There are lots of issues around the body, for example that someone doesn’t feel beautiful and feels like the own body is not good enough. In this world many people are focused on the figure and so they feel ashamed which can even result in depression. And it is not always like this that people really have a reason to feel that they are overweight. I have met many people who ‘feel fat’ but would not be called overweight by any doctor, scale or with any calculation. But they still have this feeling that they are not thin enough.
I always say to everybody that you need to find the weight that you yourself feel comfortable with and then you have the power and the possibility to keep this weight. I see many times that someone eats a piece of chocolate and afterwards feels guilty. This is a concept that I don’t understand. If you eat something, please enjoy it and then feel good about it. And if you know before that it won’t be good for you, don’t eat it. And again, beauty is not about physical appearance. We are not only the body, there is a soul and for me a beautiful soul is much more important than figure, colour or shape.
Well said Swami Ji!
I think you mentioned an important factor when you said that people will eat a piece of chocolate and feel guilty about it.
Our mental relationship with food has a lot to do with our eating habits and the way our bodies respond to food. I wrote a previous comment about the sick mentality toward food in America. Rather than being a pleasure, a source of life, and something to be treasured, food is viewed as a means to an end. Something that needs to be finished as soon as possible. Or even something to comfort our empty feelings inside. Either way, food is abused in American society because of the mentality toward it.
People are often a slave to their mind, and don’t realise that they do things, or in this case, eat things, for the sake of their mind, not their hunger. People often eat out of boredom, or as a way of coping with stress as as feel good factor. Eating has gone beyond nourishment in many western countries, largely due to the media that encourage eating bad food as much as possible to improve their profits, yet maintain that a skinny size is most attractive. We live in a very mixed, and emotionally confusing world.