New Year.
BY CHRISTIAN ADRIAN BROWN
FIT LIT Body, Mind and Quill
ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Quadragenarian fitness model, lifestyle coach and bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Feast of Fates, Christian A. Brown received a Kirkus star in 2014 for the first novel in his genrechanging Four Feasts till Darkness series. He has appeared on Newstalk 1010, AM640, Daytime Rogers, and Get Bold Today with LeGrande Green. He actively writes and speaks about his mother’s journey with cancer and on gender issues in the media.
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FEBRUARY / MARCH 2022
We’ve talked about New Year’s resolutions before, moreover, how to structure them into small, measurable goals to achieve incremental success. If you’re looking for advice on that front, you can revisit my piece in last year’s early issue. Today, though, I’d like to talk about a specific metric for personal fulfillment and success, your health. Since this is a literary column or at least one where we talk about the conjunction of wellness and literature, we’ll later talk about how you can use reading—yes reading—to enhance your health. Covid has been a daunting global challenge. We’ll be dealing with the personal, financial and policy aftershocks of the pandemic for decades to come. Although one thing that we’ve known from the beginning—and which has been largely ignored in the panic and mania surrounding the disease—is that people who suffer from metabolic disorders are disproportionately affected by the illness. In addition to modern therapeutics and vaccines, control over our health and wellness has always been within our reach. Now more than ever, we need to be having familial, community and national conversations about health and the sovereign, personal actions we should all be taking to ease the burden on our health care systems. As someone who has worked in the fitness industry with people of various body types, I can assure you that there is no “perfect” body. I can equally assure you that no one should aspire to be too thin or too large. Just do the best that you can with nutrition and activity and allow your body to find its ideal fat/ muscle distribution. Don’t look to magazines, social media or other coercive influences to tell you how you should feel about your body. As we begin to understand more and more about the corrosive— and not just the beneficial—aspects of social media, we learn that these places are echo chambers and often do
