Maybe you do eat too much and move too little...

So?

‘Move more eat less’ is the cruel adage of every fat-free social media fitness guru. It hurts. It feels like we SHOULD do better because it means our fatness is OUR FAULT. And I think for a lot of us it is. Not our FAULT exactly, but not moving enough and eating too much IS exactly what is happening. And I think IT IS within the realm of possibility that we can change it. But I’m not convinced that we should. And I think if we don’t want to… then we shouldn’t.

Unlike what popular culture would have us believe, by near constant promotion of every new fitness fad that springs up on the block, fitness and eating well are hobbies. They are interests. And you don’t have to be interested in them.

Fitness only became popular in the 80s and has really only become widely mainstream in the late 90’s. The Pilates boom, my studio and my career have been part of, happened in the early 00s. The fact that everyone has heard of Pilates even if they aren’t exactly sure what it is, is astonishing considering it is an abstract form developed post WWI by an Austrian man who mainly peddled it to mid-century dancers in NYC and originally created it for wounded soldiers! It was never even trademarked. The fact that it now exists at your grandma’s YMCA is fairly shocking. 

This is the case for pretty much every other form of exercise you can think of besides weight lifting (turns out lifting heavy things has been around since we had opposable thumbs and heavy stuff to lift). Running? didn’t really get much traction till the late 70s. All this Hiit stuff? like, in the last ten years even though it was originally developed in the early 80s. Orange Theory? Barf. I look forwards to when they go the way of Radio Shack.. Barre? originally developed in the 30s and still has all the patriarchal trappings of a form created to keep women thin (p.s. Barre absolutely will not make you thin and will most likely hurt your back) without looking too messy doing it.

This is all to say that even 20 years ago there was no where near the pressure to WORKOUT that there is today. I’m not saying fatphobia didn’t exist. It did. But the steady thrum of treadmills and spin bikes on every corner could never have been imagined. Trying-not-to-be-fat was mainly relegated to taking uppers and going on horrifying diets like only eating grapefruits all day (please don’t do either). Gyms were still for ‘meat heads’ and ‘jocks’. 20 years ago it was still taboo for women to lift weights! I know, because in high school my bestie and I used to lift weights together and we were usually the only females in the free weight room besides maybe one heavily steroided lady flexing her delts. Back then if you lifted weights you were into body building and also steroids were a lot more socially acceptable. For reference this is the mid 90s and my friend and I were not into bodybuilding, we were the generation paving the way for women to enter the free weight room just because we wanted to add lifting some heavy shit to our workout routine! My generation basically enabled the modern gym, the Equinox’s of our day, to exist. Before us, gyms were smelly, sweaty and decidedly men-only, even if it wasn’t said explicitly on the door. Fitness as we experience it today is still new!

Body types are also real. Just as there are people who eat junk food and are sedentary and are still slim, there are people who eat ‘healthfully’ and exercise a lot and are still large. (healthfully in quotes because that is a loaded term and to most people it just means low fat but in my opinion encompasses anything which is not made for shelf stability and addictive behavior over nutrition.)

The above painting is from 1774. It depicts the greek goddess Ariadne. The painter is one of the first female neoclassical artists, Angelica Kauffman, who painted in England during this time. We can be certain she had a model for this painting and at that time the model would have been living on a diet of almost completely peas, beans and the most dense bran-y-est bread you’ve never seen. Like break your tooth whole grain bread that just doesn’t exist today.

She did not have access to endless hoho’s and soft drinks. She also didn’t Netflix and chill. Life was challenging (like haul your own water and dig your own potatoes challenging) and food was much more scarce. And yet there she is, voluptuous hips and thick thighs spilling from diaphanous silks. She does not look like a wan pasty college student eating the saddest vegan diet ever… even though I’m sure she was in her twenties and was in fact eating the saddest vegan diet ever. More peas please!

