The dinner was a run of the meal healthy dinner, a smaller type that would probably be considered normal size in many parts of the world. I was proud of myself for starting to eat healthier and mentioned nothing about a diet yet it was an eye opener to me that one of the first comments on the photo was that the person also felt the need to go on a "diet" ... a word that hadn't been uttered anywhere near the photo in my caption.
Let me preface this by saying that I have been the person that believed healthier eating always meant diet in the past. If someone wasn't eating junk food semi-regularly (a habit that has always been hard for me to break), I figured they were just trying to lose weight and never considered that they were trying to be healthy.
So when I read the comment on my picture and thought about it, I somewhat understood where the person was coming from.
Everywhere Americans look, there are ads for the new fad diets and pills that we can take to make us skinnier. Add that to pictures in every magazine with skinny, airbrushed models and you can see where the pressure to diet comes from. This is somewhat amusing (in a sad way) when you consider that even with all these ads, America was the most obese country in the world until we were overtaken by Mexico earlier this year.
The loss of the "world's most obese" title wasn't celebrated by all if some headlines were correct as one of the top articles to come up when you Google "most obese country in the world 2013" has a headline that reads "Disappointment: America Displaced as World's Most Obese Country".
For as long as I can remember, America has been obsessed with skinnier people without actually really trying to obtain the results. I remember seeing kids in school put on a diet and I have dieted off and on throughout my life. Like many people, some of my diets have been unsuccessful while others have had moderate success but I always end up looping back to gaining back all the weight I lost or sometimes even more than I had in the first place.
This came to a massive head this Spring when I decided to change my approach after putting some thought into many different areas of my life.
After talking to a friend soon after the beginning of the new year, I went on yet another diet. She had lost over 40 lbs in about five months and I had to know what she had done.I had gained a ton of weight since graduating high school and was tired of it. My problem was that once I adopted her method, I turned into an extreme dieter.
I lost 15 pounds in about a month and a half between eating way less than I should have and exercising like a demon, but that soon came to a halt when my finger accident happened. Because I was eating a lot more while sitting on the couch and not exercising, I gained eight of those pounds back. Thankfully I realized I was gaining it all back before I went too far down the rabbit hole and at least stopped the train from returning to the station, if not backing it up to the old one.
This time I decided to try something different. I did a little research and decided that instead of going on a hardcore diet, I was just going to eat healthy. Many researchers and other people pointed out that if you want to be healthy in the long run, you need to change the way you are living.
One article had the good advice to eat a salad a day (its thought process was that if you ate three meals a day and ate a salad a day for one of those meals, you couldn't screw up life too much), a theory that I've adopted in addition to the old adage that we need to eat breakfast every morning.
I have been eating like crap the past few weeks so dinner is still a work in progress but I'm already feeling better than I did on any diet or any other "meal plan" I followed. I'm also becoming one of those people that avoids the fast food restaurants (minus Subway, it is my weakness) because 1) it makes me feel like I weight 5,000lbs after I eat there 2) after adding up how much money I spent at fast food places per month, I realized there was much more I could put my money towards. I won't lie though, there is one day a week that I go out with the girls for dinner and don't worry about healthiness (cheese fries and margaritas are the Devil's meal but they taste so good!), but I also don't worry too much about that one weakness, we all have them.
I definitely get that eating/living healthy is hard when there are so many other ways to go with food & exercise. We are pressured into trying to look as skinny as possible so diets are the way to go in our minds.
However, when people believe that just because you are eating healthy means you are on a diet, something needs to change. Instead of picking up Dr. Phil's newest diet book, we should look at picking up the Healthy Cooking book right next to it. If previous generations would have done that, maybe our thought process would be different today.
To end the blog, I'm going to put a quote that wasn't meant for this rant but that seems to fit anyway:
“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.” -Mahatma Gandhi
Aka, the real quote that has turned into "Be the change you wish to see in the world".
Gandhi is one of those people that was so influential he is still impacting the world 65 years after his death so I figure he is someone we should listen to. If not for wisdom, then at least for a good quote.
Until next time,
Mel
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