Pagan Values Blogging Month: I am a community.
As part of her roundup of favorite posts from the first week of International Pagan Values Blogging month, Diana Rajchel points out a post at Fat and Not Afraid on the concept of "My Body is a Temple". I like F&NA's outlook: "my body is a temple", which implies to me a certain awareness of stewardship (eating right and exercising and never mind the ( Read more... )
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Excellent points. I think this raises a great question: What do we mean about something being another person's "business?"
~Should they get to judge me? Hell no, I think. They don't know the whole story, so how could they, even if they had the right? (They still will, and I can't stop them. And really, they have the right to their opinion. But that's not what I think we're really talking about here.)
~Should they help me? If they can, and I want their help, then yes, I think.
~Does it mean that I have a responsibility to take care of myself because what I do affects the community? Yes, I think so.
And I'm guessing this last one is the main meaning of "business" that half_double was getting at. But I'd love to hear more from her and you about what we mean here by "business," and if that definition changes our comfort level ( ... )
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I'm with you on all of them, I think. (No to judgement, which is generally really not helpful anyway. Yes if help is mutually useful and available.
And yes, I think that I have a responsibility to recognise that how I make choices affects the larger community. (Which I very much do). But at the same time, the community has a responsibility to recognise how the choices it makes affect me, and my available options.
That, I can totally buy into. But it's a very different thing than society saying there's one answer to a problem and insisting it fits everyone (which, regrettably, happens a lot for weight, even though we have tons of evidence that calories in/calories out/more exercise does not in fact work for a substantial number of people long term. I think it's worth people trying, obviously. But I think given how many people it fails, more solutions might be better all round.)
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So, there's this study that absolutely fascinates me. You've probably heard about it. Basically, researchers put obese people on stupidly restrictive diets and strenuous exercise regimens and monitored their every move for a year, and the subjects all lost a crap-tonne of weight, and then they went home and gained it all back.
Then they took a bunch of skinny people and told them not to exercise and eat double their usual amount for about six months. They all gained a crap-tonne of weight, and then, as soon as the study was over and they went back to their old patterns, they lost it all--with no extra effortSo, absolutely, personal makeup is a huge part of this. Everyone's body functions differently. My metabolism is not the ( ... )
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Yes! At least for me, this was what I got out of half_double's post, and was why I liked it. I actually clicked through expecting not to like it, which made me extra happy that I did.
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That's part of why I hesitate to throw posts like this onto the world: context is crucial, and few people have it. But, you know - International Wear My Paganness on My Sleeve Month will not be denied. ;)
But I can't agree, because it's so counter to *my* experience. You know enough of my own health issues (and have had enough meals with me) to guess at that.
Right, I do, and I do understand that gross generalizations are, well, gross, in every sense of the word. You are always one of the people I think of when I talk about "people who take good care of themselves and f*ck the number on the scale".
I'm not wild about the phrase "none of your business" or its corollaries, and if F&NA hadn't used it in her comment, I would have phrased it differently in my post. I was thinking along the lines careswen uses: "Does it mean that I have a responsibility to take care of myself because what I do affects the community?" You are taking care of ( ... )
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And for anyone else reading, I talk about some of the resources that have particularly informed my thinking (both in religious terms, and in practical terms) over here: http://gleewood.org/seeking/broader-questions/the-question-of-bodies/
(The religious bit is that I think it is about as close to a sin as I get to waste time and energy obsessing about things I can't fix, which for me, after enough experimentation to make Virgo-librarian-me happy, includes my weight. I can do a bunch of stuff for my health, mind you - just that the scale number, not so much with the moving.)
Perhaps, unconsciously, this is where those peanut gallery moments come from: people remember, in buries recesses of their brains, that helping others and caring about their well-being is part of our species' history, but no one knows how to do it correctly anymore ( ... )
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1) Now I am feeling like a Very Terrible Friend, because I didn't realize that your health had gone kaboom. I knew you were having woes, but I didn't know they were kaboom-level woes.
2) Food wastelands where getting fresh affordable food without lots of chemical additions is near impossible.
Oh, I could hold forth alllll day on how we need to figure out how to make fresh, sustainably produced, healthy food available to everyone. I hope this will become one of the major cultural/agricultural movements of the next ten years or so.
3) As it is, I get this "That would be a good idea, wouldn't it?" and nothing beyond generic advice, and the stuff I reverse engineer myself.I wonder if this is in part linked to the medical profession, as a rule, being sloooow to embrace change. Seriously, sometimes I think that if it wasn't accepted medical fact when he was in med school in the late '60s, my dad doesn't believe it. If I'm not mistaken, it's fairly recent to think of people with asthma as being able to be physically ( ... )
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