Dear Fitness Center:
When we joined your gym a few months ago, my partner mentioned that he'd been a member previously. He was asked, "Why did you quit last time?" I understand the purpose of this question, to try and help someone tailor their experience differently in a way that retains customers. The answer, as it is for many people who join gyms and quit them, was a complex muddle of "It cost more in time and money than I was willing/able to spend to get the benefits I wanted."
But if I ever have to answer that question, here's what I'll say:
It's your towels.
Not specifically the towels themselves, you see, but what they represent in the context of your gym and how you manage it.
The best time for me to work out is at lunch, which means I drive over, hit the elliptical for 20-25 minutes, shower, and drive back to work for the afternoon. This is, for me, a workout routine I can establish as a habit, meaning that regular activity 3-5 times a week becomes a set part of my life. All the studies I've read say that, whatever my size, that is an improvement and a positive thing over spending the same lunch hour working, or sitting at my desk and reading.
But here we find...the towels. I am not particularly body-shy. I have used communal showers for almost two decades now, so being unclothed around a bunch of other women in the locker room isn't really a thing with me. But I'd like to wrap a towel around me as I walk from the shower to the locker, in part because it's a bit chilly in there, and in part because that seems to be the standard of behaviour everyone else is engaging in, and I'd like to respect others' comfort levels.
The towel won't wrap, though. Each time I work out, each time I shower, I attempt to squish my body into one of your towels, unable to even convince it to tuck neatly around my chest, and it simply gapes below. My hips and stomach are completely exposed, in all their rounded glory, as I scurry to my locker, trying to juggle my workout clothes and shoes and my glasses and my conditioner, and keep the towel from falling off. I have yet to succeed; every day or two I hold my head up defiantly as that inadequate towel pools around my feet. I can't go back to work unshowered, and packing a towel for my own use adds a load of laundry each week to an already-full domestic schedule, so I face the towel every day, and it demoralizes me, removing some of that endorphin high from my workout.
I look around at all the pictures you have, of people enjoying their workouts, happily swimming and biking and practicing yoga, and every last one of those people is thin. Not just an average-weight person, but a deliberately thin one, one who fits in the towel with ease. There are no pictures of happy fat people working out in your gym, not anywhere. I have never, in fact, worked out in a gym where there were pictures of happy healthy fat people, despite the fact that I know a lot of happy healthy fat people who enjoy working out.
When I came in for my 'free consultation', I explained "I am trying to rebuild healthy habits, so what I plan to do is get in the habit of coming in, just to hit the elliptical, or the treadmill or the stairmaster, several times a week. I have about 25 minutes. Eventually I will want to put together a weights routine that I can switch out with that, even though I know it'll have to be limited." The trainer explained patiently that 25 minutes of weight lifting just wasn't even worth doing, and if I wasn't willing to commit to more time than that, then probably I should just stick to the elliptical, because that would have to be enough and it was 'better than nothing'. I was pushed and pushed and pushed to weigh myself and lay out a 'goal weight' and a 'target weight loss rate' no matter how many times I said it wasn't about getting skinny.
All of this, over and together, tells me that the story you're selling is this one: thin people go to the gym. Thin, happy people are people who work out. People who work out are thin, happy people. There is no space for the fat fit. They do not exist, they do not belong here, this is a place where inadequate people come and they get thin, because thin is how you win when you commit to fitness as a lifestyle.
I will never be thin. Even at my 'goal weight', five or ten pounds above where my face starts to look a little uncanny-angular, I am a 36DDD. As for the bottom half of my body, this train is an express to Callipygia and it is equipped with a full caboose. There is no changing that, and I do not want there to be.
My 'ideal body' is measured in my functionality. At my peak of fitness, I can't tell you my waist size, but I can tell you that I can hike 8 desert miles with ease, and manage Hill Country hikes with hundreds of feet of change in elevation. I can run five back-to-back 20-hour active days without exhaustion. I can lift, carry, and push almost anything I'm likely to need to. My long-term goal is a solo overnight 20 or 30 mile hike. But when I explain to people at your gym these functional goals I have, I hear "Ok, so at what weight do you think you'd be able to do all that?"
