The Sparklebelly Diet
This summer I read several books that continued my thinking about diets, women, and my body. Diets have damaged our ability to know whether we are hungry or not, to see how we are beautiful, and are absorbing so much of women's time and energy that could be spent doing who knows what wonderful work in the world. Also we judge each other so instantly and so harshly based on each other's weight.
'Sparklebelly' is my word to remind myself of the origin of life, of what the pagans had right - worshipping the womb. Fat is a support to gestation. To hate fat is to hate femininity. And dieting makes me crazy anyway - it makes me think only about food. I'm better off when I plan what I'm going to eat, eat slowly, savoring food with joy, and then feel when I'm full.
And then think about what else I love doing, and spend time doing that.
posted by sparklebelly @ 5:42 PM
3 Comments:
you go girl
I heard a few years ago that the beauty industry generates somethink like $8 billion a year: that includes diet books and paraphenalia, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, women's magazines (the devil's playground), etc. I may not have the exact right dollar figure, but you get the idea. All of this to keep women worrying about what they look like instead of how they could change the world, if only they were paying attention to that instead. And instead of women figuring this out and dropping their interest in conforming to an impossible, commercially based standard, now men are trying to conform to one as well. How absurd humans are.
There's just a lot I could say about this...one is definitely:will you ever read this?Another one would be: it's true, THEY want us to be perfect in as many ways as possible, THEY also want to sell us their products, the little diets, the make up and clothes, the fitness gear, the magazines. But then again I want you to open a book about cultures, about people around the world, in Asia, in Africa, in beween these two continents, South America and even Europe (don't know very much about Australia...), and I'm not talking about starving people, people who live relatively on the same standards that we live on. How many people are overweight? Are they and if not, why not? I think that the main trigger about being overweight is actually how the society is setup and along with it the infrastructure of this country. Just compare people in New York and people in Housten. What's different? People in NY don't sit in their cars to go shopping and they don't go to the drive thru for money and they don't have to sit together with their children in the car for half an hour (imagine the time you need from Austin to San Marcos!) to find a playground. If we wanted to be radical, we'd want sidewalks and neighborhood groceries and so on and even our sense for community would be a lot different. We'd be in better shape!
Post a Comment
<< Home