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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In some ways, one of the biggest problems is expressed in Rajchel's comment: the idea that "a diet" is something you (temporarily) "go on". It shouldn't be. Your diet, what you eat, is a lifelong thing. If you make a change to your diet, enabling you to eat more sustainably and also maintain a better health level, that should be a permanent thing. Crash diets, fad diets, OMG gotta-burn-a-lot-of-fat-now diets, mostly I see them as a problem. They teach people that eating "healthy" has to involve deprivation and is a short-term thing. They teach our bodies to go into starvation mode and hoard calories. They can be a good kickstart to a difficult process, but mostly... they teach the wrong attitudes and no real skills.
Sorry. I know I'm probably preaching to the choir (is there a good Pagan way to say that?). I'll stop.
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Aside from good old-fashioned laziness and inertia, which I will certainly cop to, this may be a big part of why I was so overweight for so long. I did a ton of crash/fad/OMG gotta-burn-a-lot-of-fat-now diets in HS. Maybe I lost a pound or two, but when I got tired of grapefruit or couldn't drink one. more. shake, I gave up, and the weight came back. And because I thought that "diets" like those were the only path to weight loss, I decided at some point that I would rather be fat than subject myself to that suffering again.
Whereas, what allowed Leora and me to lose as much weight as we have and maintain the new weight has been an overhaul in our diet (lifelong). And, you know, I don't feel deprived, or like I'm starving myself, or like I'm somehow dishonoring my body by eating differently or less.
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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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My father believes in the quintessential "balanced meal" - a protein, a vegetable or two, a starch. My mother likes the meal to look pretty on the plate. She used to joke that "a Twinkie and a pile of peas will do it for me". The nutritional value (or lack thereof) of dinners was a frequently erupting source of tension between my parents. Mom stood firm: if you don't like what I cook, you make dinner. Because Dad was unwilling to take on the cooking or the grocery shopping (typical "I work, so you do all the housework" B.S.), Mom controlled most of what we ate, pretty much 'til I went to college.
She, in turn, was influenced by her upbringing: her father was, literally, a meat and potatoes man and felt that vegetables were to be endured, not enjoyed. Also, he worked physically demanding jobs that required more calories than my eight-hours-at-a-computer gigs have ever called for. Many Ameriacns still eat like we're farmers ( ... )
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I'm not interested in forcing anyone to do anything, and I'm certainly not advocating walking up to the next stranger I see and telling them all about how they could be living healthier lives.
Honestly, what I want is for everyone to come to the point where they care about this stuff, all on their own. To make the interconnections widely known and understood and then have everyone say, "ZOMG! I've got to clean up my act!" I want, in the words of a terrible movie, for them to want to do the dishes.
I frankly have no idea what to do in the meantime.
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