Trimming Down

I’ve written about the health journey I started late last year. My goal was to find optimal health for me—the exact spot where I felt good and my health hit optimum levels. I was tired of being tired, achy, puffy, and grumpy.

I needed to find my equilibrium.

A side effect of the process? I lost weight.

Many people who see me daily haven’t noticed. People who haven’t seen me in months typically say that I look fantastic. Yet there’s a subset that says I look too thin or different (one said “weird”)—as though I’ve lost too much weight.

I’d listen if they had serious concern. I don’t want to get “skinny.” I haven’t trimmed down too much—I’m not certain of the poundage because I don’t weigh myself—but I have needed some new clothes. Clearly, though, the concern isn’t sincere.

How do I know?

The ones who seem most worried immediately follow their “skinny” comments by saying that they need to lose weight—and asking how I did it. They’re not concerned. They’re jealous.

Why?

Why does every woman you meet believe she needs to trim down—even the trimmest of the trim?

I find it sad that our culture focuses on thinness over health. Frightening skinniness is not healthful, either, yet that’s what most fashion magazines tout. People do some of the most unhealthful things to lose weight. Starvation. “Cleanses.” Colonics. Fad diets they can’t sustain more than a few weeks. (Remember the Grapefruit Diet? How about Atkins?)

Let’s crusade for healthfulness—not weight. Weight is a side effect. And people can be healthy at many different scale weights. We are not numbers. Each body is different.

The trick to healthy living? Loving your body by eating well and exercising. Healthy people chronically live healthfully. Does that take discipline? Yes.

And it’s worth it.

Be My Everything

Few of us retain the elementary-school notion of a single best friend from whom we’re inseparable. As adults, we reach out to separate friends for different needs and activities.

Recently, I wrote about accountability partners, mentioning that I have a few, because one can better encourage me in a given area than another.

Yet the notion that a single individual can serve every purpose in another person’s life persists. And it causes many relationships—romantic and otherwise—to fail.

Pamela Haag’s Marriage Confidential, which I’ve written about in the past, posits that the ideal of the romantic other half, to whom you become each other’s everything, is one of the reasons modern marriage struggles. The notion puts an unsustainable weight on a single bond—albeit an important one.

As Haag points out, expecting your spouse to become your “everything” just wasn’t the notion prior to the romantic-marriage era. You had other confidants. Other activity partners. You expected your spouse to play one or a few roles—not all.

Yet today, the partner-as-everything is our overarching cultural expectation.

Expecting any one person to fill every purpose in your life brings disappointment—and disillusionment. Yes, friends and partners must spend time together and have adventures together to maintain and build their relationships. However, they need to recognize that putting the weight of “completing you” on any one person is too much pressure, too much responsibility—and doomed.

As with accountability partners, one person may be wonderful for one facet but terrible in another. Turning to the right person for the right need just makes sense. Not all friends will want to participate in all your hobbies. No one person can provide the right counsel in every situation.

And you should have multiple relationships, anyway. Research shows that strong support networks are critical for health and happiness.

A strong support network is never a single person.

Seems like we set ourselves up for disaster, no?

Trouble

Me playing Pac-Man at about the same age and in about the same belly-flop position I would have read and written past lights-out. (No one caught a photo of that.) c. 1980

Ready for me to out myself as the most boring person on the planet?

In my youth, I got into trouble most for reading and writing past lights-out.

Yep.

No surprise to my followers here: From the moment I gained the ability, I loved to read. (Before then, I loved to have someone read to me.)

I’d read by the dim glow of the Disney night light plugged into the socket by my bed. When my parents remodeled the room and the bed no longer abutted a wall, I’d sneak as close as I could to the edge of my bedroom without risking detection to read by the hall light, which we kept on to scare away boogeymen (mainly vampires).

Also, as I wanted to be a writer, I’d take my notebooks of novel into the same dim circle of hall light to sprawl on my stomach and pen as many scenes as I could.

My dad made a sport out of catching me. I could sometimes hear his knees clicking as he tiptoed toward my room to ensure I slept—but not always. Looking back, I detect his pure delight in making a “nab.” Back then? I felt too terrified to notice the game. He’d jump out of the darkness and boom: “What are you doing?” and “Get back in that bed right now!”

My punishment? Lost privileges. No television, for example.

I can’t say that hindered me much.

For which deeds did you get into the most trouble growing up?

Robot Diet Helper

A company called Intuitive Automata has created a robot it’s named Autom.

Autom sits on your kitchen or bathroom counter with its uncanny, oversized, slowly blinking humanesque eyes and talks to you about whether you’re on track with your diet and exercise.

How long did you exercise today? What kind of fitness activity did you do? Have you eaten as you should have?

The company touts that no two conversations with Autom are the same and that she adapts, tailors her advice to your tendencies, and builds a supportive relationship with you.

Unsettling, no?

Is it creepy to have a little creature lurking on your counter, poised to pop to life and question you about whether you’re doing what you should and to guilt you if you’re not? To ask highly personal questions and collect data on your answers?

This sounds far worse than a bathroom scale leering at you as you exit the shower. Is it good to obsess about food and exercise so much?

And what other robots will someday sit around our houses to nag us about other things? Will there be a personal and household hygiene robot? A fix-your-marriage robot? A homework robot? A professional-goals robot? (In fact, these machines may already exist, for all I know.)

I'll stick with my human accountability partners.

Would you use a product like Autom?

The Lost Society

Reading The New Yorker, as I do, I encountered a chewy, thought-provoking review by George Packer of recent writing about the current recession. (The magazine published Packer’s “Don’t Look Down” in its April 29, 2013, edition.)

The review frames the books in contrast with the journalism from The Great Depression.

Packer makes a number of compelling points about the differences, one of which is that writers covering the Great Depression profiled the downtrodden, destitute, and struggling and how the economic crisis affected them. Yet in the thick of our recent recession, writers mostly focus on how the bigwigs, the perpetrators of the scandal, and the celebrities of the downturn masterminded or contributed to the financial crisis.

These days, people don’t want to read about desperation.

Seems to contradict my article about people craving the upbeat in trying times, doesn’t it? After all, I referenced the Depression as a supporting point. Yet something Packer brings up later in the review ties it together. We’ll come back to that.

Packer’s final sentence struck me hardest: He points out that our society has no idea for the future “genuinely shared by large numbers of people—[no] real and lasting solution to the conditions described in these books.”

During the Depression, large swaths of people believed communism or socialism or the New Deal or general-purpose activism would solve the problem. And although the theories varied in specifics, universally everyone agreed that a society should take care of people—that being American meant justice and compassion for our fellow humans.

What do we have today?

Like Packer, I don’t see a theme. I haven’t heard a truly collective vision for the future.

About to mention the Occupy Wall Street movement, were you? Like Packer, I disagree that Occupy was more than “a moment of its time—a cri de coeur, stylish, media-distracted, and (to invert one of Agee’s best-known sentences) not so easily wounded as easily killed.”

Occupy became an outlet for anger and frustration without any overarching argument for how to handle the problems it decried.

And that brings us back to our unwillingness to look at the bleak in favor of the fluffy: If we shared a vision and passion for where we want to go, seeing how it could help the people currently afflicted would become a positive and motivating call to crusade.

Without one, seeing them suffer is just depressing.

Do we really want to be a society without a vision?