There are plenty of beautiful fat people, big from hard work and healthy appetites. There are also plenty of men and women who prefer a mate with "more to love." Fat can be sexy. What's not sexy, and you'll know if I'm talking about you, is fat and lazy. Fat and bored. Fat and depressed. Addicted to junk food and television fat. That's not sexy to anybody, and it's a sign that something's wrong with your life.

In the affluent west we have a medical obsession with symptoms, treating symptoms of health and community problems instead of the problems themselves. We medicate for depression and ignore even its simplest environmental drivers, like lack of fresh air and sunshine. We medicate for asthma and continue to pollute our living spaces with toxic chemical cleaners and emissions from oversized vehicles. We live dissatisfying lives, free of joy and fulfillment, and consider obesity our plague.

Obesity is only the most common symptom of chronic dissatisfaction. You chose to read this article because you are dissatisfied with your life and with your body. Thing is, your life and your body are the two things you have that are truly yours. Love them. Treat them as the precious gifts they are. Use them. Is that too vague, perhaps? To tell you to use your life, to use your body? Let me be more specific. My advice to you is this: find one thing, one small thing, that gives you joy, and explore it.

Say you like art. Spend an afternoon once a week exploring free galleries. Buy yourself a sketchpad and pencils, and spend a few days a week searching for scenes or people to sketch. Take drawing or art history books out of the library. Look for community art workshops, or take classes if you can afford it. If you aren't any good, so much the better. You'll only improve. The point is to explore art, and to explore your self through it. The same philosophy works whether you like history, literature, cars, computers, stamp-collecting, sports, photography, fashion, food or any other realm of interest.

Spend time with your passions and find joy in life. Some people's dispositions don't allow for this sort of exploration. These people need goals or end products to look forward to. There's nothing wrong with this. Just remember that no goal is out of reach. Say you admire marathon runners you see on television (it's a safe assumption, dear, fat, unhappy Reader, that you watch television) but you can't climb one flight of stairs without losing your breath. So what? Start by going on a slow daily stroll around the block. It doesn't matter how far or fast you go, what's important is that you go.

Soon enough you'll have the endurance to go longer and then faster. Read up on what runners eat, invest in a good pair of running shoes, hit the track, begin a training regimen. Give yourself time to improve and be forgiving of your limitations. This is for you, not for anybody else. Within a few years, you'll be running a marathon or half-marathon. You'll be that runner you once admired on television, that person who once seemed so different from you. I'm not saying you need to run marathons.

I'm telling you to ask yourself what goal, what activity, what dream you've been denying yourself, and to stop denying yourself of it. You're not too busy. You're not too poor. You're just not using what's yours to use.

Once you stop denying yourself, change will follow. Your outlook will change, your moods and energy levels will improve and you will be healthier, stronger and more confident. You will probably lose weight, too, but that's incidental.

Copyright (c) 2008 Brooke Consulting Co.