A Queer personal trainer in Toronto says obesity is systemic (part 2)

So if obesity is systemic and the responsibility unfairly falls on individuals to both manage it in their own lives and change the system itself, what do we do? 

A Queer personal trainer in Toronto offers a bunch of suggestions

Actually quite a lot is the short answer. There are lots of little (and big) things that we can do to change our lives, the lives of our families and communities and you know… the world. 

A Queer personal trainer in Toronto says eat fresh and local

First of all, as much as possible eat fresh, not processed food. It is significantly more healthy for you and you aren’t supporting garbage corporations who care naught for you or the planet. And if you can pair that with going to farmers markets and eating locally you are supporting local food agriculture, the slow food movement and giving your body the most nutritionally rich food it can handle. Plus farmers markets are just generally very happy places where communities come together. Knowing who grew your carrots and how their kid is doing in school is shockingly important for your soul. 

And with all this amazing produce what are you going to do with it? You’re going to cook it yourself because if guitars stop fascists cookbooks aren’t far behind. One of the best things you can do for yourself is to make your own food. And I get it. It’s a time thing. I understand. Do it when you can, as often as you can. Batch cook. Squeeze it in however you can. Literally re-arrange your life if you can to accommodate. To my mind feeding ourselves well is truly one of the primary responsibilities we have - to whatever capacity you can, embrace that. 

A Queer personal trainer in Toronto thinks we all need to look in the mirror

And this is where we come to the part where we quite seriously take stock of our lives, our values, the kind of world we want to live in, and we act like what we do matters and has impact on ourselves and others. We re-arrange our lives. We do it for ourselves, our families, our communities and the planet. The simple fact is that most of us aren’t as happy as we could be and it is in part due to how we arrange our lives. Our agency in this varies. From the minimal to the almost exclusive. To whatever degree you have agency, use it. Use it to prioritize movement, good food and good company. You wanna beat obesity? Starve it of late-stage capitalist misery. Prioritize what matters. 

A Queer personal trainer in Toronto wants us to all calm the f**k down

De-stressing matters. We are stressed to the max and that causes a lot of issues around how we eat. From the amount to the quality. Exercise coincidentally is a great de-stressor. Not only does it lower our stress levels but it conditions us to be more resilient to stress the next time it comes around. This is huge. Not only do we become less stressed out but we are then less likely to become as stressed out the next time. That is rad. Meditation is another great tool to lower our stress, keep it lower and provide us with skills to allow us to more meaningfully see our environment and interactions in ways that could lead to even more positive change. 

One of the biggest issues that we have here really is that we do not have good ways of self-soothing and we often mistake numbing for soothing and it is not the same thing at all. Numbing puts us in a worse position to deal with stress while soothing puts us in a better position. A nice bath and calming music is soothing for many of us. Binging a TV show is more often numbing.

And that’s not to say that binging a TV show is always horrible or that binging on food is always horrible but when it is the primary mode that we have for dealing with the world yeah, I’m gonna say it those things end up being pretty horrible. 

So we basically need to learn how to keep ourselves grounded and relatively chill and then when things heat up (they will for sure heat up) we need to be able to soothe ourselves in ways that are actually soothing. 

A Queer personal trainer in Toronto believes we need to fix the system

And then we need to fix the damn system. How do we do that? Remind politicians all the time that we work too much for too little. VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLARS. Do not lend your strength to things that you hate. And help raise children to know better than we ever did. 

That’s it for me this time. Come back in a couple of weeks when I do a deep dive into sleep. It is one of the single most important things that we do (or do not) do!!