Put on your eating pants
Mansur's Musings
This year for the holidays, I’m putting on my eating pants and calling it a day. In an age of relentless self-improvement books and podcasts, weaponized therapy-speak, and the daily bombardment of new fitness and diet trends, I’ve decided who I am and the body I’m in right now is good enough for me. Yes, it’s good to work on ourselves, eat well (though the food industry and nutritionists can never seem to agree on what ‘well’ means) and exercise, which can be great for both mental and physical health. But you know what I’ve never actually tried in 29-years on this planet? Accepting where I’m at and trusting myself to give my body and mind what they need without the external pressure to train, eat and think in highly specific and artificially engineered ways. Because whether I’m not working towards any goal and quietly judging myself for not “doing enough” or I’m actively working towards some fitness or food goal, the gnawing voice in my head pestering me to be in a state of perpetual improvement is never satisfied.
There’s so much pressure these days to be the best version of ourselves. Whether it’s wellness and hustle culture influencers saying everyone should wake up at 5 a.m. to journal, gym, or meditate (no shade if you do these things, but it’s not for everyone), companies implementing goalsetting that conflates our performance improvement with our value, or even that one friend who keeps saying everyone should be in therapy. No one activity, habit, or method of improvement works for everyone.
Even the foods and exercises that work for each of us varies and so does the timing of implementing new habits. For instance, I find I’m better suited to a cycle that goes with the seasons, where over the spring and summer I shift into more intense and demanding ‘improvement’ habits and then pull back into a softer and slower pace for the winter, prioritizing acceptance. What’s best for someone else might be a cycle that repeats every morning. Or week. Or month. Whatever it is, we get to choose and we shouldn’t feel bad because what works for us looks different to what might be trending in that given moment.
The dark side of perpetual, unbroken self-improvement is struggling to see yourself as whole. I don’t want to feel complete, whole, or my best purely because I fulfilled the demands of a trend. Because we may have had the body positivity movement, but it was immediately followed by the celebrity Ozempic craze.
I’ve simply had enough. Being my ‘best’ is not sustainable. It doesn’t allow for the nuanced shifts of life’s ups and downs and the wonderful mess of creativity that comes out of the challenges we experience that can make ‘best’ hard to achieve. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not over here trying to be my worst self, but maybe I can just be myself. Period.
