(Body Shop ad)
Was watching a two-year-old eat this weekend and wondered where we lose our delight and sheer joy in eating. As I spend this time reading about food on all levels--from the political to the cosmetic, I am having trouble remembering the last time I just simply ate. With no guilt, no promises of working it off, just simply enjoyed every single bite.
From where does this craziness spring? Every year, as we fit/ordered choir dresses, almost every single girl would wail about how fat she was. And these, for the most part, were itty-bitty size 2 and 4 singers. Even now, I have 4th graders in choir who talk about being too big.
Yes, I believe in exercise. Yes, I believe in eating produce (day three of my five-a-day--woot, woot). And yes, I know airline seats and stadium seats are larger now to accommodate American girth and today's paper announced that US youth are too fat to fight. And I know that there are myriad inner reason for which to follow a reasonable and moderate diet.
I don't know if you remember when Jamie Lee Curtis did this photo shoot, but with the reaction by/from/in the media, you would have thought she had cured cancer. This is all a meandering through my own path to finding peace with food and hopefully a mental shift in focusing more on things that actually matter than some arbitrary numbers on a scale.
(I can't find the image, but I used to have a great poster up at MCHS that said "A Woman's Worth is Not Determined by the Pound.)
(I can't find the image, but I used to have a great poster up at MCHS that said "A Woman's Worth is Not Determined by the Pound.)
Hah! That's one heckuva Barbie.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I have kept my enjoyment of food - my love of it. I do a Happy Food Dance, D. says, when I'm really enjoying what I'm eating. (Of course, my inner child is occasionally stuck at 8, so what can I say.) I have discovered lately that fewer carbohydrates makes my relationship with food completely different, so that I enjoy more and crave random things less and when I do eat a carbohydrate, I savor it even more.
Everything is new for the two-year-olds; they're still trying things out. We slightly older two-year-olds are already in the phase of "no, don't want that," and we don't approach food with a sense of awe that this one thing both nourishes and delights us. We are picky and pass things by. Meanwhile, actual two-year-olds carefully examine dirt for its future gastronomical possibilities...
It's all in the perspective, I guess. We should become like children... perhaps in all things.