A Diet Life

For decades, food manufacturers, helped by medias that explain to us all day long how fat we are, offering us only morbidly thin beauty standards to identify with, have been selling us low fat or sugar-free products, fat ironically being replaced by different types of sugar such as corn starch and sugar being replaced by carcinogenic chemical substitutes such as aspartame.
No food in itself makes us overweight, it is the quantity we ingest associated with our metabolism that makes a difference but each oil (except palm and coconut oils), each butter, each cream, each sugar whether slow, semi-slow or fast has benefits for the body.

Our bodies are not fat, they have the corpulence adapted to our age, our physiology and our way of eating and, although sport allows us to stay in shape, it does not eliminate excess of weight and we can be both thickly built and muscular. Each of us is a unique being and our body is no less so since it is an essential part of us. It is our ego, supported by the injunctions of our societies, that whispers quite loudly to us that we are too fat – compared to what or who, one wonders! – or rather not attractive enough to be loved which is indeed the root of the problem. Weight only becomes a real problem when it endangers our health, otherwise every weight is ideal if it corresponds to our body shape.

For years, when I was in my 20s and 30s, every spring, like many other women, I wanted to lose a little weight – I weighed 124 pounds for for a height of 5,5 feet, needless to say that I was far from being overweight. So I dieted and went to the swimming pool for a few weeks to lose my cellulite, all associated with very chemical slimming body lotions… After my daughter’s birth, around my 40th birthday, I had access to my in-laws’ swimming pool every spring and summer and I was finally able to realize that, even if swimming combined with regular walking reduced my cellulite, it did not make it entirely disappear for it is linked to both my morphology and my bloodstream. No matter how hard I tried, I would never succeed in getting Gisèle Bunchen’s legs because I am not Gisèle Bunchen, just as beautiful but different a woman. If I had had realized that earlier, it would have saved me 2 decades of guilt for not making enough effort to be beautiful…
It reminded me of the « Eat, Pray, Love » movie from Elizabeth Gilbert’s wonderful novel – and life lesson; at the beginning of the movie, Julia Roberts, who plays the heroine in search of life meaning, explains to a woman friend she met in a store that no man has ever run away from a woman who had a few fleshy bumps showing when she undressed. Have you ever been rejected by someone you were going to have sex with once they saw you naked whatever your body looks like?
Furthermore, if you look at the canons of beauty of each era, during the Renaissance, our today top-models could never have appeared in the paintings of the great masters due to their lack of voluptuous forms.

Our body is our best friend, we go everywhere with it and we should, every day, thank it for taking us wherever we want with such kindness and complacency despite the mistreatments we inflict upon it. Indeed, despite its good and loyal service, we do not take care of it and keep on torturing it because it does not fit into the « canon of beauty of our time » marketing box into which we want to put it at all costs… We are usually only aware of our body when it is in pain – and we instantly resent it for abandonning us when we need it the most or we judge it mercilessly without ever listening to its needs. Yet who would we be without it? How would we know the pleasures of our senses: the sweet taste of a juicy mango or the intense chocolate taste of a fudgy brownie, the caresses of our loved one, the smell of roses or freshly cut grass, the amazement at a sunset or rainbow diversity of colors, the music which serves as our lives soundtrack… Each of these sensations, like each of our emotions, is physical, carried by our beloved body which brings us so much happiness and satisfaction on a daily basis without us ever noticing it and thanking it in return…

Speaking of happiness, what would you think of a diet happiness? Indeed, if we choose to rely on industrial manufacturers for our food, the same goes for our happiness if we let it in the hands of medias, social networks, religions, governments, societies which constantly reduce our freedom of being… Have you ever heard the phrase « we should settle for the little moments of happiness we have » ? If you ask me, this saying has been greatly distorted from its original meaning. Indeed, if I think that it is essential to be aware of each moment of happiness, big and small, that life offers us, I do not believe that we should “settle for them”. I believe that we all deserve absolute and unfailing happiness and well-being – please note, I am not talking here about egotistical pleasures but rather deep profound happiness – and that we should never stop creating more of them in our lives. Our life possibilities and the achievement of our dreams are limitless if we do not listen to our fears.

And what about « diet sadness », will you ask? I will answer you that each emotion is important to our life path and that sadness allows us to better enjoy happiness when we experience it, to better savor it; indeed, it would be difficult for us to fully appreciate moments of relaxation if we never worked, so it goes with happiness and sorrow. In addition, our sadness opens us to a better understanding of others’ grief and allows us to develop our capacity for compassion, our ability to support and comfort those we love.

If we put a lid on our “negative” emotions, if we try to alleviate them, we put a lid on our entire ability to feel, including pleasant emotions, and thus our ability to live in alignment with ourselves, in harmony with the world around us and with what we truly desire; when we are aligned, we are less affected by the difficult moments of life for we can lighten them thanks to our constant well-being and to our ability to understand that nothing ever lasts and that difficult times therefore always end up passing too.