A tip or two for healthy living
In between romance and gossip, timeless tips on Jane Austen’s holistic health code
“WHERE health is at stake, nothing else should be considered,” wrote
Jane Austen.
Romance, gossiping into tiny tea cups aside, “health” is mentioned more than 100 times in Austen’s six classic novels – a high frequency for pure romance yarns. Themes of health are so conspicuous throughout her writings, you can trace them from her earliest teenage stories to her final, unfinished novel Sanditon (set in a spa town where Austen is doling out “secure and permanent health” to as many characters as she can).
So cherished and pervasive, the blessings of “improvement of health” run alongside Austen’s usual marryman-of-fortune formula for success.
The likes of Marianne Dashwood, Anne Elliot, Jane Fairfax and
Mrs Smith must all experience a restoration of health before their tales can end happily ever after.
There were shocking similarities between the habits health researchers prescribe today and those Austen extolled more than 200 years ago.
Here are a few of the many lessons she has taught me so far.
Don’t obsess over weight
Living in an era with a weight fixation almost as neurotic as our own (where a cult of sensibility drove women like Dashwood into newfangled starvation diets), Austen calmly disputes the idea that a number on our scales or waistlines somehow reflects our health.
Austen’s characters don’t focus on their weight, they see health for what it truly is. From the Anglo-saxon hale, meaning “whole,” true health brings self-evident harmony to your body, from tip to toe. Hence Austen’s frequent reminders to consider the whole “picture of health.”
Our energy, our skin, our relationship to food and exercise, our stress and emotions, how we feel and think about our bodies – all are important to Austen for determining true wellness. In short, if you are running low on what Austen would term “fresh life and vigour”.
In fact, excessive thinness incurs Austen’s literary wrath. No one stunningly thin is considered healthy or attractive in her novels.
“I am grown wretchedly thin,” admits a former beauty in Northanger Abbey, while Miss de Bourgh is repeatedly described as “thin” and “sickly” in Pride and Prejudice.
Presupposing the diversity of genetics, Austen knew that attractive, healthy bodies come in “every possible variation of form”.
Eat like a heroine
Austen’s advice on love, lust and outmanoeuvring the odd creepy vicar is just as sharp today. But she also left us some brilliant advice on maintaining a proper relationship with food.
Bad food romances, after all, are just as common in Austenworld as bad hookups – from Mr Woodhouse’s joy-sapping diet in Emma to Dr Grant’s fatal eating binges in Mansfield Park. They serve as relevant warnings to our current foodie culture, just as Austen’s heroines serve as guiding lights.
Without counting a single calorie, Austen’s leading ladies exist within every dieter’s nirvana: fully enjoying food as one of the dynamic “comforts of life” without it ever controlling them. They pull it off by sticking to some unique mental strategies all of us can emulate today, from keeping emotions out of eating
(Lizzie famously refuses to gush over “ragout” with Mr Hurst in Pride and Prejudice) to the importance of eating “in company” – food is far safer, for example, in Austen’s novels the more it is communally divided.
“Austenworld” even has its own snacking guidelines, better known at the time as “nuncheon,” a noontime nibble, which brilliantly anticipates the importance of insulin control on weight management.
Exercise intuitively
Mr Darcy aside, you might call it Austen’s biggest fantasy – her seemingly unrealistic insistence that exercise is fun, enjoyable and, above all, easy. In fact, use the most famous exercise whoop from Sense and Sensibility – “Is there a felicity in the world… superior to this?” – and you’d get laughed out of your local gym, where aches and agony are an expected part of any effective workout.
But look again. Because, far from being weak, Austen was espousing something very smart, known today as intuitive exercise, the sensible awareness that our bodies are experts at avoiding pain, that pushing them beyond their physical comfort zones is not a sustainable fitness strategy.
“Shall any of us object to being comfortable?” asks one of the intuitive exercisers in Mansfield Park.
Renew through nature
In my first forays into Austen’s health code, nothing surprised me more than her (rather hippie-ish) beliefs that a good diet requires a daily dose of nature. In her novels, air, water, sunlight and earth are treated almost like vitamins.
Jane Fairfax, for instance, enters the story line of Emma only after being prescribed more fresh “air, for the recovery of her health.”
It was Austen’s nearly 200-year head start on Edward O Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis – the conviction that humans need routine contacts with nature to thrive, both physically and mentally.
Science now supports all of Austen’s nature prescriptions, including the importance of morning light on hormone regulation (“A walk before breakfast does me good,” Jane says in Emma), the realities of sickbuilding syndrome (“bad air” indoors affects Fanny’s health in Mansfield Park), and the rejuvenating magic of forest bathing (a wooded grove brings “comfort” to Anne in Persuasion).
Even Austen’s approval for getting a bit dirty while walking – “her petticoat, six inches deep in mud,” as they say in Pride and Prejudice – finds fresh agreement in the latest health research that suggests exposure to dirt might actually be good for us.
Not too bad for a mere romance writer who figured out the basics centuries ago: we all have “a taste for nature” imprinted on our DNA, a missing puzzle piece as vital and revitalising as love itself. | The Washington Post