So here we are. Living in the age of a popular fitness boom. And some of us are naturally thicker and some slimmer. And a lot of us eat out of synch with our physical needs and rarely move our bodies anywhere close to the potential that bodies, ALL bodies, naturally have (even disabled people can exercise quite strenuously otherwise the special Olympics and wheelchair section of the NYC (and other) marathon wouldn’t exist). There was no indoor toilets when that model was modeling. Anytime she had to poop she probably went up and down several flights of stairs then walked to an outhouse where if she had any sense she probably did a hover squat over the most nasty butt-box ever and ran away as quickly as possible. You and I walk like 3 feet, flush and walk away. Also check out her arms! Girl was ripped. Nothing was made of plastic in her day. Anything she was carrying, using, opening, lifting, was either in a glass or ceramic jar, a sack (super hard to lift) or a wooden crate. No GrubHub delivery for her! When you compare the kind of lives that our bodies are made to survive with how we are living today WE ARE eating too much and moving too little because that is exactly how modern life is set up!

We live in a sedentary society. Fat is the default. How could it not be? We don’t even walk to the mailbox for the morning newspaper anymore. Amazon killed walking to the shops. With smart lightbulbs and electronics you don’t even have to get up to turn the light on and off…I just turned up the heat from my couch by using my phone. I could have walked across the room.. but why get up?? All those little lost moments of movement ADD UP. We sit A LOT. Even typing away used to be a more active activity. Have you ever pressed old timey typewriter keys? Those buttons take energy to push! Typewriters are heavy and changing the ink was a whole process. Now we just tap away on our ultra efficient devices and let our systems slowly turn into prototypes for the Wall-E people.

What if being chubby or even fat IS your fault (‘fault’ is a harsh word, more like, potentially you have the option to change some of this). AND ALSO what if it was just no biggie if you didn’t? Like not everyone is into every interest and our modern world is completely set up to make it very hard to move our bodies and eat fresh food in balance with our sedentary lifestyle. You don’t have to be a hero. You don’t have to feel bad about yourself because you aren’t bucking an unfair capitalist system designed to deprive you of reasons to engage with your body and simultaneously encourage you to eat an endless array of snack foods (the amount of food options in the modern grocery store is BOGGLING - no one needs that many pretzel options!). You don’t have to behave like a chubby Viking, brandishing a peloton at the howling winds of endless Amazon deliveries, while simultaneously throwing all your delivery apps into ‘uninstall’.

Fitness is an interest. You don’t have to be ‘into’ it. While I can easily equate the need for physical fitness with the need to brush your teeth, they are very different. While both have dramatic effects on your physical and even mental health (no one feels good about themselves with a mouthful of stinky rotten teeth) for one you need a toothbrush, toothpaste and a place to spit, for the other you need hours of your week, at least a few special clothes, some general instruction, and since it takes much longer to exercise than it takes to wash some plaque off your teeth, it super duper helps if you have at least a mild interest in taking it on. This is 100% why fitness fads come and go.. they are for people who aren’t into a sport or skill but found a movement activity that was fun (which is great!).. until it wasn’t, and now they stopped, and now no one is doing Reebok slide anymore.

‘Move more eat less’ is a very painful #fitspo phrase that keeps sticking around and I think the reason it has such staying power is because for a lot of us it’s true. And for many of us, it won’t change without a major lifestyle overhaul which might even truly necessitate getting a new job. I recently had a client change where she worked because her old company wanted to return to the office but she was able to find the same position with a new company staying virtual. She made this switch because staying virtual allows her to jog during the day, something she discovered over the pandemic and didn’t want to give up.

But for a lot of us, it won’t change. For most of us, our bodies won’t change because we don’t want to change or we can’t change ( it’s not easy to find your same job but with a new ultra-flexible option). For a lot of us, there is no real interest in fitness or exercise or engaging with our body in those ways. And if we’re not interested we just won’t do it or we won’t stick with it. And really, you don’t have to. And hand-in-hand with that, you don’t have to care about what you eat really either.

You are an adult and you are allowed to be interested in what interests you and treat your body however you want to treat it. Your chub, or your fatness is not harming anyone (not even yourself). And even if it was ( because a lot of junk food is actually harmful at a more cellular level) .. who cares. People smoke. People drive without their seatbelts on. People hike without telling anyone where they are going and don’t bring water… people do dangerous harmful things all the time. That’s human nature. The fact that you aren’t into something as mind-numbingly boring as sitting on an exercise bike with a bunch of strangers in a dark room at 6AM.. is, I think, a compliment to you.

