Last year I got very serious about gaining weight. I had been “underweight” for a while and didn’t like it, I took some serious steps that included some strength and weight working out but one of the most important steps I took was watching what I ate. It made a big difference and I soon realised I had to add about a couple of meals a day to make up for my active lifestyle as well as cutting down on some fatty foods and adding in some richer protein.
It worked and I gained the weight I wanted fairly quickly. This is no unusual, many people face weight and health issues (either over or underweight) and change their diet to affect that, but do you think about it more broadly than just what you physically eat? What about the media you consume?
Photographic food
Someone recently challenged me to work through the key magnum photographers. It’s easy to do as many of their works are on the magnum website. Doing so was a way to start consuming the creme de la creme of photography. If this was food it would be a fine steak dinner in a fancy restaurant.
This experience actually gave me “photography” bloc at first, I felt so in awe of their images and mine seems so terrible in comparison that I didn’t want to go out shooting. However, I found some of them so interesting and rich. I’ve gone back and looked at many of these again seeking new ideas and inspiration from them.
In comparison, many of the images on social media sites are like McDonalds, they are light and easy, with little depth. Sure some of them have a clever trick but ultimately they don’t make you think, they don’t richen you and many are terrible (see my comments on photo communities here).
Ultimately, they don’t give you the nutrient you need to grow. It’s like me with my weight gain, I was weak and punney because I wasn’t getting enough good rich food. It’s the same with looking at terrible photos all the time.
Spiritual food
Similarly with the news, books, games and so on, they all send out a message. Most of it is a message of hate and greed. This might be subtle but a lot of it teaches us to keep wanting more things, to not be satisfied in ourselves, to distrust others and to not like those who are different (they might be a different group, or they might have done something “bad” so we should judge them, worst of all they might not like us so we should hate them back).
If you are taking all that in, it will come out in you. If you are surrounding yourself by people telling you that you should want something…you’ll start to want it. If people tell you that you shouldn’t trust someone, you won’t trust them.
However, it’s not all bad news.
Eating good food
After all If you eat good things (great photos, rich spiritual food like reading the bible and meditating) then you’ll grow strong quickly. Just like how as soon as I started purposeful replacing the rubbish fat with good rich protein and making sure I got enough each day, I started to bulk up quickly, cutting out poor photos and replacing them with high quality ones and cutting out negative input sources and replacing them with deep ones will lead to the world of difference in your photography and more importantly your whole life.
Of course, you’ll need to exercise those muscles too, but getting good food is vital to give you the energy to do that.
Are you watching what you eat?
Are you making sure that your input sources are rich? That you avoid the calls to take the easy root or pursue worthless riches?