Food Franchise

Posts Tagged ‘Knot’

There’s a persistent philosophical conception (dating back to Plato) of the human existence being divided between the mind and the body. Modern marketing themes have targeted commercial products as being good for the mind, body and soul. The idea of ‘inner peace’ as being the harmony of those three ‘components’ of the human has been used and abused by today’s media. Inner peace is today packaged and sold on the back of purified water bottles, is legitimized with the knot on a black belt, is written into canon by self-help books that convince you the problem is with you. It’s advertised by beaming models holding a ‘less-fatty’ salad from fast-food franchises that are much more interested in profit margins than an individual consumer’s serenity. And while maybe some people are able to completely detach themselves from their physicality, for most people who are acutely aware of their perceived ‘flaws’, being self-conscious about one’s own body can seriously undermine their sense of inner peace.

But most people with body image issues won’t find lasting, meaningful solace from external means. After all, we develop those personal negativisms from those very same social and cultural sources. It’s that slender model holding the salad that reminds us that our breasts aren’t as large or shapely as hers. Or that we’ve got that spare tire around our midsection that’ll prevent us from ever landing us a date with a girl who looks like that. Which isn’t to say that the very model doesn’t find a number of flaws with herself, but the point is, we’ve been raised and conditioned to recognize and evaluate people based on their appearance. If our own doesn’t meet the standards established by our society, then we tend to view ourselves as inadequate or ugly because we imagine other people do. If we lived entirely by ourselves in the wilderness, in addition to being incredibly bored, at the very least we wouldn’t concern ourselves with our fat faces, our flat asses, our expansive guts, our stretch marks… you get the idea. (Hell, I’d be walking around naked but my preferred lifestyle is irrelevent to this article.)

A very important aspect of accepting our physical appearances is that, should everybody else in the world suddenly disappear and we were left entirely alone, our physical flaws would still be present. Those ’skinny legs’ or ‘chubby cheeks’ wouldn’t change, but you simply wouldn’t be as conscious of them because there’s nobody to impress, or more appropriately,