The Paradigm Shift that Blows My Mind......

A while after I started macrobiotics, people who knew me well and saw me frequently started asking me if I was well, or if I had been ill. The only thing that had changed physically was the way of eating, which led to some weight loss along with the rediscovered need and love for exercise. The biggest change was emotional and spiritual. I wasn’t stressed / hurried / complaining / completely task focused, and looking for some elusive perfection. I was in the moment, smiling, and enjoying life, and this was perceived by my friends as an illness, which shows how upside down a lot of the world has become.

So then I am answering the questions of the friends that have identified me as ill about how I have achieved this “miracle of weight loss” and I respond “very disciplined eating and exercise since last year, slowly but surely” So from there then there is the mildly interested “ How question” and then when I detail the diet regimen I get the “I can’t do that” at least my husband is honest enough to say “ I don’t want to do that, I chose not to do that” People don’t want to hear that they shouldn’t eat a cheeseburger or a muffin any time they want. It annoys them and runs contrary to their sense of entitlement.

That is usually where the conversation stops, like they can’t deal with that simple of an answer. Or I get the old, negative, and limiting “I can’t do that” or “I have tried”. If they were serious they would eliminate the CAN’TS and the TRYING and actually DO.

I once had a swim coach tell me “Can’t means you can, but you don’t want to” which drove me insane at the time because he was right. Now I use his mantra on my children, because I don’t want them limiting themselves or their thinking. If they do that, then they defeat themselves before they even begin their journey.

Now I love my friends, so basically I assume through the power of positive thinking that the seed of information will fall on their good soil and grow up when I am not looking… wishful thinking perhaps, but I choose to stay hopeful and put positive intention into my friends.

I have mused over this perception of my illness for a few weeks now to get my head around all of it. I find it strange that the paradigm in the US has flipped so far that Ill has now become well and healthy, and healthy has become an illness.

One thought that occurred was that maybe there really is something to the macro / vegetarian lifestyle that makes you look inherently different from a more omnivorous person. That is my face is thinner, I have always, even in high school carried weight in my face, and I am close to the same weight now, but my face is much thinner. I am also more toned, even then I was in high school or college, distance running every day will do that. That combined with the macro diet really leans out your whole body very nicely.

My complexion is also different. The middle of winter in Texas may not be cold, but it does mean a lot of wind, which tends to dry out everyones complexion, and while I am not greasy skinned by any means, I am not dried out this year at all. Quite the contrary. My skin is great, after the initial “macro breakout stage of discharge” which did not take that long maybe relatively ( it ended for me after the first six months really, at the six month mark it was really bad, but within two weeks the breakouts were all gone) I have not had any skin problems.

I am doing crunches and I go further into the thinking to ask, Has it become so rare in our culture to see someone in a state of balance that when we do we don’t recognize it as such? Has motherhood become such an excuse for undisciplined sloth that when someone gets on the discipline train, and loses the “pregnancy weight” that they are a freak???? All that is talked about on television / magazine covers is how celebrities lose baby weight so quickly ( lipo, tummy tucks, other surgeries, or going to the gym 6 hrs a day) with diet and moderate exercise. I think if I see that on another magazine cover I am going to vomit, (not really I don’t need to throw my electrolytes off, but you get the idea).

Then I am wondering if these stories really sell magazines ( they must or they wouldn’t always be on the cover) then are people buying them so that they can get suggestions on how to lose weight or are they buying them to come up with a list of why they can’t lose weight. That is well she did all this exercise with a trainier and I can’t afford that. Or eating organically costs more ( really?? more than $5.00 / person for your large size extra value meal at McDonalds? I would like to see what you are eating organic and vegetarian that costs that much). I honestly think that is what people do they go down the list of tips and suggestions and make their own mental list of “why they can’t do that”

It’s like the anti Obama… “No I can’t” thinking that ruins it. Now I am not a psychologist but these diet / exercise plans are in many cases good at allowing people to confirm their own thinking and get more entrenched in what they are all ready doing and to justify their own bad habits further and deeper.

What I especially like are the “no excuses” exercise plans that people come up with that you can do at home that don’t cost anything. And then the excuse is that you don’t have time, or that your kids bother you, or that the dog bothers you. Still people that want to excuse themselves from appropriate eating, and exercise find a way to justify it to themselves in their heads.

But I have digressed now. The real meat of this is how the culture has flip flopped to the point where true health and inner peace and happiness looks like illness. I still can’t get my head wrapped around that. These (to borrow a term from Sex and the City) “satellite friends” of mine know that something inside me has shifted. My inner paradigm is different. They incorrectly identified it as illness, but they still saw the shift. The change, the nourishing of self working it’s way from the inside out. Good nourishing food that changes my blood and changes every cell in my body one at a time. The food that wears away from the cultural norm of various maladies and ill health and brings me toward something very positive and wonderful where I find peace, serenity, and a calmer better vibe on the way.

Something so rare it has almost become unrecognizable. Sad but true…. Health is an unrecognizable phenomenon in our culture. The majority of people are now either morbidly obese, obese or overweight. And worse there are more obese and morbidly obese people than people that are merely overweight. The latest stat that came out a few weeks ago says that in America surveyed between 2005-2006 34% obese 32.7% overweight 6% extremely obese that is 72% total adults people overweight or obese in America 32% overweight 16% obese 11% extremely obese kids 59 % of kids… sad

So I guess by these statistics I am the freak I am in the 28% of non overweight / non obese. My kids are freaks too they are in the 41% of people that are not overweight or obese.


How much smaller will the non overweight percentage get??? Will it get so bad that we normal weight / thin people become a group that is discriminated against? I will bet within the next 5 years you will see that lawsuit in the United States. Someone not getting a job for being to thin. Has the social pressure that once caused girls to become anorexic now reversed as to make them somewhat chubby so that they don’t make other girls look bad???

Case in point one of my good friends, told me the other day that I was making her look bad and should go eat some pizza. Why do I need to eat pizza? How would she feel if I told her that her overweight was making me look bad that I didn’t have healthy / athletic friends and she should go eat some brown rice???? Of course then I would be picking on her because of her weight, but wasn’t she doing that to me???? Picking on me for making her look bad????

What will be the new social disease that develops now “group pressure to be fat”???? Because that is what I was feeling like if I still wanted to be her friend, I needed to gain weight and stop exercising. And when I look around I see more and more overweight…. I will bet that by the time my girls are teens, that is where the group pressure will be: to be fat so that they don’t look better for the guys than the fat girls. Or maybe the standard of beauty will become reubenesque and unhealthy to the point women will want to be fat and men all become chubby chasers…. Who knows???

Well I know for sure that I don’t roll that way, my kids don’t roll that way, and if being healthy, positive, and in the moment makes us the freaks I wouldn’t have it any other way and I welcome anyone that wants to join our parade and follow us into freakdom with a happy heart and love to take up the cross / burden of the “healthy” label and embrace it whole heartedly.