Resolve really gets the stains out of your life, but you must read all of the directions.
Customs are killing the English language. So much so that words have meanings, and then they have particular meanings in our society. The most underused word and virtue is “resolution.” This word isn’t simply a reason to reflect on negatives and negligence in your life when the calendar turns to a new year, it’s a window into the ways we should live. Resolution is a tool we can use to embark on and then complete tasks that are important to us. The roots of our “new year’s resolutions” come from guilt, comparisons to others, and self-pity. These resolutions aren’t merely petty excuses to join in with mainstream practices, they’re indicative of all the mental deficiencies we have.
In short, new year’s resolutions don’t work because most people have bigger problems than smoking, swearing, and needing to take the the stairs instead of the elevator. We struggle so much to meet the expectations we have for ourselves that we’ve got to resolve to do things that should be simple parts of our lives. What’s worse is that we do so much to disregard these things until the last week of December and we pretend for the first week of January that this resolution will instantly help us prove to ourselves and the world that we now have this unbreakable discipline.
But resolution and resolve aren’t the sorts of nouns we think they are, as if we can use them to directly improve our lives. Like most of the other things that make our lives better, we build resolutions and we operate with resolve if we want to improve our lives. Targeting one area of your life for change that’s already drastic considering what you already do might seem like a positive thing, but it’s no different than overeating at Thanksgiving or watching fireworks on the fourth of July simply because you were always told this was the thing to do at that time.
Resolution and resolve have little to do with making resolutions and have everything to do with finishing the things we set out to do. If what we call resolutions are really ways we’ve decided to improve our lives, and the level of resolve within us is what allows us to complete these tasks, then ideally, we would make these improvements and then make it a goal to operate with resolve so that things happen for us. I’ve never really heard of a new year’s resolution that did stick and work for a person so well that five and ten years later they say something like “2005 was the year man, that’s when I really changed my life for the new year.” I have though, heard a person who is so fed up with who they are and the way they live that they say “I’m not only going to do so many things differently, but I’m going to commit to finishing them.” These are the times when lives change, and they rarely happen because one year is ending and another is starting and they usually happen at a time when making resolutions isn’t fashionable. This year, this month, and today, operate with resolve, finish what you start, and seek out more things to do that really improve your life. People with real resolve live the virtue. Everyone else waits for the new year to make resolutions because it’s fashionable do so without ever teaching themselves how to carry out those meaningless resolutions.
Soon video games will also tell us how to eat and sleep
Fitness isn’t a game. Unlike the other important things we’ve tried to turn into games, or tried to force games into, it truly doesn’t work properly when you’re playing around with it. Fitness games for video game consoles puzzle me. People won’t go out and exercise properly. They offer dozens of reasons they either don’t bother with exercise or don’t exercise enough. All of it usually boils down to them not wanting to be involved in the flow of competition all around them. Gyms are full of the superficial elements of exercise-all of the machines are catered to aesthetic effects, all of the patrons are there with aesthetics on their minds, and they’re constantly offered mirrors to judge themselves and each other. The parks and roads are filled with dedicated runners and bikers who are only interested in doing better, and a person trying to look better can’t survive around a person trying to do better and be better. So game console makers have brought fitness and that competition into the home.
Not that I’m fully against it, but I think that we’re setting a poor precedent for future generations. The definitions we have for fitness and exercise are blurred, and we are scared of these things in their purest forms. Video game companies are simply capitalizing on the understood needs of the people: If you’re afraid of exercising in front of people, we will keep you home. Uncomfortable about your looks? Clothes? Wear what you want. The entire time, the consumer is thinking, “well, the worst thing that could happen is that I can’t do it, I can just pack it back up. The kids will get games for it.” This is how it’s no better than the BeachBody infomercial tapes you bought. The exercises work, but nothing you buy will give you the dedication to do these things fully, and if you could, then why the hell are you not out getting them on your own?
If we allow this to be the era when we brought “fitness” to the living room for good, then it will travel to the sofa, then the bed, then we will be taking fitness pills. We all thought years ago that we’d be eating astronaut food in 2010 but we’re repulsed by food that isn’t unhealthy and comes in enormous portions. We do eat artificial food, even though others in the rest of the world are going hungry. I don’t know what people thought would happen to our bodies by now, but Americans are obese, and the ones who don’t want to be are clinging to artificial exercise as a solution. The very thought of embarking on “free” exercise is frightening to people, and the more money they spend for artificiality, the more they convince themselves that they’re doing a positive thing. In my opinion, when people told me as a child that the best things in life were free, they weren’t lying. Free things that we learn to value require both a mental and physical connection. This is something that most of us can’t create with too many things in our lives. Nothing you buy at Best Buy can create that for you, but I can create it for myself.
