“I’m trying to be good. I’m going to have the salad.”
“I’m not eating bread anymore.”
“I’m going to the gym tomorrow. I need to burn off this chocolate.”
Who has heard someone say something similar? I hear comments like these all the time. And I mean all the time. It is pretty sad isn’t it? This is what consumes our conversations, food being either good or bad.
Do you remember a time where we weren’t food obsessed? When we just ate a meal, enjoyed the company and didn’t scrutinize our choices and other people’s choices. I’ve had years of being stuck in it.
Being a personal trainer I regularly get comments by friends about my food choices and they often feel the need to justify their own food choices. It isn’t heroic not having a piece of cake at the end of a meal. If you want the cake have it, if you don’t want it, don’t. It can be that simple.
When we hear the word diet we think weight loss. When really, dieting is what we all do, it is the way we eat. It is our eating approach. However it is now pretty common to use the word diet to mean deprivation in order to fulfill an aesthetic body goal. What happened to health?
Magazines promote diets and associate it with celebrities. So somehow being on a diet and losing weight gets associated with being happy, rich and successful. Now we have the social media so called models, they post their diets and then stand in their underwear taking selfies for self-validation in which people buy into thinking they must have it all. The number of likes a person has doesn’t make them any more happier than the next. It doesn’t mean their outside life is full of friends and happiness. A picture doesn’t give the full picture! Plus don’t forget, people buy there followers and likes too.
What is beautiful? The standards we accept as truth are shaped by what we buy into.
Over the past months I have seen even more people on Instagram post underwear shots. I choose to unfollow because it doesn’t inspire me. There is nothing wrong with these people doing this, but it is up to us as to what we accept as culture norms. At the moment there is this confusion with health and thinness. You be heavy and be healthy, you can be thin and be unhealthy. A picture doesn’t tell you the entire story.
Imagery is powerful. Our subconscious picks up on all this information around us. Advertisers know this and easily manipulate us. I will never buy a magazine, yet I can’t help but watch tv. I’m also aware that every day people don’t look like the celebrities. I know not everything on tv is fact and to question and be curious about everything. Young girls are more impressionable. They see the happiness, the skinny girl being popular and having the popular boyfriend and then the comparisons start, leading to diets and aspiring to look like them. You should never want to look like someone else. You are your own beauty.
When someone loses weight that is supposedly inspiring. A person gets praise for becoming smaller and again we have this heroic mentality of that person. Inspiring is such a powerful word. I’ve seen clients go from barely being able to stand to now being able to run, lift, eat and do normal activities such as driving. That is inspiring. We have all struggles, I’m not saying your weight issues aren’t hard, but we need to put things in perspective too and remember how hard life is outside of body weight troubles.
Can we move away from dieting meaning to get slim or to get abs or to change the physical self? Maybe instead think of dieting to become healthier. Just a thought…
Eating nourishes your body and mind. It keeps your body functioning so that is can perform well. It gives us pleasure. Regulating food intake is not any of that.
People spend a lot of money and energy into diets in the hope to change their lives. The chances of the diet being successful is pretty low. In the pursuit to lose weight and be happier, we cause more harm, we get more depressed, we put on more weight. This yoyo dieting causes havoc on the body and mind.
Becoming healthier isn’t always visible. I am the healthiest I have ever been and looking at me who would really know. But I feel more energetic, I have great blood work, I’m not in pain, I’m strong, I sleep well and I function over all great.
The world we live in is becoming more unhealthy and overweight. I tend to think we are becoming more unhappy psychologically too. With all the diets out there trying to make us smaller and happier, surely we have come to the point where we can see they don’t work and stop giving into these norms.
You can make the choice to change the norms. You can choose what you talk about next time you are sitting with a friend having lunch. You can choose what you tell your personal trainer what your goal is. You can choose who to follow on Instagram. Each person can make a difference. It may take time but if we start now we are improving the life of our future generations.
Think exercise and body positive. THINK HEALTH.
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