Keep On Moving

Welcome to part two of my series on lifestyle and wellbeing.  This time I’m focussing on the benefits of physical activity for wellbeing.  We all know about exercise releasing endorphins and all that stuff, so what I’m going to do here is take a closer look at how exercise benefits me personally and give some examples of my favourite activities.

First and foremost, exercise is essential in order to be physically fit and healthy.  This is one of the main reasons I do it, and the great thing about being physically healthy is you feel physically healthy too (and mentally of course!).  Of course a by-product of this is perceiving oneself to look good, which is great for self-esteem.  For general fitness and toning, one of my favourite things is the humble exercise DVD:  it costs little to buy one and you can use it time and time again in the space of your own home.  They usually have different workouts that you can pick and mix depending on how much time you have, what you feel like doing or which body parts you want to work on.  Personally I’ve used Mel B’s Totally Fit and a couple of Davina’s DVDs and can thoroughly recommend both!

Another huge benefit is that sport and exercise can give you an immense sense of achievement.  This is especially true if you’re training for something specific, but even if you’re not, you still get that notion of improvement that brings with it psychological benefits, and again self-esteem.  Unfortunately, it’s not the case with everything in life that you get out what you put in, but with sport/fitness, you will always get results when you do the work.  I’ve experienced this myself through my recent endeavours in track cycling, helped by having a coach and tracking my progress using online software TrainingPeaks.  If you are thinking of getting into sport seriously, I’m an advocate of hiring a coach or personal trainer to keep you on track and motivated, if you can afford it.

Depending on what type of exercise you choose to do, a further potential benefit is time spent outdoors.  We all know the sun is great for enhancing our mood, and I think there’s a lot to be said for the benefits of being at one with nature on wellbeing.  Try a long walk or bike ride in some woods or a forest.  This can also be great for clearing your head and having some thinking space if you’re alone; otherwise it’s a fantastic opportunity for socialising, the benefits of which I’ll discuss further in my next post!

In my previous post I looked at the psychological benefits of having fun and experiencing child-like states.  Discovering a sport can bring about these benefits and offers great opportunities for fun and trying new things.  During my time at uni I used to occasionally have a knock-around on a badminton court with my best friends.  I was terrible at it but it was great fun, got the blood pumping and offered a much-needed break from revision!  I always felt so good afterwards.  So, even if you think you’re no good at a sport or feel that you are inherently not suited to exercise, I strongly advise that you experiment a bit and find the sport for you.  I think there’s something out there for everyone!

Finally, physical activity provides distraction and the opportunity to release stress and have some time away from whatever pressures we may be experiencing.  My favourite example of this is climbing, a sport I was into at uni and have started to take up again in recent weeks.  Climbing requires real concentration, meaning it’s pretty much impossible to think about anything else whilst doing it: perfect if you’re struggling to switch off from the stresses and pressures of life or having a hard time for whatever reason.

So, that’s it: my summary of the benefits of physical activity on wellbeing.  This is just my take and I’m sure others have different examples of alternative sports and how these improve their lives; as always I welcome comments with open arms.  Thanks for reading; now go get exercising!

We Are Amazing

Hello readers!  Apologies for my long silence – most of my time and energy have been taken up with work and cycle training recently – but there is no excuse for not writing and I will endeavour to post a bit more regularly in the future (people tell me one of the best ways to get good blog readership is to post regularly, so I hope I still have some despite my atrocious irregularity!!).

I should take a leaf from his book and blog more often!

I’d like to clarify that the fact I haven’t published anything on here in a while doesn’t mean I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the things I write about.  I suppose I’ve had less energy to think and write about these things because work has been tough going, but right now I’m sort of feeling a new lease of life and hoping it lasts!

Recently I’ve met and had discussions with a fair few people who share my views on mental health, body image, etc.  The feeling I get is there are a lot of us, which makes it even more frustrating that things aren’t changing more quickly.  Anyway, my favourite encounter happened a few weeks ago when I discovered a new musical hero, who by fortunate coincidence was the support act at a gig I went to.  She goes by the name Philippa Hanna, and one of her songs in particular struck a chord with me (pin not intended!!).  Well, more to the point, the sentiment behind the song struck a chord (this is one thing I really like about this girl - she is a proper singer-songwriter and gave a little synopsis of each song before performing it - nice touch!). 

