Sometimes I just need to put into perspective the whackadoodle stuff that people tell me would make me healthier. For today’s blog I thought we would play a little game of “what’s really healthier”. It’s sort of like the S.A.T.s…maybe we should call it the H.A.Ts: two choices, you decide which one is truly unhealthy:

Seeking out movement that I love doing or thinking of exercise as a punishment for not being thin

Mindful eating based on internal cues or eating 500 calories a day and being injected with hormones extracted from urine

Feeling like a success because I did my healthy habits or feeling like a failure because those habits didn’t lead to weight loss

Eating whole foods or eating low-fat and non-fat versions that are full of a chemical shitstorm of replacements for whole foods

Eating to nourish my body or eating to starve it in the hope that it eats itself and becomes smaller

Doing the best I can with the body that I have now or getting my stomach amputated in an effort to make my body do what it will not do naturally

Appreciating my body for how amazing it is or hating my body because it doesn’t meet a culturally arbitrary standard of beauty

Here’s my perspective: Health is not a moral, social, or personal obligation. People can choose to prioritize and pursue health at whatever level they want but that neither guarantees it nor makes them better than people who don’t choose to prioritize or pursue health. Health has both physical and mental components. Hating ourselves is not healthy. Most of what gets sold to us by the diet industry is the exact opposite of healthy. Weight loss isn’t the same as healthy habits, thin isn’t the same as healthy, and appreciating your body is never a bad thing.

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