Strength in Body
How to Fix a Broken Culture — Part 9 of 10
Depression is a very real and very potent psychological disorder that physiologically throws your entire body, mind, and life off…
Anger… love… and any other strong emotion physiologically influences you.
But this is not a one way street; your body can affect your mind too.
When I feel bad, when my stomach is empty, or my body dehydrated, I often feel fatigued. I feel too useless and just… bleh… to do anything at all.
I want to just sit there… and …
When I feel angry or rather really frustrated/annoyed/irritated as I often am… I feel like punching things or banging my head against the wall… or being a masochist and trying to intellectually combat trolls in comment sections… as nothing else seems to be working.
When I feel weak, as if I can't even do the amount of pushups I could do back in wrestling, or run nearly as far for nowhere as long as I use to,… I feel worthless, powerless, and like an insignificant pleb.
I am a small dude, weighing in at a whopping 120 lbs and lanky 5'6" or maybe up to a massive 5'7" by now. So I am all too aware of my stature and how other people view me. I have been aware of this for a long time now, and started keeping fit since middle school. I was the only one with a 6pac back in my 6th grade class… but I didn't look it. No matter how much exercise I did, I looked like the nerdy lil guy I was. At least I didn't have glasses… but then again, glasses were in, so I did not even have that going for me.
I was depressed a lot around that time, but I always had this small, ineffable, ineradicable kernel of self-confidence, because I knew that should someone actually try me… I could stick it to em good; doubly so because they would not expect me to pack such a large punch in such a small, nerdy size.
After I finally got through most of my depressive haze after highschool, I had a fit body to be proud about. And when I looked around at my peers and family and strangers, I realized that fitness was quite an emotional advantage.
Both of my parents suffer from serious medical problems. But despite both of them (especially my mother) often getting mistaken for being at least a decade younger than they really are, they are always constantly saddened about their fitness… and even restricted from job opportunities due to these problems.
On a wider and more general level, people that are obese, or even construed as such are often more prone to depression and thus eat (or starve) their feelings or worse. This strongly applies to those who are underweight as well… people like me…
Further still, food can and does affect your brain and your body.
Duh, right?
But skipping the chemistry lesson (unless you really want to talk about it?! :D)… all foods/drinks are chemicals that affect how your body functions.
So what you eat most definitely affects how you act, feel, and even what you think.
I am the last person to talk about ‘dieting’ … so I am just going to post some interesting links:
Jodi Corbitt had been battling depression for decades and by 2010 had resigned herself to taking antidepressant…www.washingtonpost.com
Suffice to say, eating healthy and keeping fit is incredibly important in self-empowerment.
Thus why the poverty of the black community is still a magnitude more complex and maleficent than what it seems like on the surface.
If people are too poor to afford healthy foods, and too slammed with menial labor to keep fit, then how the hell will they ever be able to master their body in order to keep their mind clear and creative?
This deserves a lot more attention than I am able to give it, but we have to realize how important it is to keep our bodies strong not only for ourselves, but for our entire communities. Because not many people will think or even be able to help their compatriots if they themselves are struggling to survive.
The mind and the body are not closed systems, nor are they even able to work optimally on their own. One important factor that science is only just now able to truly verify, but that has been known as common fact for thousands of years, is the importance and power of consciousness… the human soul… the spirit.