Extreme measures: Why we stopped loving healthy lifestyles
TOTAL COUPLE YEARS BACK HEALTHY LIFE PHILOSOPHY thoroughly entrenched in our latitudes and has become truly fashionable. However, already in the outgoing 2016, the reverse global trend appeared - a critical look at the hobby of proper nutrition and sports.
Recently, many have become available "smart" gadgets that help get enough sleep and count the number of physical activity, and in matters of proper nutrition, we are allowed to seriously advance a variety of applications. This year, even the Ministry of Health proposed replacing OBZH in schools with a new subject called a healthy lifestyle. Superfoods and eco-products are not just turned into a trend, but have already been criticized. A healthy lifestyle has become a philosophy, and with it a colossal industry with a huge turnover. We decided to find out why many began to annoy wellness, and thought about what a healthy lifestyle should be in 2017.
The main and not entirely obvious plus of the craze for a healthy lifestyle is that it gives impetus to the development of an environmentally friendly approach to life on earth. This is especially true of the younger generation, which in former times was fond of rebellion and self-destruction, and now wants to live a long active life and take care of the planet. Webinars on healthy eating, lectures on ecology, sports flashmobs and morning raves with green smoothies pressed the habit of gathering in a smoky room.
And if the older generation, who spent their youth in a completely different way, expresses only slight perplexity with our practicality, or even praises for it at all, then the professionals began to hold seminars dedicated to exposing health myths. Over the past year, serious journalistic investigations have appeared in the Western press accusing popular food bloggers of promoting harmful attitudes. And the point here is not only that often “nutritionists” and “trainers” do not have the qualifications to interfere with our metabolism. Sometimes they invade our consciousness - and do not affect the perception of themselves and those around them.
For the first time, authors of the acclaimed book "The Wellness Syndrome", a Briton Andre Spicer, a teacher of organizational behavior at a business school, and Karl Zederstrom, a professor at Stockholm University, offered system criticism of wellness last year. According to them, the pressure of HLS-propaganda is so great that we feel guilty for our own happy existence, if it is not organized according to the wellness trend. On the contrary, if we follow a healthy fashion, we feel superior to those who do not comply with the requirements of a healthy lifestyle.
Marketers sell us objectification in a package labeled "for themselves", but the fact remains: we are still appreciated through our body, sportiness and volitional asceticism
This is a very conditional reflection of reality, but it contributes to the development of shaming. Recently, the society began to accumulate irritation towards particularly ardent adherents of healthy lifestyles, which are so fanatical that they anathematize all those who disagree. Good eating habits, good physical preparation and the joy of a healthy body should not be equal to a sense of superiority or a way to assert themselves at someone else's expense.
Recently it has become clear that devotion to health issues does not guarantee satisfaction. Finding environmentally friendly products, studying the compositions on the labels and the war with harmful cooking methods can provoke eating disorders. This year and the concept has come to our country, which has been worrying Western psychotherapists for almost twenty years, is nervous ortorexia (by analogy with anorexia nervosa). So far, not enough research has been done to introduce orthorexia into the International Classification of Diseases. Many physicians consider it a specific case of anorexia: if anorexic is painfully focused on the number of calories, then orthorexics mania arises about the quality of the products and the observance of the "purity" of the body in every sense.
Psychological background of HLS-fanaticism is similar to eating disorders and disorders of body perception. Increased anxiety is expressed in the fear of eating something that is not useful enough, losing a muscular corset after a missed workout, and becoming a complete monster “toxin” at the end of a meal that is too lush. Constant monitoring of bodily habits provides only temporary relief from stress coming from outside, but also leads to anxiety. Here the same pernicious scheme of punishments and rewards is involved, which once drove us into the framework of the model body, and now it leads us into the framework of the sports body. If before the happiness was associated with thinness, then now - with pumping.
Over the past couple of years, positive trends have gained momentum: society has learned even more about body-positive, the myth about the dangers of physical exertion during menstruation is becoming a thing of the past and many have understood that completeness is not an obstacle to playing sports. Finally, we can not worry about how we will be appreciated, run in the park in a stretched T-shirt and free up the nervous hours in front of the mirror for self-education, creativity and communication with people. Only we began to learn to be healthy and athletic in our own pleasure, when it suddenly turns out that we are again looking for someone's approval and compliance with new standards.
The main fear within the framework of this model of thinking is the same fear of fat, behind which there is an industry with a turnover of 61 billion dollars a year. Now it is also called toxic, although physicians tirelessly assert that fat and ill health are not directly related. Marketers sell us objectification in a package labeled "for themselves", but the fact remains: we are still appreciated through our body, sportiness and volitional asceticism.
In actual fact many “healthy” approaches turn out to be moral systems that manipulate us through the markers “good” and “bad”. We all want to be good - so the gurus of diet blogs without specialized medical education preach the path of the new righteous to us. In this case, according to the canons of a healthy man is reduced to his body. Yes, this is a more sensible body than in the era of model fetish - it already has intestines, stomach and metabolism, but it is still just a body.
HLS as an end in itself will not satisfy our spiritual needs - even if we add mandatory meditation to superfoods and two liters of water. Many have heard the winged "in a healthy body is a healthy spirit", but few know that in the original, Juvenal did not have a causal relationship between bodily health and spirit. You can remain a scoundrel, wrapping green smoothies in the morning. The Roman poet teaches to ask the fate of both of them, and also of vigor, the absence of fear of death, kindness, and diligence, because it is a guarantee of a full life in a full-fledged approach to it.
Health is the basis of our entire life, but even it should not be turned into a sacrificial altar on which we place relationships with loved ones, the joy of new experiences and the feeling of full life
Another danger of “healthy” fanaticism is that the basis of this ideology is the idea of so-called positive thinking: conviction in something supposedly helps it to come true. The huge popularity of trainings, seminars and books on personal growth has turned the positive self-improvement movement into a business in the US with a turnover of 8.5 billion dollars a year, as noted by Michael Shermer, author of The Skeptic: A Rational View of the World.
However, there is no scientific evidence that such self-hypnosis has a positive effect on the human psyche. On the contrary, the not too critical conviction “I can do anything” has the opposite effect on failure: it turns out that the person is also completely to blame for himself, because he allegedly did not believe enough. Perhaps it was this philosophy that helped governments and corporations place the responsibility for world problems on citizens. The approach, built to the point of absurdity, turns the criticism of the social system and the economic situation into a whining loser, who "is just too lazy to lift the ass off the couch."
Unfortunately, a healthy lifestyle promises that for proper nutrition, good mood and the joy of physical activity will come if not enlightenment, then the notorious "harmony with the world." The problem with this unwilling puzzle is that we always want to find a universal recipe for solving life problems, whether it is conventional beauty, following a certain fashion, or absorbing chia seeds. In fact, the only way to become happier is to deal with problems where they arise. If it is difficult for you in a relationship, strengthening the longitudinal muscles of the abdomen will not help you - only recognizing problems and working on them.
In general, the fashion for a healthy lifestyle - an important achievement of recent years. We strive to live as long as possible an active life, full of travel, career conquests and creative success - even in the coming year, all of this will be more. Health is the basis of everything, but even it should not be turned into a sacrificial altar on which we place relationships with loved ones, the joy of new impressions and the feeling of full life.
Photo: Africa Studio - stock.adobe.com, Super Food, Amazon
