I'll Take the Salad, Breadsticks, AND Never Ending Past Bowl!

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been to a restaurant, or even just to Brooks, and have seen girls opting out of real food for a salad or fruit platter. I have nothing against fruit and veggies, being a (most of the time) vegan, I am actually extremely fond and dependent upon broccoli, spinach, apples, rice and so on. However, it never ceases to amaze me when I see people (often women) choosing to limit their intake to a salad, a piece of fruit, a smoothie, etc. My amazement lies not in the fact that women are partaking in healthy eating habits, but in the fact that choosing to eat only a salad at a meal does not equal a healthy body!

In discussing the fat body vs. thin body in class today we expressed the stereotypes that fat means lazy, gluttonous and weak, whereas thing means active, self-control and power. What this means is that thin women appear to assert self-control over their cravings and eating habits, and their bodies in general. In achieving the “perfect” thin body, that woman is healthy; she will never deal with the supposed obesity-related disease of Diabetes and she will never suffer a heart attack. Furthermore, because she is thin and healthy, she will live a long and medical complication-free life, whereas her overweight friend who chooses the pizza over the salad, will certainly suffer greater bodily complications and die at a younger age.

Well, turns out this is not necessarily always true. My argument lies in the salad. If I were to eat only salad for the next year, and little to nothing else, I would most definitely lose some weight. If everyday for the next year I visited the salad bar and didn’t slather on the dressing, my body would look, on the outside, extremely healthy. At the end of that year I assume I would get many compliments on looking “healthier” than ever. The problem with this is that I would not be at all healthier, I would most likely be more unhealthy than when I had started eating only salads. In eating only salads, I would lost essential nutrients that my body needs to maintain itself and I’m sure my emotional state for the duration of that year would not be very stable or happy. So, I might look thin and healthy, but really I’d probably suffer irreversible damage to some of my organs and as soon as I began eating other foods my body would have a hard time digesting it.

My point is that in choosing to skip meals and consume nothing more than a salad or a piece of fruit might seem healthy, especially the thinner the person is, but if skipping nutrient-rich meals is a common pattern in a person’s life, they are not healthy. What this point boils down to is the larger emphasis that just because a person is thin does not mean that they are healthy. There are numerous ways in which a seemingly healthy, thin person can actually be unhealthier than an overweight person: smoking, eating disorders, excessive exercising, dieting, etc. can all be extremely hazardous to a person’s health. However, because these all keep the outer body looking thin, they also keep the body looking healthy (though I’d be afraid to see what they do to the inside of the body.)

In rounding this up, I guess the moral is to not always judge a book by its cover (cliché, I know.) It saddens me to say that I have certainly been the person who has judged a thin person as healthy and a fat person as lazy, even if not on a necessarily conscious level. We all have a tendency to do this, as it’s been instilled in us since birth, but perhaps it’s time we reevaluate what it means to be healthy and in what ways attaining health actually hurts our bodies. So next time we decide to get the small house salad with the dressing on the side, lets do ourselves a favor and remember that a thin body does not always mean a healthy body.