firecat

I haven't made it through all the posts yet, but for the ones I did read, I had many of the same reactions.

On the one hand, I've spent a lot of time pointing to my lifestyle when it was active and when I was eating what people would think of as very healthy and saying, "Look at what I'm doing and look at what I'm eating, and I'm not thin." I think that for a lot of discussions it was important, although I don't know that anybody ever believed me and I wonder if it made any difference in anybody's perceptions.

Now, I'm also starting to wonder if that itself was the best approach anyway. In particular, I'm not sure why I should have been justifying my life at all. By coming back and saying, "Look, I'm doing all this exercise and I'm eating 'right'," in some ways I'm reinforcing the idea that you have to do these things to be a good person. I really think that it's also important to question the prevailing definitions of "good" in much of this society. I mean, why am I saying, "I do X exercise and I eat Y," instead of, "I write music and give it away free to the world and I donated to these charities and did this volunteer work," or something like that. Why are people so fixated on measuring how "good" a person is by their physical fitness anyway?