Health and Mind - Rough Draft

Being healthy, whatever way you choose to define it, starts from the mind. No doubt about it, the term good health varies in meaning from person to person. However, preparing yourself to follow a certain lifestyle begins in the mind. It’s believed that a person is healthy if he or she works out and eats their greens. However, I disagree, a huge step in becoming healthy and most importantly staying healthy, is building self-esteem. Self-esteem and confidence are huge contributors to self-love, to untimely raise against what society deems us to be wrong. Bodybuilders Roxanne Edwards and Cassils strive to better themselves as individuals while achieving their idolized body figure.

Roxanne Edwards is a hardcore bodybuilder and inevitably makes people take a second glance at her muscular physic. Edwards physical goal is being “Peeled,” Her aim is to have people see her as, “… when you look at me and you can look at me and you can see right through me. You can look at stuff on me and see the fibers in the muscle moving underneath my skin.” Being able to leg press more than one thousand pounds, there is no doubt that she is not physically unfit. Throughout the interview with S. Adrian Massey in DISMagazine, she carries her confidence on her shoulder, freely expressing her thoughts and ideas about her body. She acknowledges that society has a bias for women to have certain bodily features such as breasts with a petite frame. However that does not affect how she embraces her femininity. Mentally, her self-confidence is what drives her to be what others call her “inspiring.” “I’m not putting a handcuff on your potential. The only person doing that is you. I just chose to unshackle mine.” She states that she’ll let her body, “speak for itself” and after hearing and seeing her through an interview and photo-shoots, I don’t need to meet her to know that she is overall content with what she believes.

Heather Cassils, a personal trainer wanted to test social expectations through her transformation of her transgender body. Committing to a project where she must bulk up 20+ pounds of muscle in less than a 23-week period by the aid of steroids and collapsing her process in a small video. Though she does not approve of the use of steroids, she solely did it for the act of revealing, “society’s obsessed with extremes.” Her outcomes were successful, attracting attention to what she describe as “freaky androgyny.” Men would bully about her breasts at the gym and at one point wanted to arm wrestle or fight her. She challenged the way society looks at a female body, “I wanted this project to be a reflection of the value that is placed on the surface and what goes into constructing that surface. “She extended herself from: force-feeding to extreme fatigue and lost of her flexibility to prove her point. That society will always be attentive of people who oppose the social norm. The ability to think outside of what society wants you to think is an aspect of building this self-confidence to rise above objectors.

Socially, we must not commode to how society depicts how we ought to be but rather stand for what you believe if right. To have confidence and an individual mind to run one’s self, is the path to have a true health. Combining both physical and mental health, can create what people may call inspire and original.