Weight Loss Basics -- Health vs. Appearance

(Eighth in a Series)

Narrow View
Ask a child about death and he or she will look at you as if you just landed from some distant planet. Death? They may have heard the word at some point or other—perhaps when a pet passed away—but it means nothing, and has absolutely nothing, to do with them.
Ask any teenager, or anyone under the age of thirty for that matter, and if you really listen, you will hear that deep down they firmly believe they will never die. Well, let’s restate that, death is still so far in the future as to be inconceivable.
Health As A Given
These are also the strata of one’s life when health is a given. You really have to work at it to grow unhealthy as a teenager; and as a child it is almost impossible to get sick.
For the body is still growing, is still on the up swing; everything works perfectly, or corrects itself quickly if it doesn’t. That is, if you let it.
And in these age brackets, you can eat just about anything without putting on weight; your metabolism will break down iron nails. Life the way it should be.
With health as a daily given, other issues take the front seat; and as you sail into teenagership, of those, appearance will brook few competitors.
Admiration
Someone said that admiration is what we value the most on this Earth. Empirically speaking, that cannot be far from the truth. We all crave it, in varying degrees; especially from puberty onward, and somehow, we never seem to let go of that thirst.
Diets
As a result, a huge percentage—not matter what reason is ostensibly given—most diets are undertaken, suffered, and re-undertaken, and re-suffered for the sake of appearance. For the sake of admiration.
This may work while you’re still in your thirties, but by the time you slide off that particular bracket, fast food and too many years spent in front of the television will have begun to come home to roost, and health is buckling. Not seriously yet, but those extra fifty or so pounds is putting quite a strain on the system, and here and there leaks are sprung, and valves are blowing.
Still, appearance is far more important.
Friends and Health
Someone else said the most valuable commodities in the world are true friends and good health.
And, amazingly, true friends rarely, if ever, care about appearance.
Deterioration
As you age, the body will start to deteriorate—yes, the word is used quite precisely. Your DNA includes various milestones, the main one, perhaps, being the peak of growth, which some peg at about the late twenties. It’s apparently downhill from there.
Things are never stationary. As long as we have gravity, they either rise or fall—the peak of rest at apex is very short.
Until the body reaches peak growth, it’s all systems go. Once it arrives, and growth ceases, deterioration will set it, fast for some, slowly for others, very slowly for the lucky, and very very slowly for the few who value health above appearance.
Happiness
It’s funny—or perhaps not so funny—but the happiness we experience in the wash of admiration is rather shallow, and always needs someone to reinforce it with more oohs and aahs. We rarely wake up into it.
The happiness we experience from a task well done, on the other than, or from a friend helped, from a promise kept, or a lie not said, runs much deeper, lasts much longer, and does not need external confirmation. And it greets us with the dawn.
Health vs. Appearance
I believe that good health is your most valuable asset. With it, you can do or accomplish just about anything; without it, you’re shackled to a degree. With it, you dare to dream; without it, dreams fracture.
Appearance will stay with you only so long, and then it’s gone. Fact of life.
One of the most beautiful women of all time, Greta Garbo, suffered intensely from the wrinkles that appeared on her upper lip as she aged, and her mouth was the first thing she would cover from the cameras; appearance being everything.
If you, sooner rather than later, treat health as the priority it should be all through life—and if you at the same time devalue appearance as the fad it really is—you will be a much happier person.
The long way of saying that you should diet for the right reason: Health.
The multiTRIM Diet
All diet plans—except for the outright fraudulent ones, and be warned: they abound—have as their goal for you to burn more calories than you consume.
Possibly the most sensible plan we have seen in recent years is the multiTRIM diet which supplies all needed nutrients to maintain health and ease hunger in a fifteen calories meal-replacement drink.
A multiTRIM Journal
A friend recently set out to shed 143 pounds over 18 months with the help of the multiTRIM diet. A blog-record of her journey can be found here.

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