Philippa talked of how in the past she would do things like go on crazy diets to try and conform to the image of ‘beauty’ prescribed by the media.  Sometimes she thought that she couldn’t get a record deal because physically she wasn’t beautiful enough.  Then, she tells us, she realised it wasn’t necessary to do this, that she was beautiful the way she was, that each one of us should be happy with ourselves because “no one else can be you”.  She then wrote a lovely song called I Am Amazing, which illustrates her change of heart and encourage others to challenge negative thoughts about themselves.  I don’t feel I’ve done this justice as I remember Philippa putting it a lot more nicely and eloquently than I have!  But the point is that there are just too many people striving for unrealistic and impossible ideals of ‘beauty’ because it is drummed into is culturally that this is what we should do.  We need to break free from this viscous circle of media distortion and unhealthy behaviour. 

Let's stop striving for unrealistic ideals of physical beauty

Mental illness is on the up, particularly amongst young people, and I feel that this problem is a big contributing factor to this.  Probably my favourite lyric from the song is Not gonna listen to the voices of my enemies today.  I see the harmful ideals being imposed on people by today’s Western culture almost as an enemy that needs to be challenged, and re-shaped into a healthier form.  This is one of several big cultural changes that I strongly feel need to take place, and I’m determined to contribute to making this happen.

After I saw Philippa Hanna perform, I was fortunate enough to have a brief but interesting conversation with her and told her how pleased I was to hear her speaking the way she had about body image and the media.  She mentioned to me that there have been attempts in the past to pass a law the required all airbrushed images to be labelled as such.  Sadly such a law has not been passed.  Personally I think this would be a very positive step towards reducing the current problem whereby such a great number of young people are taking unhealthy steps towards unobtainable ideals in appearance.  Perhaps my next step will be to start a petition to make this happen… Who’s with me?!

Different But The Same?

This post is inspired by a research talk I went to a few days ago, which in basic terms was to do with the relationships between eating disorder (ED) symptoms and emotional processing difficulties.  As you might expect intuitively, there was found to be a greater incidence of emotion processing difficulties amongst ED patients than that their healthy counterparts.  There were some other interesting findings, but the thing that really got me thinking was something not covered by the researchers… 

An explanation of correlations - in case you don't know!!

Allow me to explain!  When introducing the research and talking about the methodology, the researcher mentioned that one of the things they had measured was depression symptoms (using the Beck Depression Inventory, or BDI), but that since there was so much data she wouldn’t be discussing this in her short 30 minute presentation!  Naturally this disappointed me slightly, as someone with a very keen interest in depression.  So, once the talk was over and it was time for questions from the audience, I couldn’t help but ask how the BDI data had been used.  She explained that they had looked at the correlations between this and the various forms of emotional processing difficulty, in the same way as they had correlated these with ED symptoms.  BUT… “Did you look at the correlation between depression and eating disorder symptoms?” I asked!  “No” was the answer, but I got thinking about what the outcomes might be if they did…

What I’m thinking is this: although I’m purely speculating at this point, I think it’s fairly likely that there would be correlations between depression symptoms and ED symptoms.  In fact, in the study I have been talking about, a higher number of anorexia patients suffered from depression than healthy controls.  What I would like to know is what are the relationships between specific ED symptoms (for example, weight concern and eating concern) and depression?

Could depression and eating disorder symptoms be, to an extent, 'different but the same'?

Why am I so interested to know this?  Well, given the general in-my-opinion-too-high levels of weight and eating concern in Western society today, and the also-too-high depression rates, I feel this type of information could be very useful in combatting and preventing these types of problems.  

If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll already know that I have strong feelings about some of the things that should be happening to combat problems with body image and mental health.  If what I’ve suggested about the links between the two is true, this brings a whole new level of importance to combatting these problems!  (I realise I have made a swift shift from eating disorder symptoms to body image in the general population, but I think it’s fair to say that many people who wouldn’t necessarily be classed as having an eating disorder do experience high levels of weight and/or eating concern). 

