Our society’s obsession with weight loss is a cultural sickness in itself.
Sure, it is true that obesity is a ubiquitous problem and is considered the cause of other health issues. For the most part, even the act of losing weight is absurd, considering 80% – 90% of people put the weight back on. Surprisingly, even in the case of surgical procedures such as liposuction or tying off the stomach, people put the weight back on. Perceptions in society and weight loss create a double edge sword and ultimately move against what the goal for everyone should be – wellness.
To tackle obesity, we need to address the mental component behind obesity. I’m talking about fears, anxieties, sadness, trauma, loneliness, and addiction. People are self-medicating with food. As well as the cultural marketing and emphasis that promote unhealthy foods and a sedentary lifestyle.
These causes are behind a lot more than obesity and would require a cultural shift from the profit motive to the wellness motive. Society and weight loss I don’t recommend anyone waiting for that shift, I do however recommend taking the first steps required to make that shift ourselves. What are those first steps? They are cultivating the awareness and understanding that our reality is a byproduct of our mental state, and our mental state is reinforced by where it dwells and what it sees. Step 2: Working on keeping our mind in a benevolent place (daily meditation practice), surrounding ourselves with peeps who are interested in doing the same (community), and de-emphasizing sources (people, marketing, media etc.) that emphasize and support negativity, fear or anything other than benevolence. Easy to say all this, but if the goal is wellness, we have no choice! I guess you could say this is the definition of a healthy lifestyle, yet I feel this takes things a little further. Right now, we have an opioid crisis, a sleeping pill crisis, a depression crisis, and an obesity crisis, and you know that is just the tip of the iceberg. I want to help support this shift! This is the content and dialogue of our Power Yoga classes. We are not concerned with acrobatics, contortions, alignment or dogma! We are concerned with supporting a benevolent mind state and eradicating any malevolent mind states. Come to my classes at my Santa Monica, Ca. studio, or stream yoga online and read yoga tips online at poweryoga.com. They have an emergency hotline and a suicide hotline; well, our classes are a hotline toward health. Not physical health (that’s the by-product), mental health!
There is a difference between being thin, or skinny, and wellness. In other words, health is a state of balance, not a state of aesthetics. Yet, due to cultural emphasis on beauty, whether it’s the model’s face and figure or the athlete’s body, this is what we believe or what we have been programmed to believe is beautiful. The psychological law states, “the more you see something, the more you believe it.” Look what we’ve seen! Because “that” is beautiful, I no longer see my own uniqueness as beautiful.
Personally, I feel there is little on this planet more absurd than being unable to see our own beauty! We have been programmed by our cultural emphasis, and that emphasis is a by-product of the profit motive (it sells magazines, just as violence sells movies), not the wellness motive. Then, of course, there is fear. Fear of not being attractive and/or accepted. If you didn’t know, emotion largely trumps reason. This is Neanderthal shit (it might be in our DNA), it’s deep! Then you get people rejecting themselves in favor of the image we have been spoon-fed since the time we opened our eyes, by a society that’s more interested in us buying its products than actually being well. You get perfectly healthy people believing they are fat or they’re not beautiful or they’re not fit. Then of course you get the ignorant folks who are afraid of not being rich, possibly sacrificing their morals and integrity by capitalizing off our body image fears by feeding us messages that say, “you are overweight,“ and they say it by showing us an image of some ripped body that we don’t look like “BUT we can help you get beautiful and thin, just buy our product,“ and the cycle is now on self-perpetuation mode.
Weren’t we told the beauty of the human race is all the differences between us???? Who’s strong enough to not buy into this crap? Who can “see“ through it?
Welcome to Power Yoga 🙂