Mashufaa

           Lifestyle & Culture

In any race, you have to train and be fit to run it!     

It is accepted medical opinion that when we are born, we inherit the propensity for conditions like obesity or high blood pressure. We struggle through life to overcome them, plus all the others we get just by living. Amid a mass of contradictory explanations of how we should live: our mother and our father says, the Gossip column, our friends say, the Bible and the Koran tell us.  

Scientists now tell us, red meat is bad for us causing cancer and white sugar is a poison. But this seems to contradict the very cultural practice that many of us were brought up in. Our mother used sugar in her ‘very, very, special cakes’ and we ate red meat as a delicacy.

Many of us are condemned to obesity, cancer, heart disease and depression. So cultural practices, though we have followed them for a thousand years, can still be wrong.

A good dietician will tell you if you want to lose weight or reduce your stress levels, you have to look at your whole lifestyle. Not just counting the calories of the food you eat, or working out with Oprah, but the relationship you have with your wife, children, or your father etc.

Practical pragmatism and intelligent research is needed. Start reading. But many of us don’t even reach this point, it is fashionable to eat the food you haven’t cooked, to sit in the car you don’t own and be driven, instead of exercising your body by walking. We want and expect to be beautiful people but don’t want to work at it. Because work is too much like hard work!

Well life is not for the faint hearted. We can win, but not without skill determination and fortitude. It is harder and less fashionable these days to do the right thing and work hard for it. But that does not mean that in the long run, it is not better. It is. Better to cook your own meals, rather than buy junk food, cooked in a microwave

in two minutes. It is better to read a book rather than sit down vegetate and watch TV all day and it is better to get on your own two feet and change your life, rather than sit down and just complain about it.

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