I've always wondered about the whole "Nature vs. Nurture" aspect of child-rearing. How much of our mental, physical, and emotional issues are hard-wried into us? How many are we taught? How are we, now as parents ourselves, contributing to the healthy (or not so healthy) habits of our own brood.
Did any of us Fatties ever really have a chance? I'm not entirely convinced that we did. There does come a point in time though, as adults, where we need to take responsibility for ourselves and for the choices we are making outside of our parent's home and our community. We need to stop blaming others for our shortcomings and work with a smile to correct them. It's hard, but it's worth it and I believe it's one of the only things that can break the cycle for children of our own.
I believe we're all hard-wired to become fat because I believe in evolution. I believe that our bodies remember old days of hunting down a beast and dragging it back to the village. I believe that our cells themselves have generations and generations of memory about food scarcity and they fear starvation. I believe our bodies are some of the most amazingly powerful survival machines ever built. Have a limb cut off? No problem, we'll just quickly snap off the blood flow to save your life. Fallen into ice-cold water? No problem, we'll just buy you some time to try to get out by pulling heat to your core. Your offspring being attacked by a wild cat? No issue there either, we'll just pump you so full of adrenaline that the cat won't know what hit it.
We're beasts, we're built to survive. Anyone who has ever tried severe calorie restriction as a method of weightloss will likely be able to attest that weight might have eventually come off, but as soon as they look sideways at an ice cream it came back with interest. Our body thinks, "Well now, I wonder if X isn't going to try to starve us again? Bugger that, I'm going to hit a plateau and gain weight back to save myself. Weight loss be damned." Our body is a beautiful machine, and will spite us every time if we do it wrong.
I think that is what gets most people trying to lose weight. I think the fad diet mindset of the 70's, 80's and 90's of extreme restriction, eating less and exercising more, denying one's self entire food groups long-term and not learning how to cope with food for a long-term solution has been society's ultimate downfall. A pill can't do it for you, it can't teach you how to feed your body. A surgery might force the weight off you, but it's unnatural and it's also not teaching you mentally how to cope with the real world of food and why you got yourself fat in the first place. The real world has family BBQ's, trips with the kids for ice cream and temptations aplenty.
So looking at how we're hard wired I honestly believe nature has set us all up for failure if we don't learn from nurture how to do it right. That brings us down to our home environments, our communities, what we've learned at school, and how we are raised to view food, fitness and diet. Home environment is the base of everything; A child should be able to have chicken nuggets or a hamburger (or some similar alternative) just like every other child but I've seen some parents taking their kids out to eat every single night. What is the lesson being learned here? In my opinion it is that when life gets too busy, too hectic, or something else is going on that it's alright to let someone else do the work for you. Sure we can say we make the best choices available to us but fast food and takeaways are riddled with nutritional scum. Salt, sugar, preservatives, fat, oil, grease. We're teaching our children that this is an acceptable alternative to making the time to make health a priority. Eating out once a month, once a week even - fine....but more than that? Those kids are on the first step of not having had a chance.
Our communities help shape who we are from the choices we make to the people we surround ourselves with. It's hard to be a part of an inner-city gang selling drugs on a street corner if we grow up in Amish country. I'm not saying there aren't those formerly-Amish out there making bad choices, but I believe that we all strive to emulate others around us - if we didn't, why the hell was high school so damnably torturous? If our communities are plus sized, if giant BBQ's and food-centric activities are how we congregate then what are we doing to ourselves and our children? We're teaching them that to be like everyone else means we eat like everyone else. I remember feeling very jealous as a child in elementary school that a classmate had what I perceived to be a better snack than mine. I wanted to have it, I wanted to eat it, I wanted to have the same thing. Looking back it wasn't at all healthy, and what I carried was a much better choice - but community can do us wrong. Not learning the difference would mean that's another mark of not ever having had a chance.
Our medical professionals are charged with the sole task of keeping after our health. They are not charged with being God, nor are they charged with slamming 100 patients into a single work day. It's not all their fault, there are so many pressures and demands but a doctor that chooses to get to know their patients by name, and learns about their family is worth their weight in gold. Often times our doctors won't recall who we are without looking at our chart, and the obvious lack of recognition is disheartening. When you're fat it also becomes the scapegoat for every single "I don't really know" about your health. Back pain, depression, anxiety, lethargy, all obvious symptoms of having to lose weight with nothing to do with thyroid, cancer, bowl disorder, etc. Pardon my sarcasm. Assumptions that we are unhealthy because we are overweight, that being the 'nugget of advice' bestowed upon us at every unrelated visit. That raised-eyebrow look between nurses as they do your intake vitals. We feel that discrimination, us fat people do, and those fat children feel it as well. If you're always wrong in the eyes of someone you look up to, trust and respect how exactly can you ever be right? Doctors are judged with our care, not our damnation: I encourage everyone to ask questions, demand answers, and not be afraid to fire your doctor and find a new one if you're always wrong if only because you're fat. As kids we're taught to respect and look up to this people...yet again, never had a chance.
Diets. Pills. Sugeries. Quick fixes. We live in a world of instant gratification and instant result. If there isn't a pill out there to fix it, then it isn't an actual problem. Growing up our mothers were all on diets or our Aunts or our best friends. Everyone was full of bad advice about our developing figures, leaving diet books and Cosmopolitan models scattered about the coffee table. We learned early to emulate the women in the magazines, on the internet and on television by watching the female role models in our lives do the same thing. I have a friend whom I believe does everything she can to keep her daughter safe from feeling ashamed of her body. It's one thing I've come to admire, adore and respect about her. The human form in all shapes and all sizes is never something to be kept hidden or covered away. Teach our girls by positive example that if they want a fitter and slimmer body to get out and have fun. To exercise by swimming or doing sport, to eat as much as they want of the best things in order to mitigate the bad things. Teach them to nourish rather than restrict. Children emulate their same-sex parent...if it's always one diet that fails followed by another, emotional damning of the child for being too heavy, or yet another new exercise machine that eventually becomes a clothes-rack in the basement we do them harm. We're only teaching them the same self-fulfilling fail-fad-diet circle, teaching them to beat themselves up over every stray calorie, and that fitness is a low priority option not something to carry with us for life. There's also the parent that teaches their child to eat whatever they want, gives in whenever a child doesn't like something, or tells them falsely that they can eat whatever on earth they like as long as they think about exercising sometime. Maybe. If they feel like it. With parents often working against their children subconciously they surely never had a chance.
Our bodies are amazing, and our children are our treasures...I believe that learning how to love and respect ourselves enough to make fitness and healthy eating a top priority is the only way to fight against nature to ensure our nurture gives our children a fighting chance. There are other things I haven't covered in this post and I must reiterate that these are my feelings in there 'here and now', Those things I haven't covered though ultimately don't make huge differences...medical conditions, or medications that cause weight issues are rampant in our society of preservatives and artificiality; but my main fact remains: No matter your circumstance you can always choose to eat healthy and find time to work in fitness if you want to. It's a choice. Every day is a choice. Make every day count.
Eggs out.
xx
