Our culture likes to romanticize the "healthy lifestyle" and promote it as the optimal way of living. New diets with flashy names go in and out of style, lifestyle influencers on social media share their fitness routines, and everyone with a Fitbit strives to reach their daily ten thousand steps. While healthy living is good, sometimes it seems that the things we tell each other and the information social media presents us with is a distortion of reality. When we make a healthy lifestyle our goal, just because we think we should or because everyone else is doing it, it's easy to fall into obsessive patterns that are in reality, entirely unhealthy.
Physical health and mental health are the keystones to a healthy life. Everyone knows the basics: exercise, eat healthy, do the things that make you happy, and seek help if you need it. Sometimes it seems that when people advertise their healthy lifestyle, they are simply presenting a healthy mask and veiling an unhealthy mind.
Going to the gym every day may, in theory, be good for your body, but if you aren't eating enough and depriving your body of the nutrients it needs for a successful workout and day, then working out obsessively can actually hurt more than it helps. Similarly, those who keep careful count of each calorie that enters their body through apps like Calorie Counter face the risk of falling into obsessive eating patterns. Often people who eat a strictly regimented diet can feel worse if they slip up, and this can seriously harm their mental health, including their relationship to food. Some, when seeing the numbers for each piece of food they ingest, may begin to eat less as a result.
Lifestyle choices like working out every day or tracking your food intake may seem beneficial, and when practiced in the right way they are. Still, they also can easily trap people in a harmful lifestyle while allowing them to present a facade of health. This continues as an endless cycle and those on the outside who only see the social media posts don't get the full picture, which is also dangerous because sometimes this glamorizes unhealthy practices. This is not to say that everyone dedicated to healthy living is actually living a lie, because many people do manage to do the best for both their mind and body. But, the mind is a component that is often sidelined.
Sometimes when I spend time with my friends I realize that all we have been talking about is food and appearances. The conversations will cycle through discussing our exercise and what we've been eating, to how we look, and how the people around us look on social media. We talk boastfully about workouts and, sometimes even how little we've been eating. So much of what we talk about revolves around promoting ourselves as healthy individuals and so little room is left to explore how we are doing mentally.
I'm not disparaging anyone working hard to exercise and watch their diet, but lately, I've been thinking about how much of the "healthy living" we do is for the parts of us that we can show off to the world. It's true that a great summer body will get a lot of likes, but nothing can compare to a happy mind. A "happy mind" is a broad term, and not easily achieved, but we have to be careful to remember that health is more than just exercise and that everyone is more complex than the way they present themselves. Remember to be kind to your body, and also your mind.