So, I get that this is a gym and selling fitness is your job. I get that your job is easiest when I'm satisfied with easy metrics like weight and body fat percentage, and when I'm willing to simply do what I'm told, make getting to the gym on your terms a priority in my life, and live out a 'success story' for your ads. Joe Sixpack who lost 60 pounds and umpty inches makes a much better photo op than the woman who hauls her size fourteen fluffy ass up 15 miles of Big Bend trails.
And I get that you're telling the story larger culture taught you: There is no room in fitness for fat people. A fat person in the gym can't possibly be working on any goal beyond self-erasure. I cannot possibly have a workout goal that includes expanding anything about myself, not even my capacity for physical endurance, because expanse should be my enemy.
I also get that you can't change that larger culture. That asking a business to change its entire philosophy when most of us can't even find pants in our size or doctors who'll consider non-weight-related causes is not so realistic. You can't change how the world views me, you can't change the American perception of fitness to include the fact that it is a thing personally defined, by each and every one of us, that it is a constantly-changing idea based on the capacity of the body you inhabit, not a cookie-cutter image of fat-free triathletes smiling past their water bottles.
You can't singlehandedly end shaming and misinformation about weight, you can't singlehandedly make people understand that the entire idea of 'extreme diet and workout program to get to the right size' is a path to failure every single time because it can never be sustainable, you cannot completely revolutionize the world so that fat people feel welcome, so that we feel we have a right to exist in this world.
But you know what you can do?
Get bigger towels.
Showing posts with label fat prejudice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fat prejudice. Show all posts
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Simplicity
Life is a complicated exercise made up of simple equations.
For example, weight and health are a function of simple equations of diet and lifestyle. Nothing simpler. If you want to gain weight, consume more calories than you burn, every day. If you want to lose weight, burn more calories than you consume, every day. If you want to maintain weight, equalize the two roughly.
Except that the numbers in the equation are made up of multiple variables, many of which change throughout our lives and can be hard to quantify. Metabolism, thyroid function, family history all play a part. So do food allergies and reactions, and the type of diet you have. Diets higher in fat, or carbohydrates, or protein, change your body chemistry and affect how you handle resources and energy. Whether the 300 calories you burn in your workout are aerobic or anaerobic, whether you're building muscle or burning fat, it all plays into that equation. If the disparity between calories taken in and calories burned is too great OR too small, then your metabolism compensates and the desired effect doesn't happen. Behind that simple "(calories in - calories out)/3500 = weight change in pounds" equation is an entire life's work of understanding your own body and what you want it to do for you.
'Being healthy' is another simple thing. Eat a variety of foods that provide you the resources you need, get regular moderate exercise and plenty of restful sleep, drink lots of water, see your physician for an annual checkup or if anything about your health needs managing. Very simple, and if we all did that, we'd all be healthy regardless of our waist sizes. All the mysterious miracle "eat this and don't eat that and never touch this food and if you only eat sugar while standing on one foot it doesn't count" diet voodoo in the world can't even begin to touch the benefits of giving your body the right amounts of rest, resources, and exertion.
But then come the variables. What are the resources you need and how do you prioritize them? If you need more iron, do you get it from leafy green vegetables that are loaded with fiber and other nutrients but don't supply much protein, or meat that supplies protein with added fat and no fiber? Vitamin D in your milk, or from sunshine? What if you're allergic or sensitive to a food that provides a critical nutrient? Do multivitamins supply the things you need, or just pass through your system undigested? How do chronic health conditions, from celiac disease to fibromyalgia to insomnia, play into the balance of eating, exercise, and sleep? Is your thrice-weekly strength training a sustainable lifelong practice? How can you afford to see a doctor regularly or even in an emergency if you have no health insurance and can't afford an office visit?
Habits also play a huge part in how we live and in our general health. It is my habit to have a cup of coffee every morning. This decreases the absorption of my iron supplement, so on days I take iron, I have to delay my cup of coffee until mid-morning and start my day with orange juice. It is my habit to come home from work and relax with my cats for a while to unwind, but after doing that it's really hard to get motivated to go exercise. If I want to get in the active time I have to come home, immediately change, work out, and then pet the cats. Because it's important to me to stay active and healthy, I have had to figure out ways to balance what I need to do with what I want to do.
