She talks about normalizing being unhealthy, but who defines what healthy is?

F or some people it's just feeling good and somewhat energetic and at peace with t heir life, regardless of if they're overweight or not. It's possible to be comf ortable where you're at physically, even if that's not ideal, while not being co mfortable with where you're at mentally and spiritually, and then going out and improving those areas of your life. Then, once you've done that, you can worry about being in better physical shape. Also, God wants us to take care of our bo dies, but we aren't obligated to be in ideal shape, for one thing that's just no t possible for most people. Most people have to work 9-5 and have family obliga tions, and doing what Maria does and making a regimented schedule to fit in work ing out around all her other duties every day is actually more stressful and doe s more harm than the good the workouts do, so it's counterproductive. Furthermo re, she owns her own business and is a writer, so she has a flexible schedule an d thus the independence to plan her days the way she wants. Most people don't h ave this independence, and therefore for them it's much harder to fit a formal w orkout into their daily routine. I think the bottom line is this: it's good to be physically fit, but it's not the most important thing in life because you ca n't take your body with you when die, but you do take your soul, so we need to s pend more time making sure our souls are in ideal shape rather than our bodies. She also has to question why she went on this crusade in the first place, what's her true motive? I don't question her desire to help others by using her own experience to motivate them, but sometimes it helps to reflect on why we do thin gs and why we prioritize certain things but not others. It seems to me she star ted this mission because of her own struggle with bulemia, and decided that the only way to overcome it was to stay disciplined and develop a mindset that sets goals and doesn't tolerate excuses. That's fine. But what she seems to have fo rgotten is that for the women who never struggled with cravings and eating disor ders, even if they did struggle with wanting to eat too much junk food, their ex perience is different than hers. So they don't have to put as much mental effor t into avoiding too many carbs as she does and therefore they don't have to work out as hard or as often as someone who is in danger of slipping back into their old habits of overeating because they never overate in the first place. That's not to say that women and men who are obese should be proud of it, but that's th e other end of the spectrum. You shouldn't let yourself become obese and people should do everything in their power to maintain their weight, but some people l ose this battle. Some are just lazy and don't care, while others struggle might ily but have biochemical imbalances in their brain, and when combined with stres sors in their life, they lose this battle. The problem with Maria's argument is that it doesn't leave much room for the nuances that inevitably pop up when dea ling with such a complicated issue that involves all 3 realms of the human being - physical, mental, and spiritual. I should be clear that it's not her fault t hat certain people are offended by her comments- far too many people are too thi n skinned in this age of political correctness and sensitivity, but her approach is a little too black and white. If she intended it to be that way because it' s more likely to motivate people and get attention that's fine, but she also sho uld've foreseen that in this age of the soundbite and constant social media acti vity, things are easily miscontrued and if your original message isn't clear it can be easily drowned out by the perfect storm of our adhd, pc culture, partisan politics, and the 24 hour news cycle. She should have focused more on the peop le who already succeeding and using them as an example (besides herself) instead of those people who have the potential to be in that category. I know she wante d to say that it's ok to make time for yourself to be in good shape even if you have kids and other priorities and duties and that it's never impossible if you just have the right attitude and the will to change yourself for the better. But whether that's her intended message or not becomes irrelevant if it's not wh at people perceive because then the perceived message drowns out the intended on e, which was meant to support and motivate the women who struggle as she has, pa rticularly moms. I don't find her comments offensive, but I do believe they are somewhat misguide

d, or misdirected.

Maria's other problem is that she kinda puts physical improvement on the level o f spiritual improvement. What she doesn't understand is the spiritual is always more important than the physical, as is the mental, and some women choose to fo cus more on their spiritual and mental well-being instead of their physical fitn ess, and they still might try to eat healthy and exercise a few times a week, or walk every day. It's just not a priority for them, and that's ok. I think the main thing that offends people about Maria's statements (not me) is that there' s the sense that she's bringing physical fitness into the realm of morality by s aying or at least implying that if you don't do your best to be physically fit, you're not doing the right thing. There's a sense that she's making judgments o n the women who don't drive themselves as hard as she does, especially if they'r e single and have a lot more time and energy to workout. But what's missing in all this is a simple analysis of human nature. Humans by our nature don't wanna do extra work, which is an evolutionary instinct to conserve energy because ba ck in the ancient days that could be the difference between finding food, runnin g from predators, and other things, and thus between life and death. So back then it made no sense to do what today we call exercise, which would see m like a random expenditure of physical energy and make no sense to them because they spent most of their time being physically active and thus had no need to s et aside a time specifically for making sure they were physically fit. No obvio usly that doesn't apply to humans today, but the evolutionary instinct to respon d to incentives remains, our brains are hard-wired to think that way. Now that' s no excuse to be lazy and never workout, but it does explain why someone like M aria who's had a huge incentive to workout every day because of her bulemia (and the legitimate fear of that weakness overcoming her again) would make that a pr iority whereas an average woman who's never had severe weight problems or any ki nd of eating disorder and has a mentally demanding job like being a doctor or la wyer has a very different set of incentives in their life. They don't have to h ave an excuse for why they're not in good physical shape if they're working 12 h our days and have to spend the rest of their free time studying, and that doesn' t even take into account all other aspects of their lives like relationships and the time and energy it takes to maintain those. Their mental health and mental and spiritual well-being is a lot less tied to th eir physical health as Maria's is, and for that matter, many women and men who h ave eating disorders and image/identity problems in general. Therefore when she asks the women who are overweight but not obese what their excuse is to not wor kout every day, their answer probably is "I don't have an excuse, nor have I eve r attempted to make any. I know I'm not in the best possible shape, but that's not the most important thing in my life right now and honestly I don't have the time or energy to fit a workout into my daily routine. I'm ok with that. I exp ect my life to be less hectic at some point and then I'll have more time and ene rgy to devote to my physical fitness, but until then, my future career is depend ing on me prioritizing these other things first." They just hadn't given much t hought to why they didn't spend time working out because there was really no inc entive for them to, or at least the incentive wasn't strong enough, or was drown ed out by all the other stronger incentives in their life.

