The Zen of Calories

Part Nine: Health vs. Appearance

Narrow View

Ask a child about death and he or she will look at you as if you’ve just arrived from some distant planet. Death? They may have heard the word at some point or other — perhaps when a pet passed away — but it means little and has absolutely nothing to do with them.

Ask any teenager, or anyone under the age of thirty for that matter, and if you really listen, you will hear that deep down they firmly believe they will never die. Well, let’s restate that, death is still so far in the future as to be inconceivable. Can’t see it from where you stand.

Health as A Given

These are also the strata of one’s life when health is a given. You really have to work at it to grow unhealthy as a teenager, and as a child — under normal circumstances — it is almost impossible to get seriously ill, for the body is still growing, is still on the up-swing.

Here, everything works perfectly, or corrects itself quickly if it doesn’t. That is, if you let it. And in these age brackets, you can eat just about anything without putting on weight. You can metabolize nails if it came to that.

Life, in other words, as it should be.

With health as a daily given, other issues take the front seat and as you sail into your teens you usually find that appearance brooks few competitors.

Admiration

Someone said that admiration is what we value the most on this Earth. Empirically speaking, that is probably not far from the truth. We all crave it in varying degrees, especially from puberty onward. And, somehow, we never seem to let go of that thirst.

Diets

As a result of this admiration-thirst — no matter what reason is ostensibly given — most diets are undertaken, suffered, and re-undertaken, and re-suffered for the sake of appearance.

For the sake of admiration.

This may work while you’re still in your twenties or thirties, but by the time you slide off that particular bracket, fast food and too many years spent in front of the television will have begun to come home to roost, and health is buckling. Not seriously yet, but those extra fifty or so pounds are putting quite a strain on the system, and here and there leaks spring and valves blow.

Still, appearance remains in the front seat.

Friends and Health

Someone else once said that the most valuable commodities in the world are true friends and good health.

And, amazingly, true friends rarely, if ever, care about appearance.

Deterioration

As you age, the body will start to deteriorate — yes, the word is used exactly as normally defined. Your DNA includes various life-progress milestones, the main one, perhaps, being the peak of growth, which some peg at about the late twenties. It’s apparently downhill from there.

Things are never stationary. As long as we have gravity, they either rise or fall — the rest at apex is very short.

Until the body reaches peak growth, it’s all systems go. Once it arrives, and growth ceases, deterioration will set it, fast for some, slowly for others, very slowly for the lucky and the few who value health above appearance.

Happiness

It’s funny — or perhaps not so funny — but the happiness we experience in the wash of admiration is rather shallow, and always goes begging for someone else to reinforce it with more oohs and aahs. We rarely wake up into it.

The happiness we experience from a task well done, on the other hand, or that from a friend helped, from a promise kept, or a lie not said, runs much deeper, lasts much longer, and does not need external confirmation. And it greets us with the dawn.

Health vs. Appearance

I believe that good health is your most valuable asset. With it, you can do or accomplish just about anything; without it, you’re shackled to a degree. With it, you dare to dream; without it, dreams fracture.

Appearance will stay with you only so long, and then it’s gone. Fact of life.

One of the most beautiful women of all time, Greta Garbo, suffered intensely from the wrinkles that appeared on her upper lip as she aged, and her mouth was the first thing she would cover from cameras; appearance, for her, still being everything.

If you, sooner rather than later, treat health as the priority it should be all through life — and if you at the same time devalue appearance as the fad it really is — you will be a much happier person.

All of this as the roundabout way of saying that you should diet for the right reason: Health.

© Wolfstuff