Want to take a walk with me on the beach? Here is your chance in day #175 of Happier People podcast! We begin by asking are we all artists spending our life's work on one most beautiful creation? How much are we aware of this masterpiece which is our body? Do we view our body like artwork and a holy temple or like an amusement park (Charlie Sheen) and a dumpster? What help does this viewpoint offer in our daily struggles to overcome the temptations of bad habits?
Will you join me on a walk along the beach in Saint Petersburg, Florida because in day 175 of Happier People Podcast you may discover a way of thinking about yourself that makes any change simple and instant?
What is our most beautiful creation in our lives?
I'm grateful to explore this with you today because this helps me to feel just love and joy about having this body, because our bodies are the most magnificent creations of our entire lives.
Would you like to join me for a walk on the beach here as we explore St. Petersburg Beach in Florida?
This is my most beautiful creation right here, this is it, this is my body.
This is the project I've been working on for 34 years and I am excited to see the memes @lexiconical makes with these photos!
Now, picture that, when we talk about making music or making art, we think about things like, "I worked on this for a year or a couple years," or "I played this video game for this long."
I've been working on my body for 34 years, since it was a tiny one cell, I've built that, I've built this from one cell, that is a beautiful sacred creation.
When I used to poison my body with things like alcohol and medications, and even things like vitamins, all kinds of foods, I used to not feel very good, and then I'd be in pain.
Today, I treat my body as a holy temple, the same way you'd create and treat something like a painting. Imagine if you'd worked on a painting for 10 years, wouldn't you treat that as something sacred?
"Wow, I've put my heart and soul into this painting."
You wouldn't go up there, maybe you would I don't know, and just kick it down, tear it apart, throw paint all over it and ruin it.
I'm grateful today that when I realize my body is my most beautiful creation that helps me. I get a lot of just feeling good and respect for myself. It helps me see which choices are the best to make, and then it's not a struggle.
I have a family member who is trying to eat better and quit bad habits, and it's a struggle for them as it was a struggle for me for so many years to stop drinking alcohol and to stop eating all these foods that poison my body.
The family member says, "It's challenging."
Now, if we believe that our body is this prison that we're stuck in, if we believe our body is something awful, something shameful and disgusting, that it must be hidden and how gross it is, then of course it's going to be difficult to stop trying to numb the pain and poison our bodies.
When we view that our body is something beautiful, our holy temple, our most magnificent creation of our lives, then it's not difficult to take good care of that creation.
Imagine I bought a new car in 1960 or something, a car that was a throwback, I took good care of it and I put all this time, energy and love into fixing it up, making it just perfect. Now, imagine if I just wrecked it on purpose, that'd be insane, right?
That's what a lot of us are doing with our bodies.
We've built these beautiful bodies, and then we go wreck them on purpose. You could find some humor in that if you wanted to.
At the same time what we believe often guides our behavior much more powerfully than our wants and desires.
Today, I believe that my body is a holy temple, it is my most magnificent creation therefore it's not difficult to avoid the temptation of poisoning it, anymore than its difficult to avoid the temptation of smashing your most beautiful creation apart or deleting all of your pictures off your iPhone.
Imagine all these pictures you've got on your phone that you've worked really hard for to accumulate over all these years, are you tempted to just erase them all, just delete them?
Do you struggle with temptation to delete all of these posts you have, just delete your social media account?
Maybe you do.
What I'm saying is when we look at our beliefs then change becomes automatic.
As I told this family member, "You don't have to struggle to change," in fact some of the most profound changes in my life have occurred in an instant.
When we treat our bodies with love and respect it's also easy to treat all the other bodies with love and respect. You see, when I love and respect my body, then I'm less likely to criticize someone else's body. When I love and respect my body I'm less likely to want to hurt the other bodies.
When we hate our own body, when we believe our body is this temple of disgustingness or is something shameful that has these nasty filthy desires we have to fulfill just to get through the day like eating, sex et cetera, when we view our bodies and have beliefs like this, that we've often been raised with and we're not even conscious of them, then it's difficult.
The miracle is, as soon as we change our beliefs, change can happen in an instant.
I started eating whole plant foods on a mostly vegan diet in an instant, I didn't struggle to do that. Now, before that, I struggled to try to eat healthier all the time, but as soon as I realized that what I eat has a huge impact on my body and how I feel, it became easy.
I was doing two personal training sessions every week, I was paying something like $300 a month for personal training. Meanwhile, I was paying almost no attention to what I was actually eating.
Sure I was tracking the calories, but my personal trainer said 80% of what your body looks like is what you eat and only about 20% of it has to do with exercise.
If you just worked out and didn't hardly eat anything all the time, for example, you'd be incredibly thin, you'd have a hard time building any muscle, you'd have muscle, but you'd be really thin.
I ate so much all the time that while I built muscle doing personal training I was still fat no matter all these other things I did. As soon as I changed the belief around eating, for example, that I have to eat to satisfy my desire to eat, and I modified it into I eat in order to build and create this body, that my eating is one of the primary activities I do to create this body, it started to work.
