Housewives starting businesses with micro loans.
Thriving, some of them.
But if your husband decides to take your money or hit you or your children, you are his property. It’s his choice.
Or is it?
The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff, takes on all this and more, while being laugh out loud funny. The humor is sometimes dark but earned, and the ending is sweet.
This is a somewhat dismal quote, but hang on for the flip side.
Individuals who perceived themselves as less active than others were up to 71% more likely to die in the follow-up period than those who perceived themselves as more active. This finding held across 3 samples and after adjusting for actual levels of physical activity and other covariates. Conclusions: Individuals’ perceptions about their level of physical activity strongly predicted mortality, even after accounting for the effects of actual physical activity and other known determinants of mortality. This suggests that perceptions about health behaviors may play an important role in shaping health outcomes. – Zahrt, O. H., & Crum, A. J. (2017). Perceived physical activity and mortality: Evidence from three nationally representative U.S. samples. Health Psychology, 36(11), 1017–1025.
Thinking you’re less active than your peers can have negative affects. Turns out the opposite is also true. Hotel maids who were educated on how much *exercise* is involved in their daily work and that they were getting more exercise than recommended had their blood pressure drop and other changes despite making no conscious changes to their routine- just being aware that their job activities was beneficial.
More recently, researchers found you can see similar affects with step counters. (Gift link – no paywall.)
(I will note, as usual, that pedometers do not always work uniformly on superfat people etc etc.)
What I will say is: Give yourself credit for what you are doing for yourself.
Getting enough sleep? Yay!
Following up on some nagging thing like a sore tooth or getting a physical? Yay!
Rubbing lotion into your dry skin and maybe giving yourself a bit of a foot massage? Yay!
Going for a walk? Yay!
It all counts.
If it helps, remember this meme:
I seem to have hit on a string of books where the characters drink alcohol every day. Usually multiple drinks at a sitting.
Then I read a Tumblr post that reiterates that 3 to 5 drinks at a time is considered a binge, and the liver needs time to process it, so even if you only have a drink a day your liver is getting affected. Plus researchers poking holes in the theory that “moderate drinking” is good for you.
Yes, before he passed, my dad had alcohol-related dementia. So it can be a button for me. But there ia a lot of weirdness around alcohol in our culture. I don’t thinking any drinking means “OMG PROBLEM”. I do wonder at cocktails followed by wine followed by port.
Possibly some media depictions of drinking are merely aspirations of having the time and money for that sort of thing, similar to Dorothy Sayers giving her character Lord Peter Wimsey a new, spacious flat with a butler and a racing car while she herself was “hard up”. I don’t want to deprive authors of wish fulfillment. And yet…why is this the wish?
Are you thinking about leaving your state or country? This essay has a good discussion of factors. The comments are even worth reading.