to come up with clever ways to make the most from the few participants we have.”

Stott says the ISS exercise program worked great for her. “I got to exercise for two hours a day, and I rarely had that much time before flight,” she says. “So I came back in better shape than when I went.”

Adventure Racing

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In October 2008, I decided life was too easy and entered my first adventure race. I had never even heard of adventure racing until a few months before, but it ended up on my do-again list. If you’re looking for a way to shake your training out of a rut, adventure racing is not a bad way to go about it.

With two legs still to go in the Tomoka Lighter Knot adventure race, I had already capsized my kayak and eternally drowned my cell phone; now, as I headed toward the transition area for the first time, I had to stop and shake the fire ants out of my shoes.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how I got fire ants in my shoes while kayaking. But there was no time to think about that now. I tucked my new map into the driest spot I could find on my body and jogged off down a sandy road, hopefully in the general direction of the first checkpoint on the “trekking” portion of the race through Tomoka State Park, a beautiful spot on the wild side of the Daytona Beach area.

As sports go, adventure racing is a relatively new one—the sport was born a few years after the first Hawaii Ironman made triathlons trendy. A typical adventure race combines paddling, off-road biking and trail running, perhaps with rock climbing, swimming, zip-lining and even hang-gliding thrown in just to make things interesting. There is no marked course – individuals and teams use a compass and map that is distributed at the beginning of the race to navigate a series of checkpoints.

I had decided to do this particular race because, along with the six-hour Elite race, there would be a more doable three-hour Sport race. Since I’d be a team of one (I couldn’t find anyone else crazy enough to do it with me) I wanted to be on fairly familiar ground, and I couldn’t get too lost at Tomoka State Park.

Ormond Beach resident John Sheriff designed the course. He and his daughter are regulars on the local adventure race circuit—their idea of a good father-daughter outing includes spending the evening paddling among the alligators on an all-night race along the St. Johns River.

They also crewed for a team in last year’s Primal Quest, the sport’s highest-profile event. “We had a little popup camper and van,” he says. “They’d come in, eat, bandage their feet, maybe go in and sleep two or three hours, then head out again.”

Adventure racing is gradually edging toward the mainstream, says Greg Owens, who runs Pangea Adventure Racing. Pangea organizes about a dozen races per year, including the Tomoka Lighter Knot.

“A lot of people want to try adventure racing, but they’re not sure how to get into it and they’re intimidated by the long events,” Owens says. “So we’re trying to have more races that work as an introductory vehicle.”

With 2-4 miles of trekking, 6-10 miles of off-road biking and 2-4 miles of padding, the shorter Sport races are tough enough to attract athletes who want a challenge but are still within reach of less-than-superhuman folks like me. Many of those entering the sport come from orienteering, competitive paddling and the like, as well as runners and triathletes who want to mix things up a bit.

To prepare for my first adventure race, I cross-trained triathlon-style, biking into the West Volusia back country, paddling the St. Johns River and Tomoka Basin and jogging on roads and trails with my dogs. I discovered moving my workouts into the woods made long training sessions much more enjoyable.

Fire ants and flooded cell phones aside, the race itself turned out to be a lot of fun. Besides taking me down hidden trails and to the top of Indian mounds, the race forced me to hone a skill I hadn’t used since I was a Boy Scout – navigation with map and compass. Each control point successfully reached was in itself a little victory.

Awards went to the top three finishers overall in each race. First place went to the Goat Getters, who finished in 1:42. Besides dumping my kayak, I made some other mistakes and finished in just over three hours.

I’m sure, however, that if I hadn’t had to backtrack and hunt for the map I’d dropped on the road during the bike portion, then had to backtrack again to pick up the passport I’d dropped elsewhere on the trail, I’d at least have edged out both teams of 10-year-old girls.

That’s okay – I learned a lot this first race. I’m sure I’ll smoke ‘em next year.

For more info on adventure racing in Central Florida, visit pangeaadventureracing.com.

 

Why “Holding Up the Heavens?”

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Holding up the Heavens is the name of a qigong exercise, although this is not a site about qigong. I conceived this site to share information about total fitness—by that, I mean fitness of body, mind and spirit. To me, holding up the heavens symbolizes the things we do when we start taking responsibility for our own health and happiness.

“Qigong” is a Chinese term that refers to working with life energy. A lot of things are qigong—kung fu is qigong, and so is acupuncture. Tai chi is also qigong—it’s an internal or “soft” martial arts. Tai chi teachers typically have students start out learning to create internal and external harmony by learning some qigong before going on to the more complex movements of tai chi.

I first learned the qigong Holding up the Heavens exercise in 2003 after I started studying tai chi. A few years earlier, I was in a very bad auto accident which left me with a lot of long-term aches and pains, along with pins in my right tibia and pretty serious cartilage damage in that knee. I still had to walk with a cane part of the time and would sometimes lose control over the knee and fall.

Years earlier, I had studied karate, and I knew a martial art practice would help me regain normal use of that leg. However, there was a very realistic possibility that would damage it worse. I thought tai chi might give me the martial arts benefits without the risk of injury, so I joined a class.

Holding up the Heavens was the first movement I learned in tai chi class. Within weeks, I put the cane away. I have since done a lot of things—like , like compete in an adventure race and learn to powerlift—that the orthopedic surgeon told me I shouldn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t be able to do.

So for me, Holding up the Heavens started me moving toward a life lived more fully. I hope holdinguptheheavens.com can start you moving in that direction, too.