If my claim that depression and ED symptoms are correlated is substantiated, this would mean we should be working towards interventions that aim to tackle both issues simultaneously; and given the high incidence of both, this could be extremely beneficial!  How we do this is a different question altogether, but as I’ve eluded to in previous posts, I think that schools and the media have very significant roles to play.  

Food for thought!

I realise this is all a bit woolly as it’s based on my own speculations to an extent – I do plan to try and find some relevant research literature and will be sure to do a more evidence-based post when I do! – But in the meantime, I hope you’ll agree, it certainly gives us some (excuse the pun) food for thought! 




 
Links:

Information about the Beck Depression Inventory:

http://www.apa.org/pi/about/publications/caregivers/practice-settings/assessment/tools/beck-depression.aspx 

That's Not Real To Me

The song this post’s title comes from is Real To Me by good old Brian McFadden!  I’ll be talking all about how so much of what we see in the media in today’s society isn’t real, and the difficulties that we face in distinguishing what is real and what isn’t.

What inspired me to write this post is something I saw on TV on Sunday.  I caught the second episode of Superstar, Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s latest reality talent show, in which he searches for a ‘Jesus’; someone to play the lead role in Jesus Christ Superstar.  To my surprise, Jonathan Ansell (or ‘the blond one out of G4’) appeared on the show.  He’d got through to the boot-camp-style training stage of the show but was sadly sent home at that point.  Anyway, there ended up being a bit of an uproar on Twitter where Jonathan received a lot of stick for being ‘arrogant’, as a result of him being edited to be portrayed in such a light on the show. 

 

Now, back in the day I was a MASSIVE G4 fan (and proud, might I add!) and have followed Jon’s solo career to certain extent since they disbanded.  As a result, I’ve met him quite a few times at gigs and happen to know that he is actually a really lovely guy and has a huge amount of time and respect for his fans.  But 10 minutes on TV showing viewers a couple of moments that don’t paint him in a good light and bang!  A great number of people is left with an inaccurate, negative, but probably lasting impression of his personality.

On a brighter note, Ben Elton has written some quite entertaining novels that illustrate this propensity of reality TV producers to edit people in whichever way they like to make a more entertaining show (namely, Dead Famous and Chart Throb.  Dead Famous in particular is a good read, in my opinion).  Chart Throb basically takes the mick out of singing competitions like The X Factor.  In this story, the Simon Cowell-like producer of the show uses the powers of television editing to make some perfectly reasonable people seem like complete idiots.  For example, a sound-bite of “I’m not claiming I’m the next Elvis” would later be cut down to “I’m the next Elvis”, to make a humble individual seem perfectly arrogant.  Although it’s obviously a fiction book, I wouldn’t mind betting this is a fairly accurate, if slightly exaggerated, representation of how things work on these show in real life! 

As well as being damaging to individuals’ reputations, the media’s portrayal of certain things can also be damaging on a much wider scale to it’s consumers.  I’m talking particularly about media influence on body image, ideal self and self-esteem.  As you may have picked up on in previous posts, body image is something I feel really strongly about and there is a lot of work to be done by various parties to diminish the deep-set problem of poor body-image and self-esteem in modern Western society.  The media has a key role to play in this issue, with the use of airbrushing to create unrealistic ideals in appearance that real people can never hope to achieve, and for that matter shouldn’t hope to achieve!

An example of the images used in Media Smart's educational package

Fortunately, awareness of this problem seems to be on the up, and the Government’s Body Confidence Team has recently worked in conjunction with Media Smart to create an educational package which is designed to teach 11 year-olds about airbrushing and how to distinguish between what is and isn’t real; what images they should and shouldn’t aspire to be like.  What’s really great about this package is that it uses images of really famous people, like Britney Spears and Keira Knightly, and shows children how these people look before and after airbrushing.  This should help to give people the tools, from a young age, to view media images critically and learn how to avoid striving for unrealistic ideals in their appearance.  There is a lot of work still to do, but I think this is a great start.

I could go on about body image all day, but for now I’ll finish there.  Please do leave comments if you have any views on this, and please do come back for more on my views on body image in later posts.  As always, thanks for reading!