Spring Break
Barefoot Living
Crashed out dieting
Keven O'Toole, Columnist, kmwilson@smu.edu
Issue date: 1/29/08 Section: Opinion
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.
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.
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