In my humble opinion, diet is more important than physical activity, although th at is also very important and can't be neglected in order to be truly healthy. But if you look at the health of the average person throughout history, especial ly in this country, it's clear that it's been strongly tied to the way we eat, e ven more so than how active we are. We know that most people back in the day were more active than people today caus

e they had to walk a lot more, and more people lived on the farm and did manual labor. However, I think it's safe to say that the average person back in the 18 th and 19th centuries didn't do much more than walking X number of miles per day and that was the extent of their physical activity. Yet the research is clear that none of the major chronic conditions of modern day america existed back the n, and the few diseases that did exist that weren't completely caused by microor ganisms were exceedingly rare (like arthritis, autoimmune disorders, cancer, obe sity, all kinds of mental illness, inflammatory bowel disorders, etc). Now what changed more between that period and today, diet, or physical activity? I woul d argue it's definitely diet. Back then there was no such thing as working out, and for good reason. Kids pla yed and that burned plenty of calories, and adults walked everywhere and that bu rned enough for them, and most people weren't overweight or obese so they didn't have to worry about setting aside time to burn calories every day. What changed more than anything was diet, as is well documented. People didn't have as much money to spend on food as they do now so they ate less, and what th ey did eat was real food, not processed junk food. They ate more saturated fat, less carbs, and hardly any PUFAs, which we now know to be a major cause of obes ity in this country. PUFAs are in pretty much every junk food that people eat a nd they have many negative effects on the body, one of which is weight tain. Al so, we eat a lot more carbs now because fat has been demonized for so long and s till is (although that's starting to change) that people, especially women, have cut out almost all fat in their diet but just replaced it by eating more carbs, which are then converted to fat by the body anyway. We also have all kinds of artificial sweeteners and chemicals in the most common foods of our time that ha ve been scientifically proven to increase appetite far beyond what is natural wh ile providing no nutritional value, which adds pounds in a big way. Back then, none of these things were options for people, so they ate healthy and didn't gain much weight from their diet. I would say it was the change in diet more so than activity level, that led to the skyrocketing rates of obesity and every other chronic disease of today. My conclusion is that while Maria's intentions are good, she focuses on exercise more than diet when it should be a balance of both. If you don't get the diet right, no amount of working out in the world will help you shed pounds. This ha s been shown over and over again with women who try the various fad diets and en d up being victims of so called yo-yo diets. What happens is they limit their c alorie intake too much and don't get the right kind of nutrients in the right am ounts, so their body can't handle the stress they're putting it on it and once t hey go back to a regular diet it compensates by storing fat just as efficiently as before, despite intense workouts every day. In fact, one thing that gets ove rlooked in the discussion about exercise is that it's common for women to overdo it, and if this happens it actually is counterproductive because it raises cort isol which increases fat storage in the body. That's why the message should always be one of moderation, especially with fitne ss, because the negative effects of overdoing it outweight the possible lack of results of not doing it enough. What's changed is that now people tend to eat crappy AND aren't physically activ e, but if they just changed their diet that alone would go a long way to improvi ng their physical fitness and mental health, and it would make it a lot easier f or them to find the time to workout every day because they'd already be feeling better. I strongly believe that if all the women in this country who are overwe ight and eating a bad diet would change their diets without increasing their phy sical activity at all, a large percentage of them would lose weight significantl y. Increasing their activity level would only add to this improvement. There i s a lot of science to back this up, much of it having to do with evolution, horm ones (specifically leptin), and epigenetics. (http://www.paleoplan.com/2013/0416/the-art-of-losing-weight-without-exercise/) This sums up a lot of what I've said here. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=125877&page=1

jackkruse.com If you look at all the famous people throughout history- Einstein, Churchill, N ewton, Reagan, Thatcher, etc, they never focused on their physical health, and i t surely wasn't ideal. In fact most of them would be seen as overweight and out of shape today, yet they managed to accomplish some of the most amazing things the world has ever seen. They didn't need to spend time in the gym every day or to be physically fit to be happy and at peace with themselves and to have a sen se of purpose and well-being. They had priorities and goals and they stuck to t hem, probably to the detriment of their physical health at times, but not to the point where it prevented them from being highly functional. In the end they we re successful at what they set out to do, despite their physical imperfections. We have to understand why the average woman these days has to spend more time ea ch day working out than her ancestors- because her life is more stressful, she' s getting less sleep, and she's using her diet as a way to relieve that stress, which all causes her to gain weight. More than that, life was much slower back then and therefore people were less st ressed out, and on average got more sleep (which as we know is a major factor, i f not main factor in weight problems). There were a lot less environmental toxi ns as well. Ideally you wanna be happy with your relationships and your overall state in lif e and the state of your soul while being happy with your physical fitness, and o ften they go hand in hand, but it is possible to have the former without the lat ter. Whether that's her intended message or not becomes irrelevant if it's what peopl e perceive because then it drowns out her intended message, which i assume is to support and motivate the women who struggle as she has, particularly moms.