‘But It’s All Down to the Magazines’
Some people even have the gall to blame the glossy magazines for being overweight and unhealthy. They claim if it wasn’t the pressure to conform they wouldn’t rebel and eat. What amazes me is the people who bitch about these magazines buy them all the time. I know this may sound stupidly easy but if you think the magazines are causing your problem – don’t buy them! But they do prove my theory that fat is not the new black. If it were, we wouldn’t have pictures of nice-looking bodies on the front covers of magazines, we would have fat people. People like to look at attractive people – that’s just how it is.
But the main reason why ‘big isn’t beautiful’ is because when you’re big you just don’t feel beautiful – you feel fat and bloated, you can’t move as you want; you can’t wear what you want and you don’t feel as sexy as you want. There is nothing beautiful about a life spent feeling that way and with disease hanging over your head.
‘But I have an injury so…I can’t exercise’
You must have heard them (you may even be one them) – people who say the reason they got overweight and unfit was because they sprained their foot, knackered their elbow, broke their leg or damaged their ligaments, and so the list goes on and on. However, in order to have an injury so severe that it stops you from doing any kind of exercise you would need to be in a Christopher Reeve situation. Actually, that’s not even true. One of the many things the truly remarkable Christopher Reeve did for the nine years of his life as a paraplegic was to make sure he exercised whenever he could. His exact words from his inspirational book Nothing Is Impossible are, ‘I’ve also found the self-discipline to exercise when I don’t feel like it…’ Remember these words if you’ve ever banged on about how you can’t exercise because of whatever.
If you have a leg injury, do some upper-body exercises. If you can’t move your arms, move your legs. If you can’t put pressure on your joints, go for a swim or jump on a trampoline. If you really can’t move anything without being in pain, do some deep-breathing exercises and cut down on your fuel consumption. After all, you wouldn’t put the same amount of fuel into your car if you weren’t using it as much as usual, would you?
There isn’t any reason on the planet why anyone should become unhealthy or overweight just because they have an injury. I’ve seen people in wheelchairs whacking tennis balls over nets and shooting basketballs into hoops, and I’ve seen people with no arms running marathons. In fact, I’ve seen people with no legs running marathons with prosthetic limbs.
Whatever the injury, it shouldn’t be an excuse for not achieving your health and body-shape goals. Look at someone like Tanni Gray Thompson, a truly remarkable and superb athlete. Losing the use of her legs didn’t stop her training and getting the rest of her body super-fit, so much so that she has, at the time of writing, won an incredible 11 gold medals for Great Britain at the Paralympics. What’s your excuse?
Then you have the, ‘But I used to…’ gang. You know, the people who tell you how much sport they used to play; how they used to run all the time and how they used to always be in the gym. But so what? Used to means Jack! You can spend your life living in the ‘what I used to be able to do’ world, but that’s not going to change how you look and feel today.
The truth is most people can usually exercise with an injury, no matter what the situation. There is always a way if the person is committed. Instead of looking at what isn’t possible because of the injury, people should focus on what can be done.
‘But you’ve got to live…you could get run over by a bus next week’
That’s true – but don’t you want the week to be nice before the bus comes along?
For every action there is always a reaction and every action you take today has a knock-on effect which will determine your tomorrow. People who are overweight didn’t get that way one day; it took many months and years of consuming too much of the wrong kinds of foods and drinks and not moving their bodies very much to get that way. It’s all very well and good living as if there’s no tomorrow and saying, ‘the bomb could go off tomorrow’ or ‘I could get run over by a bus tomorrow’, but what happens when it doesn’t and you don’t? What happens when you eat and drink junk every day, get fat, unhealthy and lethargic – or all three – only to wake up and find that tomorrow very much did happen and it’s here to face today? I used to make the excuse that ‘Anything could happen tomorrow, so why not just indulge’, only to find that ‘tomorrow’ always happened and I would still have to face it as a fat, unhealthy bastard!
Yes, you may get run over by a bus next week, but what about today? Don’t you want to feel good today? Don’t you want to be able to wear what you want today? Don’t you want to wake up with energy and vibrancy today? Don’t you want to feel light and slim today? Those people who say they are eating and drinking junk because they are ‘living for today’ or because the bomb could go off tomorrow seem to have missed the irony. It’s all about today, and the only way to create a much better today is by understanding that there is a tomorrow. Unless you keep an eye on tomorrow it’s going to come up and bite you on the bum, and that could be one hell of a bum!
This excuse, like all of the others, is total rubbish.
Nobody, when they are tucking into a cream bun and a large Coke, is ever thinking, ‘The only reason I’m doing this is in case something happens to me tomorrow.’ If you really thought tomorrow wasn’t coming, the last thing on your mind would be, ‘Yippee, how much junk food can I stuff down my gullet today?’ Your only focus would be on finding the people you love and telling them how you feel.
‘But Jason, life is too short.’ I agree, life is too short, and unless you change it will be even shorter! It’s also too short not to live your dreams; it’s too short to live feeling sluggish and overweight, hating the way you look and feel; it’s too short to be scared to get into a bathing costume; it’s too short to hit your head on the pillow every night hoping things will be different tomorrow; it’s too short to wake up every day with a junk-food hangover; it’s too short to collapse at the end of the working day with only enough energy to slump in front of the TV for hours on end – YES, LIFE IS TOO SHORT – so stop saying, ‘I could get run over by a bus tomorrow’ because that’s not why you eat and drink rubbish or don’t exercise – it’s just another excuse.
I suppose there is some argument on the other side though. I mean, if you keep eating and drinking rubbish and end up as big as a house, the chances of a bus actually being able to run you over would be pretty slim!
‘But I can’t because…I’m too old’
Too old for what exactly? Too old to buy some fruit and veg? Too old to peel a banana? Too old to go for a walk? Too old to push some vegetables through a juicer and drink it? Or too old to live?
The truth is that if you believe you’re too old then you’re right, and if you believe you’re not too old you’re also right.
I’m not saying that the years don’t take their toll. As we get older we often genuinely can’t do what we used to be capable of, but it doesn’t mean for a second we are washed up and on the scrapheap. Age is just another excuse, which once again is simply based on fear – the fear of taking the leap from settling for what we have to making life an unbelievable