Fat Exercise Instructor

If an exercise instructor gives a good class, would their appearance, i.e. weight matter to you? Would you be turned off if you hired a personal trainer and an overweight person showed up but they did their job well?

There was a situation in which an instructor was laid off because of weight.  People are not motivated by fat instructors, thinking - if that's how the instructor looks WITH exercise, well ...

I'm undecided.  If I really liked the class, then of course, I would be sorry to see the instructor leave, but I can see that people would be perturbed by a heavy exercise instructor.

The Pleasure Principle

In an article on parshas Pinchas that I read, an explanation was given about the Baal Peor idol and how it was worshipped.  It said that every constructive physical act is pleasurable.  Physical acts have a purpose, such as eating to sustain life.  In order to ensure that man does these important things, they come along with pleasure.

Pleasure just for its own sake is a corruption.  If we do something just for pleasure alone, it is devoid of anything good or holy.

In reading this, I was reminded of the frum world's obsession with food as seen in kosher food magazines, numerous cookbooks, articles about surgery for obesity, etc. It is claimed that the preoccupation with food is a good thing: here but I'm not convinced.  The shockingly crass ads I've posted about have not convinced me that the eating is l'sheim shomayim or just plain neutral.

I'm not claiming to eat every mouthful for the sake of heaven, and yet, pride in being a foodie, the eagerness to have yet another culinary experience, the weird combinations of ingredients for the sake of something new, is just too much.

Fat and Happy

There was an interesting letter to the editor of Ami Living this past October.  The letter-writer was outraged by a line in a dieting article which said, " ... in the morning, you actually will look forward to getting dressed!" 

Why? Because she is an overweight woman who has no interest in losing weight.  She assures us that she does her best to lead a reasonably healthy life in which the drink of choice in her home is water and every supper is served with salad and vegetables.  She tries to exercise regularly (though she doesn't always get around to it).  She has regular checkups and her numbers are all fine.

She is interested in being healthy, not in achieving a certain weight.  She says she is happy, successful and confident and her husband thinks she is beautiful.  She is perfectly happy when she gets dressed in the morning.

She wants to dispel the myth that overweight people are all unhappy and want to be thin.  She concludes by saying, "Please stop telling me that in order to be happy with the way I look, I need to be thin.  You are doing a disservice to women everywhere.  Instead, adopt a Torah-true outlook that encourages women to make healthy choices and feel good about themselves no matter what size skirt they put on in the morning."

Yes, I'd like to get a look at this person who attempts to live a healthy lifestyle, whose numbers at the doctor are good and who is overweight nonetheless.  She does not say how overweight she is. Is it 15 pounds? 50? For it is possible for lean people to have poor numbers and heavy people to have good numbers.

She is right that our society's obsession with the scale and size is not a Torah-true outlook.  What's true is that if you look at pictures of Jewish women and men of previous generations, you see they are not as thin as people want to be today.  In fact, if those of yesteryear saw how thin people strive to be today, they would be appalled.  Years ago, this was considered unattractive and cause for immediate action, i.e. eating. So apparently, our outlook has changed and it is not because we've learned more Torah!