When I eat it influences how this body feels, when I eat it influences how this body looks. In fact, I was sold on this only after having eaten just a disgusting meal in terms of all kinds of meats it had in it. There's not a problem eating meat per se, but when you eat all these meats from all these different animals, you have no idea where they come from or how they were raised, how they were killed or how long they spent before they actually got to your plate and what life they lived.
When you unconsciously eat with a whole bunch of other salt, added oils, et cetera, and you throw that all in your body, guess what?
After eating like that I felt depressed and finally I realized it, "Oh my God, how I ate just gave me a bad mood, I can literally avoid bad moods if I eat better."
As soon as I realized that, I changed in an instant. My new belief is that how I eat has an impact on the moods I have and for selfish or altruistic purposes, however you want to look at it, I want to feel good all day every day, I don't want to feel bad at all, what good does feeling bad do?
Therefore, if I want to feel good, look good and do good, I have to eat good, and in order to eat good I need to know what is good for me to eat and generally whole plant foods are the best.
Now sure, there are other things that can be good to eat. I believe that in certain situations it can be good to eat meat also like if you've raised something like chickens and you've taken care of them, you love them and you slaughter them at home, and it took great joy in providing that as the meal, then sure that could be healthy.
Having something you don't know anything about might just be poison to the body, at least as far as it was for me with all the meat I ate in my life without caring or participating in its life story. Therefore, it might be more ideal to grow plants at home instead of eating them. The point is that when I eat something it's as simple as, how do I feel right afterwards?
Then, I realize and believe that what I eat influences how I feel and how I look, and if I want to feel and look good all the time, then I don't have to struggle to change. I automatically start to adapt behaviors that go towards that.
I think I look good now, this is the best this body has ever looked before, I intend for this body to be beautiful for 120 or so more years at which point then I'll be ready for another one, or maybe just some time off from having a body. I can intend whatever I want. You might say that's crazy because the average person does not live that long and so what?
This is my universe I can intend, I can aim at creating whatever I want to. It doesn't matter how long the people beside me live, in the Bible it says people live to 100. Moses lived 120 years old, why can't I live to 150 with all of our modern medicine today? Why can't I look good, feel good, do good that entire time?
I'm grateful today that I see my body as my most beautiful creation, I take care of it, I respect it and part of respecting means exercise.
When I realize this body needs to be active, move around, do things including get out in the sun sometimes, not just be in my dark studio all day, then I go to the beach, put sunscreen on because it needs some sun every week.
I don't have to discipline myself in the way you might think of as whipping myself to exercise. I love exercising every day because I love this body. It's like adding a little bit to my favorite painting or adding some stamps to my lifelong stamp collection.
I used to make models when I was a kid, like cars and airplanes. It was a joy to paint on those airplanes, it was a joy to make them look more beautiful every day. It was a joy to contribute to the beauty of those models every single day, it wasn't work. I didn't have to force myself or do all kinds of crazy schemes. I've done all kinds of crazy schemes when it comes to exercising in my life. I've tried to run, I've hired a personal trainer, I've spent thousands on personal training in my life.
Finally, I realized that just walking every day for an hour and a half, that's enough; standing up when I work for six hours a day, that's enough; being active as a lifestyle in life choice, that's enough.
When I love my body, I want it. I want to do the things that make it look how I want to make it look. I'm not looking to be some huge body builder, because I look how I would like to look right now, it's nice to have a healthy amount of fat, and it’s nice to be more on the thin side rather than on the bigger side. I've weighed 60 to 80 pounds more than this most of my adult life.
Today, I also realize that beauty is in the variation, if every one of us looked the exact same there'd be no beauty, it would be boring. I don't need to try to match up someone else's external standard. I don't need to have abs that match some definition of what a magazine thinks my abs should look like. I don't need to have arms that match some definition of what's supposed to be beautiful, my arms are beautiful just the way they are.
If I want anything to be different like if I want a six pack of abs, then I'll make that if that's how I want to make this beautiful artwork of my life. If I'm not interested in that, it's still nice to know what's possible.
I realize that this body might benefit from shrinking up just a little bit more, take a little bit of the fat off it. The action I was inspired to do with that is start fasting until about noon.
Now, how did I figure out how to do that?
My friend Tomas, his body is a little bit thinner than this one. I listen to how he handles his eating, he does fasting every day, intermittent fasting. I realized that if I want to turn this off a little bit more, then I shall fast. Now it's not something I have to force myself to do. It's just a natural progression, the same as if you want a beautiful painting, you grab the paint brush, then you get your paint and start painting.
If you want a beautiful family and you're single, you get to work making yourself attractive and looking for a mate that wants the same thing.
I hope explaining this has been useful for each of us today, because these are ideas that often seem crazy, especially when I bring up things like aiming to live 150 years, looking just about like this the whole time, and looking at my body as a beautiful creation instead of something that's shameful and nasty, that needs to be hidden.
I'm grateful today to have this message to share because I need to hear it. I need to be reminded of things on a daily basis, just like this.
Thank you very much, I love you, you are awesome.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Happier People Podcast, which was originally filmed as the video below on a walk at the beach in St Petersburg, Florida.
I appreciate you being here and I hope you have a wonderful day today.
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Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript by GoTranscript
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