“She dumped him for being too fat, but he got revenge by losing 100 pounds. Now he’s lean and trim and she regrets it.”
These stories are popular all over social media, but the most disturbing part is the context and delivery, using words like “dumped”, “revenge”, and “regret”. The fact that this kind of clickbait language is so effective, says something about our current society and it’s quite discouraging.
Anyways, being 100lbs overweight is really unhealthy and can have deadly results. In fact, it’s now found to be deadlier than smoking. If we don’t value or respect ourselves enough to even try to at least be somewhat healthy, why would anyone else value or respect us?
Love does not conquer all things. Love is not unconditional. What?! We humans like to pretend we’re better than that or that we’re above certain things. We’re not, nor should we be. We’re human and this is how we’re built no matter how much we pretend to deny it.
Love taps into a combination of attractiveness, health, humor, value, philosophy, compatibility, intelligence, desirability, safety, confidence, success, outlook, career, resiliency, chemistry, communication, timing, and an endless amount of life sh*t.
And “attractive” doesn’t necessarily have to mean aesthetics, but aesthetics does play a significant role. We’re not all neo-cortex. That’s a good thing; otherwise we’d be completely logical and emotionally dead meat sacks and there would be no such thing as love, art, or beauty in the first place. A terribly boring existence.
We can become unattractive in other ways, besides appearance, such as having a miserable or negative outlook, being unhappy, having no sense of humor, laziness, not valuing ourselves, drama, no self-growth or financial growth, gossip, being habitually disagreeable, constantly being “busy”, controlling, combative, gas-lighting, being “logical” all the time, and not taking care of ourselves.
And vice-versa, we can become more “attractive” by adopting more positive traits.
Getting back to the revenge fitness thing though, who knows why the breakup sparked his motivation to get fit. Maybe it really was revenge. Probably not though, but it sells. While revenge can be a strong motivator, it comes from an unstable source. In this case, he values her perception of him after the fact more than he respects himself for his own good.
I’d like to think it was a wake-up-call and he did it for himself. But, if revenge does inspire or motivate us to move in a more positive direction, that’s great. At some point though, we need to make the transition to doing it for ourselves, our self-worth, and self-respect. Self-respect is the ultimate form of beauty and attractiveness.
I hear Bruce Willis singing in the background, “If you disrespect anybody that you run in to, how in the world do you think anybody’s s’posed to respect you.” Hmm … the first person we run into everyday is ourselves.
“… aww, respect yourself”. Great rendition of this song; great album too: The Return of Bruno. Check it out.
Cheers
Photo by Motown Records
I Am No Yogi 