Healthy Images and Healthy Choices

Food is an important part of a balanced diet. ~Fran Lebowitz

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside. ~Mark Twain

Pop Quiz! Name 3 ways to lose weight and get ‘healthy’ right now!

Does your list include any of the following? South Beach or Atkins’ Diet, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig.

It seems that our society has become increasingly obsessed with weight and body image. Where did this come from, and even more importantly, where does this leave us?

I can understand the need to be healthy, and I too would love to lose some unnecessary body baggage. But how do we classify what is healthy? Does this mean stick thin, under a certain body weight, or the ability to perform some type of exercise at a certain level? And more importantly, how did food come to be the most commonly associated object to getting healthy. Sure, it plays a large role, but what about fitness and keeping your body in shape, getting enough sleep, preventing stress and mental of emotional problems, boosting immunity to sickness, and feeling confident in your own skin. This may sound very 7th grade health class, but you can’t be healthy unless you take into account this whole spectrum, and decide how you ought to measure yourself in that context.

In order to avoid sounding like an old gym/ health teacher, or a psychological counselor, I would like to focus on the eating aspect of health. (First off, I would like to say that I have tried the South Beach Diet, so I am not just speaking off of assumptions here.) As for the fad diets, the South Beach and Atkins, the all-carb, the all-juice, the take-away-your-favorite-food diet, I just don’t understand why anyone should do this. I admit that when I did the South Beach diet I also lost weight. But one morning I woke up and really wanted a bagel, essentially putting an end to my carb fasting. So why do we limit ourselves like this? Why do we take food away that we know aren’t actually hurting us, except by maybe putting and extra pound on here of there. Is there anything fundamentally unhealthy about carbs? No. Will you gain a lot of weight if you eat carbs like you drink water? Yes. So I preach moderation.

Eat what you want, love what you want, but in appropriate portions. Eat pasta for dinner if you love it, but skip the bowl of cereal and deep-dish pizza that same day. My feelings are that if you deprive yourself of something, the more you will want it, and when you get it, you lose control. You will overload on what you couldn’t have before. That’s what happened with the South-Beach-ending-bagel incident.

So now I eat what I want, just not as much. I try to balance my meals, which is extremely hard at a college cafeteria where you have little to no control over what composes your dinner. But I do my best, always trying to keep that silly food pyramid in the back of my mind. And if I indulge, I hold back later.
Why not emphasize the pleasures of eating food, rather than turning it into our enemy. We have to realize that when people, especially grown adults, show so much concern with their health, or more specifically their weight and dress size, a certain message is sent to others, most often young children, and young girls and teens in particular. Is this the kind of message we want to send? Food is dangerous in terms of keeping a perfect body image, and so it’s best to avoid possible problems by dieting, or worse, by eating. Talk about unhealthy. If we want to understand why there are so many young girls who suffer from eating disorders and the like, we ought to just take a look at how we present our own relationships to food.

Food is not our enemy. And I really think its time that we get this message out. We shouldn’t focus on how people can cheat the scale by cutting out food from the diet, or showing that it would all be easier if you had Jenny Craig prepare and ship frozen foods to your home in order to eat healthfully. Instead, we should highlight the benefits of food, show how eating can be healthy, teach all of our kids how to cook for themselves and how to recognize appropriate portions and the healthy from the non-healthy foods.