In the last blog, I mentioned that obesity shouldn’t be considered a disorder, and that it’s merely a reaction to social norms. Understanding this concept is the real first step to controlling the obesity problem. So let’s look at the three factors I said cause this reactive society to react negatively every day and stay obese: sex, food, and exercise. The ways our society treats these things is what mostly effects how we handle our weights. People with the proper views on these three things are usually quite fit and quite comfortable with their bodies.
Sex in America is a funny thing. It ruins good relationships and masks problems in bad ones, boosts and batters self-esteem, indirectly drives the actions of many people we see and know, and it controls fashion. It’s also one of the ambiguous things hanging over us that is always present. Little boys know that wearing cologne to smell good is a good thing, and little girls know that shorter skirts and higher heels look better. Boys are told to respect girls privacy and girls are told to cross their legs when they sit. Why? Everyone is thinking about sex, and those who say they aren’t are trying to protect the innocent world from it, so they are thinking about it more. Most smart people have a healthy fear of sex because it can ruin lives, and many who aren’t smart are trying to explore sex in ways that will ruin their lives. Two things are constant though, people will still keep having children, and people will still want other people to desire them sexually, never thinking that the need for the two are related deep within our minds.
With sex though, all people aren’t desirable. That’s just the plain truth of it. So in a society where procreation and vanity are at the forefront, some people might be left out, and even worse, some might be settling. Chances are that most of us will never have sex with a person with an absolutely flawless body, face, or who turns us on in just that special way every minute of our lives, but people will still try their best to create the illusion that things are perfect with material things. So to create certain illusions, women will shop at Victoria’s Secret, not because they all look the way the models wearing the undergarments look, but because certain clothes will build an air of sexuality around them with men, and hence, make them look and feel sexier, even if they aren’t too special naked.
I’m not saying that women shouldn’t try to be sexy for men, I’m just saying that seeing lean models wearing lingerie you’re about to wear and do no justice to should be disheartening. There should be less of a need to look sexy and more of a need to be sexy, so that clothes make us look sexier. Looking sexy is not only fake, cheap, and disappointing, it’s also ephemeral. Looking sexy lasts just about until your carriage turns back to a pumpkin, so let’s find a real reason for the prince to marry you, and a real reason to lose weight.
What if that reason was death? I can guarantee even that doesn’t scare Americans much. We’re conditioned to do a lot of terrible things, but eating insane portions of artificial foods is this society’s embarrassing specialty. Anyone with an adult body will tell you that we can’t all look like Victoria’s Secret models and professional athletes and eat the ways we do. In a week, most people eat about fifteen times the number of meals as times they do real exercise. Not only does the common person disconnect themselves from people with great bodies, they take solace in the notion that they are enjoying food and that fit people aren’t. No statement could be more untrue. Taking the time to understand that eating certain things prevents you from not only losing weight but exercising to your full potential is a powerful thing. So while fat people think fit people are missing out on great tasting things, fit people think that fat people are missing out on using the body they were blessed with.
We simply don’t need to put certain things in our bodies. This isn’t because we need to look perfect, it’s because the wrong foods do real damage to our bodies, and sometimes the right foods, when not used for energy, can take the same negative effect. The concept of using food for fuel is lost on us though. Food is another thing with ambiguous stigmas that hover over us. Food is included in every outing we have. Many times, food is the outing, making it seem as though families and friends couldn’t meet without meeting to fill their bellies. Americans, especially those both deeply rooted in the capitalist system and an old-world culture that their family might have, see food as a luxury item, or something that most often should be purchased, rather than something that is the first source of all activity. Food should be less important to us as a society and more important to us as individuals, then there would be less unhealthy eating in groups, fueling negative reactions by some that lead to obesity, and there would be more healthy-eating individuals, showing more people how much better a healthy body feels than the short pleasure of overeating.
Since we want to be sexy, and we can’t handle food, we try to exercise, try to diet, and quit, because the sex and eating parts are already so overwhelming. We all want to look a certain way, we’re envious of the ways people with sexy bodies are viewed and perceived, and the more people we see looking the ways we’d like to, the faster we want our processes to go. Even worse, we think that fixing certain body parts and not others will make us look just right, not realizing that bodies don’t work that way. We can’t, in theory, lose weight directly. The body sculpts and loses weight, but a belly just can’t get more narrow by itself, and flabby triceps don’t get lean without real weight loss in the chest, upper back and shoulders. You should simply exercise and lose weight until you stop losing weight, and see how your body looks and feels there-where you’re supposed to be. Because the house-cleaning analogy works so well, imagine feeling like only sweeping your kitchen floor was enough for you to feel like the kitchen was clean? You’d have piles of dishes and dirty counters to remind you and every visitor that it wasn’t.
