Ever see that extremely buff Norse-god-looking Youtuber with a million plus subscribers, new posts every week, go on and on about how awesome his workout regimen is? You know, that guy, the one who speaks with such extreme knowledge that you think you were in a college course in biochemistry as he goes on and on about proteins, hormone secretions, neurotransmitters, insulin, creatine, B-12, electrolytes, bioflavonoids, ketones and the krebs cycle? He’ll blast you with cautions about carbs, gluten, salt, energy bars and granola. His perky pects, bowling ball deltoids, cobra-hooded latissimus dorsi, chiseled abs that look like the challa bread he doesn’t eat tell the story of a lifestyle solely dedicated to the minute details of the dedicated monastic life of the health nut. Standing in his kitschy kitchen movie set where he guzzles his pure filtered water, his hulking physique and balanced-biome colon assuring you that he has the golden path to Wellville. Adonis doesn’t eat meals, he feeds on macros. Eating is intake. Dishes are calories. His life, measured to the beats of fasting and feasting, bulking and cutting, HIIT and low-intensity cardio, lifting and resting, is also punctuated by tips on individual packets of peanut butter, canned sardines, and single-serving plastic pouches filled with the miracles of medium chain triglycerides and branched chain amino acids.
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Perhaps it’s the lurid Dr. Kellogg in me as well, curious about the size, bulk and quality of his excremental self. Is this what is meant by stinking suspicion? That I wonder what kind of poo does this Adonis make? What is the product of his vastly superior and scientifically proven diet? What is the residue of his fibrous, omega-replete, amino-rich diet? To what level has he perfected the b.m.? Does it exit cleanly and have the corporeal approximation of cardboard-colored Colgate? Is he perhaps an alchemist? Have his perfect glutes managed to swiftly jettison … a turd of gold?
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What, in short, is in the periphery of Adonis, what in the shadows, behind the movie set kitchen? What is left unsaid? I can’t help but fantasize about the contents of the superhero’s garbage can. Does he recycle? What’s left of the now contaminated residuum of those single-serving wrappers of Cliff Bars? Are his Almond milk containers and plastic jugs of pea protein clogging up a landfill? Those leftover tins of tuna and sacks of raw, organic almonds, once lovingly stored in his stainless steel Frigidaire, now finding their way to the ocean to be inhaled by a sperm whale?
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Highlighted for me is how normal it is that our minds are divided into little categories. Categories where whole existences, whole lives, occur. Categories of self and other. Between body and not body. How extremely careful, how positively obsessed, we can be in regards to diet, exercise, health and wellness. How driven we are to look and feel sublime. How detailed we can be in determining the correct balances, and nutritive substances of our bodies. Yet somehow perversely split this oh so careful concern from a similar care for the natural world. Where are the plastic wrappers from all that ostensibly healthy food? It’s estimated that by 2050, the ocean will have more plastic than fish. There is already more plastic than the once mighty stocks of cod. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who at 821 pounds a year, isn’t the only protein-enthusiast gorging on cod – plastic and climate catastrophe may handle the rest. *
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At what point do we think of something not ourselves? Is the skin the impermeable membrane of our all-too-human categories? Is every cell that gets on the morning’s post-constitutional scale a part of the self? At what point does the air filling my lungs become part of me? At what point does the air exhaling from my lungs become not me? Or, what am I without the billions of symbiotic bacteria without which my body would hastily fail? Are the countries of bacterial cultures mapping the territories of my colon also … um… me?
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It’s been said that toilet training toddlers get a bit sad in parting from what was inside them only moments before elimination. Adults have amnesic disavowal from memories of childhood under the height of three feet, but the toddler may remember experiencing a different type, a broader sense of selfhood. The toddler’s secret – they know the turd is, or was, themselves – they look into the pot, inspect the odoriferous product and somewhat emotionally bid it “adieu.” Self and other are not yet full concepts.
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Posed in adult language, what then, is not me, and what, or where, am I? Does the self end at the boundaries of the commode, the sewer, the landfills and the marshes? Where do we locate ourselves in the world? Are not our very selves not a single skin and meat-trapped ghost, but an assemblage of symbiotic interconnections with the world, connections of air, water, energy? And if so – and I don’t know why not – where can our care, or consciousness, extend? Could not our wellness obsessions extend to our forests, rivers and oceans? Could not the material, physical world, an extension of our own perfect, pure bodies? As the saying goes, we are what we eat. But the inverse is also true. The world is what we leave behind.
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*I just read that The Rock has cut back on eating cod, a move that might be enough to save the species with can only live in the coldest water. No word yet on what the Rock is cooking now.
A Fragile Dignity 