Walking for Pleasure

Virtually every beauty and home living magazine splatter too good to be true get - thin- quick schemes on their covers every month, let alone fitness and health periodicals. Here in the fattest nation in the world we are amazingly deluded to believe that we have to be thin. Anorexia nervosa and its sister illness bulimia have well been exposed by doctors and victims who wish to raise awareness about the hell on earth they endured. Yet still somehow, it prevails.

Other disorders have been born of this obsession such as compulsive overeating which runs rampant in serial dieters. Exercise obsession is a new disorder. It has the phenotype of anorexia and the same potentially fatal physiological effects on the body. America's all too irresponsible media preached a biased "loose weight" mantra until young girls began to die. Now it is middle age women who are highly susceptible to the mental illness that cause eating disorders. Unfortunately it takes a nearly irreversible toll on the hearts of women of this age group.

Then along come the headlines about loosing weight simply by walking. The articles provide plans, goals, and ridiculous lies disguised as facts about the correct way to walk. Pictures show already super skinny models smiling with weights in each hand in eighty dollar sweat suits checking their pedometers. So American women buy weights, sweat suits, a pedometer and usually an ipod. By the time they dress them selves they are too exhausted to walk.

This is a shame as walking has some great benefits. Increased flexibility is one which will keep one from injury and ease muscle cramps.

Meditation time is one attribute more valuable than gold. It serves as one of the only ways to clear a persons mind in times such as these. A friend of mine works over personal issues as she walks and often resolves them. Another friend opts to not even acknowledge issues during "his time". Increased circulation is a life saver for people who didn't even realize they had circulation problems. People who have a general sense of feeling weak and fatigued almost to the point of sickness report feeling better and more energetic.