Kate Wicker is adding some commentary to the vanity/physical fitness discussion. Here’s a post she calls “Being a Hottie v. Being Healthy — Part I.” After a useful summary with links, she writes:
The problem I have with pursuing hotness over health is that there often exists a schism between what is healthy and what is perceived as “hot.” In my personal experience, our health and how we feel physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally rather than just how we look seems to be a better gauge for whether or not we’re perversing food and/or pandering to vanity or to gluttony rather than our level of hotness as perceived by ourselves, the world, and even our spouses.
Over a series of posts I’m going to explore why I’ll continue to champion health over perfect proportions/a hot body.
I’ll start with this: A hot body doesn’t necessarily mean we’re healthy in mind, body, and/or spirit.
I definitely don’t want to give the impression that I would champion “having a hot body” over health.
I just want to encourage people to be honest about their mixed motives. Doing so frees other people to admit the motives we’re not allowed to admit.
I wrote this, or something similar, in Kate’s combox (it’ll show up after it comes out of moderation):
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Boy, you hit it on the nail with your boldfaced line!
I think it’s important for me to acknowledge my mixed motives, and I really encourage everyone to do it. I want to be fit because I want to be healthy and strong (AND because I want to look good). I want to look good because I want to honor the body God gave me, because I want to please my husband, because I want to show my children that my vocation is joyful (AND because, face it, I’m a little vain.)
Name it and claim it, you know?
Commenter LeeAnn quoted a definition of humility as ” an honest facing of facts, admitting them, and acting according to them.” If one of the facts is your own mixed motives, then, ironically, admitting that you have some vain reasons as well as some pure reasons is a step on the road to humility.
But, as you were saying, just because you’re hot doesn’t mean you’re healthy either physically, mentally, or spiritually. It’s a good thing the devil never offered me the choice back in the day to get thin without getting, for lack of a better word, “better!” Change from the inside out is the thing to desire, *even if* the change never goes as far as the places that other people can see.
Sometimes I think that change can go from inside to out — and then reflect back inward and spur further change. I never thought of myself as having a “vanity problem” at all (mostly because I didn’t think I *looked* like a person who could possibly struggle with vanity, or wear the same kind of clothes as such a person). Then I attacked the gluttony problem, lost weight, got better looking, and bought nicer clothes. WHOA do I realize now that I have had a vanity problem, and what’s more I always did and never knew it. So… I understand now that it’s something I need to grapple with. (Along with many other faults of course. But I see now that it’s really a besetting problem for me, and deserves more of my attention than I thought it was.)
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I don’t think it’s inherently bad to want to look good. I agree that it’s fraught with not a little spiritual danger.
As my fingers hover over the keys, I’m not entirely sure I want to say, “It’s far more important to try to be healthy than to try to be beautiful!” I think that different people may be called to emphasize one or the other or neither, depending on their circumstances or their besetting spiritual weaknesses. We probably all should seek both health and beauty to some extent — along with many, many other things — in accord with the duties of our state in life.
Both health and beauty come partly from natural gifts — some people are gifted with naturally good health, some are natural beauties — and from our own efforts — almost anyone is capable of working to improve their health or of destroying it through sabotage and neglect; and almost anyone can enhance their natural beauty through presentation, self-improvement, and attitude OR can disfigure themselves to repel others. Both are a cooperation with God to bring forth fruit from whatever gifts He has given us. The analogy to being open to God’s grace in spiritual matters is clear.
I think we can learn a lot from seeking health OR from seeking beauty. A lot of us are just having trouble disentangling the two because health is usually inherently beautiful . The two are rarely opposed, as the “v.” in Kate’s headline might be read to mean.
Occasionally they are: some measures to improve or repair health are disfiguring (chemotherapy, amputations). But I don’t think most of us are dealing with that kind of situation. Maybe if we were, it would be easier to make clear distinctions. For most of us, though, it will always be hard to decouple health from beauty.
bearing blog 