Pagan Values Blogging Month: I am a community.

[half_double]

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

Comments

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A few things here:

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 active. When I was growing up, kids with asthma didn't do anything exercise-like. No PE, no running around at recess - nada. So now that people with asthma are saying, "Screw that," the medical community is running around going, "You want to exercise? Uh, great! O crap u guyz nao wut?"

I was thinking about this change-averseness in relation to the health vs. weight issue. Doctors lovvvvve numbers. Pounds. BMI index. These things are easier to measure than something as amorphous as "healthiness". Plus! It hasn't been that long, in doctor-years (only slightly shorter than geologic eras), that the push to push weight loss has been on. Obviously, cultural preferences wax and wane, but doctors haven't, historically, worried about "a few extra pounds" the way they do now. For some, another about-face is hard. Trying to convince a doctor that a person can be over the what their chart says and still be healthy is like trying to convince Leora that Elmo is not the devil.

Not sure if I had a point to all this (I was thinking about it on my way home from work, during a particularly grumpy-making commute, so any point I might've had may be along the side of the road near Marshall and Cleveland), just some thoughts sparked by your comments.

[jenett]

1) They were slowly-creeping kaboom level woes - by the time the worst of it hit, talking about it was really hard. (Which is the way of a lot of health stuff: to put it in context, at the worst of it, I was falling asleep any time I was sitting still, and could not focus to read even light fiction for more than 5-10 minutes at a time. Thankfully, that only lasted about 2 weeks, but I wasn't up for much conversation about it, either.)

But in hindsight - the fact it's taken me 18 months to get back to a reasonable level of function (where 'reasonable' is still modified by 'need to pay attention to a whole bunch of details about sleep, exertion, food choices, balance of activities, etc. or it all gets miserable again') is... very scary. I'm sort of glad I didn't have the energy to panic when it was really bad.

3) I think you're very right about that. And, to some extent, I totally get that. Doctors like numbers (and the push to see more patients in ever shorter amounts of time definitely doesn't help: nuanced health support and assistance takes time.)

But it's not necessarily leading to health, and getting stuck on the numbers has all sorts of other dangers.