That is, at the heart of it, what solving the equation comes down to. Would I be healthier if I didn't eat cookies for breakfast as often as I do, and if I never blew off working out to read a book and drink a glass of wine instead? Probably, and I'd definitely be thinner, but I wouldn't be as happy. Meeting specific and often socially-imposed criteria about the shape of my body is less important to me than enjoying the life experience that body is having, so there's a variable in my personal equation that says, "Is that fun, or at least not terribly annoying?" If the answer is no, there has to be a significant payoff for me to make that choice. A lot of folks see my insistence on honoring that variable as weak-willed or lazy, and they make assumptions about me based on the importance I place on living joyfully.
The biggest problem with all this is that people confuse 'simple' and 'easy'. The simple thing is the easy thing if it also happens to be the thing that fits in with your needs, practices, and priorities, but that's rarely the case. Consequently, some people look at others and see them struggling with what appears, from the outside, to be an easy fix. Without understanding the variables affecting another person's experience, the inability to separate 'simple' and 'easy' can lead to frustration, and even to judgment, bigotry, and discrimination.
We look at an obese person or someone with a chronic illness, and think, "How unhealthy. Why can't she just exercise and eat right?" and we make assumptions about her -- usually that her evenings consist of sitting on the sofa eating ice cream right out of the container. But there are things we don't know, can't know: what her metabolism is like, whether she lives in a food desert and can't afford fresh fruits and vegetables, whether she has a chronic health condition that makes exercise difficult, whether she's perfectly happy looking the way she does, whether she's quite healthy and as active as she wants to be, or whether decades of being pressured to look and act and eat and live a certain way have left her depressed or suffering from an eating disorder.
At its heart, fat hate and fat prejudice (and most ableist prejudices) come from the assumption that other people can and should solve their equations with your variables. They should be able to shoehorn their experience and their priorities into a set of life choices that matches what the mythical "everyone" wants. They should place the same value on what really is a marketing-driven artificial standard of 'healthy living' and strive to operate within it. The media machine that's worked so well to convince us that somewhere there is one perfect diet or exercise plan that will render everyone identically thin and healthy (and Dr. Oz will tell you all about it after this message from our sponsors) has also convinced us that living outside of an artificially established 'normal' body image is not only a conscious choice, but a lazy, despicable, self-destructive one.
Many of my friends are frequently trying to 'get healthier', with varying degrees of success. The ones who succeed aren't the most dedicated or the strongest-willed. They're the ones who work to understand as many of their own variables as possible, from the biology (family history, metabolism) to the limitations (allergies, mobility concerns, medical issues) to the geographical (availability of food resources and activity centers) to the emotional (habits, body image satisfaction, priorities), and come up with a vision of 'health' that is reasonable for them and a set of sustainable lifestyle choices they can make to reach and maintain that goal.
What does all this ultimately mean? Well, from my point of view it means I'm likely to keep eating cookies for breakfast, and work to resolve any discontent with the life and the body that choice creates.
For example, weight and health are a function of simple equations of diet and lifestyle. Nothing simpler. If you want to gain weight, consume more calories than you burn, every day. If you want to lose weight, burn more calories than you consume, every day. If you want to maintain weight, equalize the two roughly.
Except that the numbers in the equation are made up of multiple variables, many of which change throughout our lives and can be hard to quantify. Metabolism, thyroid function, family history all play a part. So do food allergies and reactions, and the type of diet you have. Diets higher in fat, or carbohydrates, or protein, change your body chemistry and affect how you handle resources and energy. Whether the 300 calories you burn in your workout are aerobic or anaerobic, whether you're building muscle or burning fat, it all plays into that equation. If the disparity between calories taken in and calories burned is too great OR too small, then your metabolism compensates and the desired effect doesn't happen. Behind that simple "(calories in - calories out)/3500 = weight change in pounds" equation is an entire life's work of understanding your own body and what you want it to do for you.
'Being healthy' is another simple thing. Eat a variety of foods that provide you the resources you need, get regular moderate exercise and plenty of restful sleep, drink lots of water, see your physician for an annual checkup or if anything about your health needs managing. Very simple, and if we all did that, we'd all be healthy regardless of our waist sizes. All the mysterious miracle "eat this and don't eat that and never touch this food and if you only eat sugar while standing on one foot it doesn't count" diet voodoo in the world can't even begin to touch the benefits of giving your body the right amounts of rest, resources, and exertion.
