Body Conscious Ramblings

People often complain about not having the motivation to start eating healthy… In my non-expert, non-medical, purely personal opinion there are two sources of motivation for humans to want to eat clean healthy food. I don’t believe there to be very many people walking on this planet who will change the way they eat or what they do to their bodies by being scared with a disease. Take smoking as an example. Putting a scary picture of lung cancer on the box of cigarettes will not deter anybody from purchasing it and then smoking it.

So what about food? I have two things to say when it comes to motivation to eat healthy: 1) Look at yourself and 2) Look at somebody else. Same as above, I truly don’t believe that telling an overweight person that their bad eating habits might cause serious disease or even death is enough to make that person want to start eating healthy. It might do it for some, but majority is going to keep eating junk, because it’s more convenient. They might have the best of intentions seeing Joe attached to medical equipment in a hospital because he can’t breathe on his own now that he is 400lbs. But next time they see that chocolate cake in the local grocery store they will just silently hope that what happened to Joe will not happen to them and the sweet tooth will win yet again. So what can one do? In my opinion, which again is not a scientific or medical opinion, one has to look in the mirror or better yet, have a photograph taken of oneself. This did it for me. In my teens and in my early 20s I was rather thin and that was the image I had of myself in my head beyond my early 20s. So when I started putting on weight I didn’t allow any other image of myself into my head, you could call it a denial, or you could blame it on my mother who, in early childhood, instilled in me this conviction that no matter what I eat I won’t put on weight, because due to my genetic make-up I was destined to remain thin. Don’t ever let anybody convince you that this is the case. So I had a child and I moved to a country where time was more precious than anything else. So to save time in order to have it for something else, like work or play, people treasure ready-to-go-meals that they put in a microwave or oven and while the “meal” is cooking, they can do something else. Hey, that’s a brilliant idea, but not so much once you realize that there is a price to pay. North Americans also privilege the super sized foods and instead of normal size portions they will often times get the bigger version, mostly because it’s “cheaper”. In any case, I did put on weight, contrary to what my mother would have had me believe.

Seeing myself in a mirror was not that eye-opening, because one can avoid them. Obviously I could see myself getting chubbier when I looked down past my chin, but that also wasn’t quite enough to make me want to do something about my eating habits. Even the numbers on the bathroom scale were not scary enough for me, because I’d convince myself that those were still my post-baby numbers and that they will just go away. At that point my child was about 3-4 years old. Who the hell was I kidding?  And then came a photograph of myself that sent me crying to my room.

I never liked having my photograph taken, strictly because I’ve always felt imperfect in some way, not necessarily weight-wise (prior to that era of my life, anyway), but in any other way. As a result, I’d avoid the camera pointing at me at all cost, so there was never a picture of me to look at. But having a young child requires one to constantly run around with a camera to capture the precious moments and so the inevitable happened. I finally “got shot” and as soon as I laid my eyes on the evidence I realized that the image from my teens and early  20s that I still held dear in my heart and mind was no longer true. Now I looked truly chubby and by my  standards overweight. Looking at that picture was enough for ME to want to change something about how I treated my body and how I looked, because it shattered my understanding of who I was and what I represented to the world. This chubby person wasn’t what I wanted to look like and what I believed I looked like. So now, every time I slip ( yes I do slip)  I go back to that enlightenment time of mine.

This might not be as ground-breaking for everybody as it was for me. Looking at oneself in a photo might be just slightly depressing, but might not uncover any strength and motivation to do something. And if that’s the case I’d suggest looking at other people (very discreetly, of course) who  might be in a worse position. Maybe seeing other people’s misery will be enough to stop the cycle. Or maybe not. Maybe looking at a healthy physique will give you the motivation you need. The bottom line is, there is no  easy way about this. Asking about how to get the motivation to change the way you look is like asking a blind person for directions to the mall. You got to figure it out by yourself.

Note: The two images are, of course, of me pre- and post- photo-enlightenment era. Please forgive my very poor studio arrangement in the second image.