Obsessed

ABC's Drum (Episode 115) introduced the author of a book Wellmania. Bridget Delaney is a senior writer at The Guardian, and had spoken about her book at the Sydney Writers Festival earlier this year. Time Out, written about that, had said “Yoga has been commandeered by capitalism. Wellness is all very... well, but what it often boils down to is big business lining its pockets with the spoils of people's narcissism”, and printed what Delaney has said. “You can’t let yoga be your god,” she had said. “Self care is really important but we need to step beyond it and remember it’s feeding a commercial beast.”

So many words I wrote down from that program: yoga, diet, “Mediterranean” diet, no processed food. It was very interesting to hear how each person on the Drum looked at “wellness”:

• be clean, lean and serene
• obsessed with people who tell us what to do
• get off the yoga mat and get into social change
• exorcise demons which are toxins
• religions which celebrate aren't communal
• celebrate – for example, Australia Day – then detox
• feast/famine

Two decades ago I was overweight: I lost 40kgs at the start of this new century. After moving to Australia in 2005 I was down around 72kg. I'm 5'11”, so I felt pretty thin. Before I lost all that weight I'd been up and down and up and down, feeling pretty depressed that my weight was hanging around me. Yes, I know that's a disparate saying, but that's how I've felt about it. I shed my overweight – maybe I cut the rope so it could no longer hang around.

I kept it off for 15 years, but since my brain aneurysm and stroke it seems to have crept back on. Not all of it, but too much for me.

At the beginning of this century I had joined the Les Mills gym where I was living in New Zealand. I worked on the treadmill and the weights almost every day, and I fell in love with Body Combat, a musical session which included punching, side kicking, front kicking, jumping, elbow punches and anything from karate, boxing, taekwondo, tai chi and muay thai which anyone doing combat might recognise. I loved it! I stuck with Body Combat when I moved over here, at first in a gym in Ipswich and on to a gym at Sunnybank Hills when I moved to Camira. The Sunnybank Hills gym soon gave up Body Combat and started in a different sort of body combat which they called Group Combat, I think. It wasn't anywhere near as good as the Body Combat I had fell in love with. Later I moved to Parkinson, and went to the AJs gym where they had Body Combat too. AJs also had two decent sized swimming pools, one indoor and one outdoor, and I got back into swimming – I was swimming up to 80 lengths – 2km - three days a week with a plan to go to an ocean swim in Vanuatu. (I never got there, long story – read my other blog Aneurysm Aphorisms).

My last home before hospital was Inala, and I joined the PCYC gym with much of the equipment I was used to. After hospital, when I moved up to Redliffe area, I joined Dolphins gym and started a recovery class with a heart recovery team. I started swimming again. Very recently I've moved to Eagleby, and there are no indoor pools around here, no gyms with Body Combat, and a PCYC which I fell out with in Beenleigh.

So what am I doing that Wellmania says I shouldn't be doing in order to lose weight instead of continuing to put it back on? Or can I just be happy with how I now am?

“Is it possible to integrate good habits into your daily life? What does our obsession with wellness say about us? And why do you smell so bad when you haven’t eaten in seven days?”

This was what Black Inc Books said about what Delaney has written. I'm thinking about buying this book, because what they said about it would (I hope) make me feel very good about where I am – I don't really feel too good just right now!