But then come the variables. What are the resources you need and how do you prioritize them? If you need more iron, do you get it from leafy green vegetables that are loaded with fiber and other nutrients but don't supply much protein, or meat that supplies protein with added fat and no fiber? Vitamin D in your milk, or from sunshine? What if you're allergic or sensitive to a food that provides a critical nutrient? Do multivitamins supply the things you need, or just pass through your system undigested? How do chronic health conditions, from celiac disease to fibromyalgia to insomnia, play into the balance of eating, exercise, and sleep? Is your thrice-weekly strength training a sustainable lifelong practice? How can you afford to see a doctor regularly or even in an emergency if you have no health insurance and can't afford an office visit?
Habits also play a huge part in how we live and in our general health. It is my habit to have a cup of coffee every morning. This decreases the absorption of my iron supplement, so on days I take iron, I have to delay my cup of coffee until mid-morning and start my day with orange juice. It is my habit to come home from work and relax with my cats for a while to unwind, but after doing that it's really hard to get motivated to go exercise. If I want to get in the active time I have to come home, immediately change, work out, and then pet the cats. Because it's important to me to stay active and healthy, I have had to figure out ways to balance what I need to do with what I want to do.
That is, at the heart of it, what solving the equation comes down to. Would I be healthier if I didn't eat cookies for breakfast as often as I do, and if I never blew off working out to read a book and drink a glass of wine instead? Probably, and I'd definitely be thinner, but I wouldn't be as happy. Meeting specific and often socially-imposed criteria about the shape of my body is less important to me than enjoying the life experience that body is having, so there's a variable in my personal equation that says, "Is that fun, or at least not terribly annoying?" If the answer is no, there has to be a significant payoff for me to make that choice. A lot of folks see my insistence on honoring that variable as weak-willed or lazy, and they make assumptions about me based on the importance I place on living joyfully.
The biggest problem with all this is that people confuse 'simple' and 'easy'. The simple thing is the easy thing if it also happens to be the thing that fits in with your needs, practices, and priorities, but that's rarely the case. Consequently, some people look at others and see them struggling with what appears, from the outside, to be an easy fix. Without understanding the variables affecting another person's experience, the inability to separate 'simple' and 'easy' can lead to frustration, and even to judgment, bigotry, and discrimination.
We look at an obese person or someone with a chronic illness, and think, "How unhealthy. Why can't she just exercise and eat right?" and we make assumptions about her -- usually that her evenings consist of sitting on the sofa eating ice cream right out of the container. But there are things we don't know, can't know: what her metabolism is like, whether she lives in a food desert and can't afford fresh fruits and vegetables, whether she has a chronic health condition that makes exercise difficult, whether she's perfectly happy looking the way she does, whether she's quite healthy and as active as she wants to be, or whether decades of being pressured to look and act and eat and live a certain way have left her depressed or suffering from an eating disorder.
At its heart, fat hate and fat prejudice (and most ableist prejudices) come from the assumption that other people can and should solve their equations with your variables. They should be able to shoehorn their experience and their priorities into a set of life choices that matches what the mythical "everyone" wants. They should place the same value on what really is a marketing-driven artificial standard of 'healthy living' and strive to operate within it. The media machine that's worked so well to convince us that somewhere there is one perfect diet or exercise plan that will render everyone identically thin and healthy (and Dr. Oz will tell you all about it after this message from our sponsors) has also convinced us that living outside of an artificially established 'normal' body image is not only a conscious choice, but a lazy, despicable, self-destructive one.
Many of my friends are frequently trying to 'get healthier', with varying degrees of success. The ones who succeed aren't the most dedicated or the strongest-willed. They're the ones who work to understand as many of their own variables as possible, from the biology (family history, metabolism) to the limitations (allergies, mobility concerns, medical issues) to the geographical (availability of food resources and activity centers) to the emotional (habits, body image satisfaction, priorities), and come up with a vision of 'health' that is reasonable for them and a set of sustainable lifestyle choices they can make to reach and maintain that goal.
What does all this ultimately mean? Well, from my point of view it means I'm likely to keep eating cookies for breakfast, and work to resolve any discontent with the life and the body that choice creates.
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