Posts by jakeallen:
I’m Wealthy, I’m Healthy
September 30th, 2008To be healthy, wealthy and wise must be everybody’s dream. What is the most valuable? It has got to be health. Health is something you can’t buy. Sometimes, though we don’t give as much thought to our health as we should.
When we are young we don’t give health a second thought. Looking after ourselves is something we don’t worry about. We live life to the full. It’s only when something goes wrong that we are brought up short and forced to think about the way we behave as far as our health is concerned.
Our attitude to health and diet and exercise in particular, is formed when we are young. Of course what we like best when we are growing up are all the things we shouldn’t eat, sugary things and sweet drinks to name but two.
Only when we reach our teenage years do we take more note of the way we look. Now we notice if we’re fatter than our friends. It starts to matter.
Parents often have a difficult job convincing their children to eat green vegetables. At an early age, we are not the least interested in what is good for us. We rebel against what we don’t like, and in far too many instances parents lose out to headstrong children. The resulting diet in those crucial years is often not as good as it should, or could be.
To be overweight in your early twenties is not a good thing to be. You are probably not aware of what made you overweight and you have very little idea of how you are going to change matters.
The most important thing is to break bad habits and that requires developing an awareness of what they are. Many of the bad habits will have been endorsed by upbringing. To go against this can be a challenge. What has been accepted as a family culture in terms of diet and exercise takes real resolve and determination to change.
To make a real and lasting difference it’s not diets that are needed, but a more fundamental change in behaviour. The only really successful way to do this is to learn new habits, slim habits, that will enable lasting change to take place.
If You’re Overweight It’s Really Not Your Fault
September 17th, 2008A group of researchers at Harvard Medical School have come up with a theory that is making a lot of people sit up and take notice. After a great deal of research involving over 12,000 people they have come to the conclusion that obesity is contagious. This doesn’t mean that you’re going to start putting on the pounds after sitting next to an overweight person in an airplane. There’s a bit more to it than that.
The reason obesity’s contagious doesn’t lie in the fact that obese deliberately people find other obese people to hang out with, it’s more because there is a direct causal relationship. In other words, a person’s idea of what is an acceptable weight changes as a result of being in the company of obese people. If all those around you are obese, then you start to believe – perhaps sub-consciously – that it’s okay to be like them.
For the first time obesity has been put into a social context. If everybody is carrying too much weight then it’s easy to see why people are not concerned by their body weight. In fact many probably take comfort from the fact that they are no different to anybody else. If not in a ‘club’, they are certainly not made to feel that they need to make change – probably completely the opposite.
What part did the environment of lifestyle have on people in this study? This was obviously taken into acccount, but interestingly it was discovered that the impact of obese or overweight friends, particularly of the same sex, existed even when they didn’t live in the same area.
It is clear that the current obesity crisis has been exaserbated by the social dimension. In fact it could well account for the rapid rise in obesity in recent years.
If it’s okay to be overweight or obese, why change? If there is no social pressure to change, why bother trying to lose weight? If we can exist within our own circle of friends and be happy, what’s wrong with that? You could argue, not a lot, but there are other things to think about – the health consequences of being overweight or obese. This has both a personal and a national dimension.
It’s not all gloom and doom though. If obesity is contagious, there is no reason why being slim can’t be contagious too! A ‘slimness’ epidemic is perfectly possible, but would it be difficult to sell? If feeling a million dollars, being physically able to do whatever you want to do, being happy, being on top of your job and in good health is hard to sell we should all pack our bags now! It’s time to get the slim habit!