One Step at a Time, Self Image

February 11, 2013 — diet, exercise, joy

Typically people want more of everything. Your ability to estimate is very closely related to your ability to execute.  Risk has many faces. In the quest to be fit and healthy the biggest risk is burn out.  I can say that with assurance because I have observed people in the earnest pursuit of better health for decades.  Over this time the offers to remove symptoms have become overwhelming.  Drugs, frozen prepaid meal plans, personal coaching, and one of the oldest, but still happening trends, the weight loss shake, are everywhere to assist the starving, overweight population.

In an effort to bypass the moment all systems are switched into deprivation mode. Suffering and tofu must follow as punishment for wild times at the Dairy Queen on the weekend.  The disconnect between self image and soul is now almost complete.  Confession and penance are the rituals that surround food and eating now.  Joy, creativity and community are not in the food pyramid for many people because diet is presented as obsession, and  denial of pleasure.  The ancestors had to grow, gather, kill, render, store, dry, milk, and otherwise do something very basic in order to eat.  They did not concern themselves with the calories contained in the food as much as they did with starvation.  They were all constantly involved with the original exercise known as work.  They did not drive to a gym or change outfits to do it.  They picked up the tools of their various trades and worked physically.  If they had a treadmill it was to run something, not to be run by it.