Everyone seems to be looking for a series of impossibilities: they’d like to be the one person who eats like a maniac, is incredibly sexy, and does little to no strenuous exercise. Truthfully, only the opposites will work to their goals. Controlling food and eating less for pleasure and more for sustenance, being comfortable with your appearance, and pushing the limits of exercise are what will cause us to look that way we’ve always wanted to look. It’s no coincidence that the people who stress about sexuality, make food ultra important, and exercise the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons usually consider themselves out-of-shape and those who are most extreme with these practices are usually obese. To combat obesity we’d first have to stop craving this lifestyle, which seems to be all we are about.
If you’ve ever lost a considerable amount of weight, you’d know that the biggest change occurs in your wardrobe. The hanging and sagging rear of your pants, or the drooping shoulder seam of your shirt or blouse can be your most effective indication of weight and size loss. It can also be the true way to change the way you think of weight loss. If your clothes became the gauge, and not the completely useless and inaccurate number on the scale, or the mirror view that’s distorted by personal perception, then weight loss might be much smoother for most and unattractive weight gain much less prevalent.
We all have target areas, and if these personal target areas aren’t causing clothes to loosen in those areas, then exercise is a failure for most of us before the results even come, and most people aren’t even on programs that yield the proper or any results. Giving yourself a reasonable timetable is first. We’ve already established that exercise and proper eating is a lifelong lifestyle, mostly because most who start, begin with immediate, counterproductive and almost harmful goals. What most need to understand is that like with all activity, the body sustains, maintains, shows results, then plateaus. Usually, this process happens in increments of twenty or twenty-five. It’s easy to get from one hundred and ninety to one hundred and seventy pounds, but one hundred and fifty may require much more time and work. So is the constant dilemma of the dieter: manipulating food and exercise to achieve a weight they can not control in a way that achieves it faster than the body wants to allow. Monitoring size is the key if monitoring is needed at all. The schedule on which you may need to buy knew clothes is a more accurate schedule to stay on. When taking out or buying your fall clothes, it’s more accurate to see the way your body might have changed over one or two seasons than over four weeks. If you are overweight, and deeply embedded in the thought of aesthetics, then you should keep a goal of not fitting that season’s clothes from last year. Half-a-year’s work is easy to see, and reward, with more work of course.
Work the Latissimus Dorsi today with pull downs. Stand with your feet together, reaching every finger and arm above your head, straight up to the ceiling and facing away from you, and immediately pull the elbows into the body, twisting and squeezing the hands and biceps firmly. Your palms should be clenched, facing you, your elbows will be tucked as if they will touch behind your back. Reach back to the ceiling, and that is one. Do a hundred of these at a rapid, controlled speed. The back and anterior deltiod should burn considerably. Breathe normally, and remember, as always, focus.
We’ve all stood on scales before, peering down at that number, wondering why it’s that number and not another. We might even simply say “I don’t feel the way the scale reads,” and that’s because weights should be reserved for doctors, because doctors read that number once a year. Imagine if we only took our weight once a year? We’d get a real insight into how our body is really changing over time. But many of people need to find out their weights daily, allowing the number to control what they do, what they eat and who they are. I can’t imagine how anyone could exercise properly with that cloud of guilt or innocence that a high or low weight brings so many of us.
There are though three things that we all should evaluate daily, whether we get sufficient exercise or not:
Can I complete every physical task I do?
Meaning that, every time you set your mind to stand and carry or push or climb anything, is there any strain at all. If so, how early in the day does it come? Remember, if you can not control your body weight, you simply can not be in shape, so its important that your regular activities that aren’t exercise be completed normally.
Do the changes in the mirror please me?
Getting away from the aesthetic ideals we’ve set are key to being truly physically fit, so it’s important that we examine results and accept them before we move on to things that really help us to maintain our fitness throughout life. See yourself in the mirror and try your best to like what your see. Realize that these things are being done for you and not for anyone else, and understand that the things that will get you the results you want are easy, but the things that will help you keep them are much more difficult.
Is this important to me?
Many times, we lose sight of why we care about our bodies. It’s an overwhelming experience, mixed with the ideas and advice of too many friends and professionals, and too many things that have to do with it are pure superstition. We have to find our own focus. We have to find out what drives our inner energy and those changes in the mirror and embrace those things for and with ourselves.
Go against the grain today and jog at your own pace for twenty minutes in the sun, feeling the heat running through your lower legs and keeping your shoulders relaxed, maintaining slow smooth breaths. Drink plenty of water before and after and remember to stretch your leg muscles however you see fit today, before your run or after. Remember that hot days were made for sweating, so do plenty of it, and don’t forget to focus.
