It’s the beginning of the year again, and you know what that means: the beginning of our culture’s annual diet season.
All the signs point in the same direction: gyms offering a month of free membership with the purchase of a one-year contract, magazines promise the impossible by summer, Oprah’s featuring an new expert every week who will finally open our eyes to change for which we’ve waited so long and millions of desperate Americans riding the half-lives of dying resolutions set with the death of 2007.
These annual efforts come into direct opposition with the tendency during the holiday season to put on a few extra layers of subcutaneous fat. Traditionally, people have needed this extra fat to stay warm during the coldest months of the year. Also, after the harvest, what better way to celebrate than excessive feasting?
It is the purpose of this article, and however many subsequent articles should prove necessary, to present a case for trashing the popular paradigm in our culture aimed toward the singular objective to lose weight. Instead, one should make efforts to adopt a holistically healthier lifestyle.
It might not appear so at first, but trying to shave numbers off a scale differs immensely from trying to improve the quality of one’s daily diet and exercise (both physical and mental). Less is certainly not more. Let me explain.
Countless men and women live their lives in constant fear of putting on pounds, thereby enslaving themselves to the impersonal rule of the bathroom scale. They assess their entire health situation strictly from the numerical gains and losses applied to their total body weight.
The “Hollywood 48 Hour Miracle Diet” is a prime example of why strict attention to bodyweight is simply the wrong lens through which to view and understand one’s degree of health. In case you aren’t aware of how it works, this “Miracle Diet” would have you ingest nothing but juice for two days. At the end you are guaranteed to weigh less.
Sure, you lose 10 pounds in a weekend, but it’s almost entirely water! Not only does this deplete your body of so essential an element as water, but you will gain that water back in a flash once you start eating real food again. Furthermore, this all-juice diet actually slows down the body’s metabolism resulting in the “dieter” storing more food as fat. The consequences are completely contrary from the results implied in its advertising.
Think about the body’s metabolism as a fire. More heat plus more fuel equals still more heat. With less fuel, the heat begins to die down, and a large log added suddenly onto glowing embers will never catch properly. This is a crude analogy compared to the incredibly complex functions of our bodies, but you get the point.
In stressful situations in which the body does not receive enough calories, it goes into energy-saving mode and converts higher percentages of caloric intake into fat for energy storage. This is an important metabolic survival strategy for someone with limited access to food.
So if you think about it, binge dieting, which is a terribly stressful cycle wherein someone goes through long periods of time eating very little and then short bursts of eating quite a lot – is actually the worst possible method of trying to maintain a healthy homeostasis, or of even trying to lose weight!
Society at large puts unreasonable pressure on people, especially women, to be thinner. Not thin, but thinner. This slant on body image is grossly unhealthy, unsustainable and completely misses the mark regarding how our bodies operate most effectively. Beyond that, “thin” as beautiful is a social construction. That is to say, many cultures would find plump women far more attractive than thin. I myself love a bit of a belly.
While a holistically healthy lifestyle will inevitably bring about the superficial desire to be physically attractive, the grand why of it all, that is the general drive governing one’s actions, will lead to an improved clarity of mind, greater willingness of body and a general sense of harmonious fulfillment. A healthy body becomes a sharper tool for experiencing reality to the fullest.
Next time, I’ll delve deeper into the mechanics of nutrition. But in the mean time, get off the bloody scale, eat more food containing fewer calories and try not to stress out! Stress leads to greater retention of energy (fat).
If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me. I love responding to this kind of stuff. Via con Dios!
About the writer:
Keven O’Toole is a junior philosophy major and can be reached at [email protected].
