Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: strength

Bagua is my life now

I am continuing to talk more about Bagua and Taiji. Here is my post from yesterday. It’s been interesting in the RKG Discord. There is a gym channel, but I don’t visit it. Unfortunately, the talk of dieting and weight has spilled over into the general producer channel as wel.l I cannot do weight/dieting talk, so I have to skim past all of it. It’s funny because I’m used to women being the ones who are obsessed with their bodies, and in this case, it’s mostly men. That’s probably because it’s a Discord based around video games, which is still a predominantly male domain. Sadly.

Unfortunately, the three content creators are equally obsessed with weight and have bought into the whole ‘fat is bad’ bullshit. They would not phrase it that way and are quick to say that you should not fat-shame kids 9or anyone), but then go on at length to talk about how disgustingly fat they were as kids.

I am not happy that men are getting in on the body hatred.In part because it’s such a waste of time. Several of the guys are doing it for wedding reasons (or did it for a wedding), and it’s like, “Why?” I mean, I know why. But it’s so futile. that’s what I learned when I was in my twenties and thirties. Any idea of ‘let me lose a bunch of weight in this short period of time’ will end badly. Something like 98% of people gain the weight back and more. Bodies are pretty stubborn about clinging to the fat.

That’s not  to say that people can’t take it off and keep it off. Obviously, they can. But the question is should they? Is it wise? And the answer to that usually is no. Don’t get me started on how ‘eating healthily’ has replaced diet talk. And is classist to boot. And the danger in assigning morality to food. Food is not good or bad. It just is.

I will admit my bias. My body saw me through death. Twice. My body is fucking badass. The fact that it has padding probably helped. It’s better to be 10 pounds overweight that underweight because the fat protects your organs. And, not to be arrogant, but my body breezed through walking (non-COVID-related) pneumonaia, two cardiac arrests, and  an ischemic stroke. Without even breaking a sweat. It shrugged and said, “Is that all you got?”

I walked out of the hospital two weeks after I was admitted. To be more precise, I was wheeled out to my brother’s car, but then I walked into the house on my own. The occupational therapist said I would need six months to a year of nehab, if not more, to get back to anything close to normal.

My physical therapist watched me walk down the hall on the fifth day I was awake. She had a few things to say to me about how to walk, but not much. The next day, we did the same little trek. She watched me, but she didn’t have anything to say. When we made it back to my room, she said she had nothing left for me. She advised mo to do the same walk a few times a day and gave me permission to go anywhere I wanted.


Continue Reading