Nobody in my house is scolding anyone else. I might remind you that you highlighted several key passages in this piece a while back:
Passages that speak directly to your complaints, A.Non.
I will include a key piece that you didn’t highlight but which speaks again to your complaint:
Man I hate to bust 5000+ bubbles, but Dude, all you and I can do is speak to what works for our unique bodies. Telling people to work out certain body parts on different days? Well, kindly, that may not work for folks’ work schedules, maybe they can’t spring for a gym membership, perhaps they are infirm or obese or whatever and the exercises are just way too far out of the realm of possibility, or to get started requires a $100 an hour personal trainer.
I could go on. Again, as with everything in life, it depends.
I have grave difficulty getting where this is scolding you or anyone else, where what I write has anything to say that you HAVE to be thin, or HAVE to be anything. I deal with disabilities, I’ve been obese, I have my own unique set of challenges. The way you make it sound is that things are so very easy for me, for others, but not for you. Kindly, A.Non, that is beneath you. Not only are you a lot smarter than that, you also know that you and I aren’t privy to anyone else’s private battles. To make any kind of unfair assumption that person A has it so much easier than you disregards the immense diversity that we are all expressing. Just as making the inane statement that a doctor once did (he was of course a plastic surgeon) that there was a singular standard for female beauty — the words castrate the sonofabitch leap to mind- is not only supremely ignorant but utterly wrong.
I use articles on fitness to make a variety of points. If a statement doesn’t or can’t apply to you, you have a choice. You can ignore it, or you can wear it like a hair shirt. The latter leads to terrible dissatisfaction, anger, frustration. If we take things personally, we are never free, A.Non.
I wish you peace and I also wish you a good journey. The one you are on, with the body you have now, is perfect for you. I’ve been down that road of self-loathing and comparisons. Never again. One way I do that is that I don’t look at magazines, or listen to ads, or watch TV other than various movies that are background music. I am barking at 70, A.Non. I don’t have the time to waste hating my body for what it is not: young, perfect, pain-free, cellulite-free, whatever. I’m strong. I’m lithe. I’m immensely energetic. I will take all those things at 67 over comparing myself to some freak of a model whose genes happen to have given her a 1% body that social media offers up as a “norm.”
You can change your course. I hope you do. For hating your body for what it can never be is a prescription for lifelong misery. Drinking the collective corporate Koolaid of what you and I cannot look like is a death sentence.
I choose life.