About Fitness And A Healthy Body

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In the summer, I started a new life and bought a fitness club card. I was entitled to two bonuses - a lecture by a nutritionist and an introductory briefing by a trainer.

The nutritionist was my shock.

About ten girls with the build of grasshoppers and toned buttocks gathered in the audience. The nutritionist turned to us with the words: “Understand, if you do not change the diet, you will not lose weight. Never.

I hiccuped quietly in amazement.

It could not even have occurred to her that one of these puny girls might NOT WANT to lose weight. Or that someone of a different body size may be satisfied with their weight. In her picture of the world, everyone, without exception, wanted to lose weight. Women, men, children, cats, dogs and budgerigars.

The nutritionist categorically banned all white buns and homemade cakes. Then she forbade eating fruit after 6 pm. She repeated several times that "as long as we allow ourselves to eat carbohydrates, fats do not go away." Why and where did the fats absolutely necessary for our body have to go? In the meantime, she noticed how wonderful it is to replace dinner with a protein shake. She noted the undoubted benefits of bran, this panacea for all diseases.

The girls made notes in their diaries.

The only question from the audience was - which bran is better?

The conversation turned to oil. When I asked which butter to use in baked goods, butter or ghee, a spasm went through the nutritionist's face. “Can you imagine,” she exclaimed in a dramatic whisper, “how much fat there is in all this! It's pure fat!"

The dietitian was unaware of the current research that eating fat does not lead to weight gain. I also didn't know that fats are absolutely necessary for the functioning of our hormonal and nervous systems. She existed in a world where everyone and for some reason always wanted to lose weight, preferably quickly. Where there was a war with fats, senseless and merciless.

This is a very specific world where you need to purposefully pump up your buttocks. Try to get the coveted biceps relief. Download abs cubes. Where a pumped and well-dried body with a clear weight deficit is of the purest charm, the purest sample.

You just need to reach the sample, and everyone will go nuts. Appreciate. Will love. In this world, by definition, you are not good enough for others - and you need to give up yourself in order to become like another. Like an ideal. So you have no right to be good enough for yourself either. How is it - everyone is happy? How does it feel to fit the hips ?!

You cannot relax in such a world. Here all the time you need to be in tension (they call it "in good shape"), all the time it is painful to compare yourself with others and prove, prove, prove that you are worthy of love. Because if not for the sake of love to endure torment - then for the sake of what else?

And this, you know, is a monstrous lie, because the willingness to give up our own body in order to turn it into something else does not bring us one step closer to love. It's the other way. As if we packed all our swimwear and flew the first flight to Magadan. Moreover, in passing we deprive ourselves of our love. There is nothing to love yourself, imperfect. Disgusting, unkempt, ugly, fat.

I was no longer surprised when the instructor asked when we met: "You probably want to make the buttocks a little more … embossed?" No, I said happily, I like my flat ass. I am already at the age when they think more about the health of the knees than about the shape of the hips.

Although, of course, age is not the issue. There just comes a moment when you stop evaluating your body. Suddenly you exhale at once when you discover how much the body needs to be taken care of, like an exhausted stray cat. How much it deserves gratitude and attention. You discover it in different ways. Someone needs to overwork to a nervous breakdown or go to the hospital. And someone is lucky - he meets people who look at his body lovingly and not appraisingly. Trying to evaluate ourselves, we seem to be standing in the bazaar and bargaining, looking at ourselves from the outside. Hostile. With disbelief. With the feeling that they are trying to shove us some kind of defective nonsense. No matter how they cheated.

At this moment we split in two - we are no longer one with our own body.

We stop feeling when it hurts - that is, OUR OWN pain. We cease to feel when he is uncomfortable - that is, when we are being caused inconvenience. We no longer understand when we are hurt, tense, tired. We do not feel, even if we are already on the last line.

You know what the coach shouted at one of my first trainings: “Girls, sucked in your stomach! The belly is gone! We have no belly!"

And what a great pity I felt at that moment for this “disappeared” belly. To this belly capable of bearing children. Containing the intestines, pancreas, liver, kidneys. Yes, a lot of useful things that require attention and care. All this, obviously, had to disappear, disappear somewhere along with the belly - but, damn it, why?

We don't even notice how we agree to erase ourselves piece by piece for the sake of a fitness trainer or a fictitious standard. Cross out the belly. Betray your hips. Turn away from your hands. Sometimes the whole body can "disappear" and only the face remains. And then we feel paralyzed in all areas of life - in relationships, in work. There is not even enough strength to travel. A head without a body cannot have sex (ok, maybe, but very limited), which means that it cannot have a full-fledged relationship. One head, devoid of support in the form of a body, arms and legs, cannot work. The head is sterile and cannot give birth. Often the head does not know at all how much it cannot - and what is going on “on the lower floors”, what happens to the body? How does it feel? Does he want to eat or sleep? Are you sick? As an indifferent (psychotherapists would say - narcissistic) mother who wants to see an ideal instead of a real child. And everything that outrageously does not correspond to the ideal - crosses out, crosses out, does not notice at close range, politely ignores, devalues, humiliates.

Then the body begins to live its carefully hidden life, and for some reason - surprises! - a person over and over again finds himself in places and situations where he did not expect to be a head. Well, if not in the morgue.

It is very expensive to pay for “disappearing belly”. And the price will be billed to us, not to the trainer in the fitness club. Therefore, it will be fair if we also act as an expert on our own body. Not a trainer or a nutritionist.

And for heaven's sake, don't eat steamed protein omelets. The disgusting thing.