ABC's Drum (Episode 115)
introduced the author of a book Wellmania. Bridget Delaney is
a senior writer at The Guardian, and had spoken about her book at the
Sydney Writers Festival earlier this year. Time Out, written about that, had said “Yoga
has been commandeered by capitalism.
Wellness is all very... well, but what it often boils
down to is big business lining its pockets with the spoils of
people's narcissism”, and
printed what Delaney has said. “You
can’t let yoga be your god,”
she had said. “Self
care is really important but we need to step beyond it and remember
it’s feeding a commercial beast.”
So many words I wrote down
from that program: yoga, diet, “Mediterranean” diet, no processed
food. It was very interesting to hear how each person on the Drum
looked at “wellness”:
- be clean, lean and serene
- obsessed with people who tell us what to do
- get off the yoga mat and get into social change
- exorcise demons which are toxins
- religions which celebrate aren't communal
- celebrate – for example, Australia Day – then detox
- feast/famine
Two decades ago I was
overweight: I lost 40kgs at the start of this new century. After
moving to Australia in 2005 I was down around 72kg. I'm 5'11”, so I
felt pretty thin. Before I lost all that weight I'd been up and down
and up and down, feeling pretty depressed that my weight was hanging
around me. Yes, I know that's a disparate saying, but that's how I've
felt about it. I shed my overweight – maybe I cut the rope so it
could no longer hang around.
I kept it off for 15 years,
but since my brain aneurysm and stroke it seems to have crept back
on. Not all of it, but too much for me.
At the beginning of this
century I had joined the Les Mills gym where I was living in New
Zealand. I worked on the treadmill and the weights almost every day,
and I fell in love with Body Combat, a musical session which included
punching, side kicking, front kicking, jumping, elbow punches and
anything from karate, boxing, taekwondo, tai chi and muay thai which
anyone doing combat might recognise. I loved it! I stuck with Body
Combat when I moved over here, at first in a gym in Ipswich and on to
a gym at Sunnybank Hills when I moved to Camira. The Sunnybank Hills
gym soon gave up Body Combat and started in a different sort of body
combat which they called Group Combat, I think. It wasn't anywhere
near as good as the Body Combat I had fell in love with. Later I
moved to Parkinson, and went to the AJs gym where they had Body
Combat too. AJs also had two decent sized swimming pools, one indoor
and one outdoor, and I got back into swimming – I was swimming up
to 80 lengths – 2km - three days a week with a plan to go to an
ocean swim in Vanuatu. (I never got there, long story – read my
other blog Aneurysm Aphorisms).
My last home before hospital
was Inala, and I joined the PCYC gym with much of the equipment I was
used to. After hospital, when I moved up to Redliffe area, I joined
Dolphins gym and started a recovery class with a heart recovery team.
I started swimming again. Very recently I've moved to Eagleby, and
there are no indoor pools around here, no gyms with Body Combat, and
a PCYC which I fell out with in Beenleigh.
So what am I doing that Wellmania says I shouldn't be doing in order to lose weight
instead of continuing to put it back on? Or can I just be happy with
how I now am?
“Is it possible to integrate good habits into your daily life? What does our obsession with wellness say about us? And why do you smell so bad when you haven’t eaten in seven days?”
This was what Black Inc
Books said about what Delaney has written. I'm thinking about buying
this book, because what they said about it would (I hope) make me
feel very good about where I am – I don't really feel too good just
right now!
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