If I were asked what new thing crossed through my life in this pandemic, I would choose to say it was an inclination toward a greater well-being and commitment to fitness, if anything at all. A lot of us either enrolled into a program to alter our daily intake of calories or got ourselves gym trainers. However, a healthy lifestyle is not something to be boxed with a range of physical fitness and diet schedules. They extend beyond that.
Experimental perspectives
While a large group of people flooded into being fitness influencers over social media, there was a significant group in the same arena exploring ideas about body positivity, egalitarianism, and maintaining a pious mental health at the same time normalizing counseling sessions through marriages and psychiatry. This group chose to look beyond immunization of just the body. They considered being better versions of themselves just by the absolute idea of accepting themselves as they are. To find the courage to face yourselves when the going gets harder and planning a solution is beyond your scope, is when you immunize your mental health against a higher form of virus that victimizes a larger share of population. They existed as a reminder to everyone that a healthy lifestyle might not just be limited to their daily diet.
The left-out mass
With a bird’s eye view at the plight of the society we come across a section of people who lost their source of livelihood and the capability to feed themselves and their family. A healthy lifestyle would a distant goal to them. Most of them stayed disconnected to the world, their kids lost their means of education. The government tried to extend relief although but clearly, as every morning a nutritionist filled his/her plate with eggs, fruits, fibrous cereals, a peer at a slum had a plate barely full.
So no matter how expansive the healthy lifestyle program was for the entire world, a huge mass was left out struggling for a livelihood as badly as even risking their lives, the migrant workers case in India during the first lockdown in 2020 is a beaming reminder. At the same time, people with access to connectivity and financial resources found to have taken their own perspectives of a healthy lifestyle into experimentation among peers and managed to influence their own set of followers. This play of ideas and perspectives around a healthy life during the pandemic gave people a chance to be more aware of health issues and step forward to self-care.
