Quite a few people have asked me in the past why I suddenly decided to go to school for nutrition and fitness. After all, I’m an artist- I draw. This has been a longstanding passion of mine, and truth be told, writing has always just been my alternative to food service. If you are not an artist, musician or actor, you probably don’t quite get the joke. If you are- you’re nodding your head. You know.
Anyway, few people realize this about me, but at one point, I weighed 225 pounds. I’m 5′1, as I mentioned before. Weight loss was a tricky thing for me- one hand, I knew that I was honestly unhealthy. Other hand- I’m staunchly opposed to the way that the media focuses on weight. You see it all the time, discussions of everything from a particular celebrity’s weight loss and why she is losing it- accusations of drug use, anorexia, you name it. Or, worse, when a celebrity suddenly gains some weight- there is this weird pity thing, though truth be told, as a nation- we don’t really adhere to the same bizarro standard of beauty we hold celebrities to.
One of my absolute favorite songs is Terminal Beauty by Serj Tankian, for this reason.
Rather than try a fad diet, or anything like that- I decided to make my own way. What I did, was a more body positive path of acceptance and health related changes- it bothers me that many people associate thin with being healthy. It isn’t necessarily so- and the current system of BMI ratings further perpetuates an unhealthy image standard that I feel needs to change. I think that the weight loss industry is a sickening, sad dog and pony show, riding closely on the heels of a disturbing obsession with weight. For me, losing weight was part of an overall healthy change in life- but had I been built differently, it may not have been. I think that very few people take into account that fact, and it bothered me. Most of these weight programs I see also seem to focus on BEING THIN! And almost always equate THIN=BEAUTIFUL!=HEALTHY! and this makes me sick. So, my big goal was to work on being able to help people find who THEY want to be- not who they think they have to be. Not who society tells them they have to be- who they want to be, and healthy.
So, there you have it.
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