Fitness and eating well are hobbies. They are interests that take time, research and require changes to your daily life. The massive SHOULD that has been emblazoned over an activity that used to be for ‘jocks’ is bizarre unless you take a wider lens and couple it with America’s obsession with efficiency (read UNATTAINABLE PERFECT HEALTH), a very specific western white youthful definition of beauty and productivity that keeps our capitalist machine running. It is true that being regularly physically active is good for your health and true that working out will change your body in subtle and not subtle ways depending on where you were before you began and what you choose to do for an activity. It’s true that working out is good for your mental health (unless of course you are using it to debase and abuse yourself, to punish yourself or to endlessly obsess via tracking apps and gadgets). It is true that eating lots of fruit and vegetables and being mindful about your energy and the size of your meals is generally beneficial for you in terms of digestion, sustained energy, metabolism, reproductive health not to mention heart and brain health. Totally true!

AND it’s also true that you can be a sedentary person completely uninterested in connecting and engaging with your body outside of daily activities and STILL BE valuable (and even healthy too!). You can still be a valuable, insightful, intelligent kind and loving (and loved!) person who also drinks liters of soda, stops for gas station pizza and eats drive-through on your way home from work. Or maybe you mainly ‘eat healthy’ but also eating bags of M&Ms after dinner (please see my post on ‘eating-a-lot’). These actions are just things that you do, and they mainly affect only you, and they don’t really mean any more or less about you than my disinterest in owning a 6ft salt water fish tank or someone being really into Manga comics.

My love of fitness and wellness is born out of many things but the first is that I really like moving my body. I straight up enjoy sweating, being sore, trying physically hard things, and doing new things with my arms legs and torso. For whatever innate and by-my-own-life-circumstance reasons, I have always had some level of physical confidence. If you did not grow up with that (and being a klutz is a real thing – aka certain aspects of one’s nervous system can be under-developed/under stimulated – and/or you might have been a lanky, tall teen, which is a challenging body to inhabit with grace.. or a round kid with stocky legs that made running across 90s kids soccer fields feel like trying to pogo stick across the Gobi desert) then being really excited about moving your body will most likely not come naturally. Which is ALSO OK! 

You are not only allowed to be ‘not into’ fitness, you’re allowed to not be into eating well. Eating ‘well’ if you did not grow up with it as a personal or family culture is a big shift. It means preparing and eating lots of fruits and veggies (like LOTS), drinking water every day (every time you go to the sink chug a glass of water and then fill a glass to take with you - or buy one of those giant cups people rave about!), avoiding excessive sugar, caffeine, alcohol (oh no! everything we use to alter our moods!), eating a variety of good quality fats and proteins..(what are those?? I’m already overwhelmed!) having a varied and mainly home-cooked diet…(help! what is boiled water??) all of this is IDEAL for so many bodily functions and chemicals that affect our mental health and longevity. 100%! And ALSO plenty of lovely talented people have done everything within their powers to de-support and literally harm their bodies and still we revere them; Elvis, Winston Churchill, every musician who has died of an overdose… Prince, culturally beloved characters like John Belushi.. Do you notice a trend? They are all men…

All of them ate, drank and drugged themselves to death in one way or another and yet they still hold hallowed positions in our cultural history for the many wonderful things they created, said or did. Where are all the fat, drunk, drugged out women of history?? Surely there have been so many talented women who’s seams strained with their every movement! Only Aretha Franklin comes to mind as a woman who rightly holds a position of everlasting esteem AND happened to be fat. (look! even a gross old white guy valued her!)

And to be perfectly honest this feels like a leap because Aretha only got big in her later years, in what I’m going to guess was a mixture of post menopause and top of her career fuck-what-the-producers-say no one can tell her to lose weight anymore chutzpah. AS SHE SHOULD!

So maybe instead of touting that there’s no safe healthy way to lose weight…because for many people there is* ( I know, it’s painful to hear!)... let’s agree that if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Like literally, maybe you COULD lose weight. Sure! And maybe I could develop a deep interest in late 70s British punk.. I’m sure I could! But I don’t want to because it’s just not very interesting to me and if getting sweaty and being sore and trying different vegetables and learning to cook isn’t very interesting to you, then just own it. You’re allowed to not want to do something. You might just become the next cigar smoking, gin drinking, feast eating savior of the western world ie a female Churchill. If you do, please let me know, so I can be proud this essay helped inspire your amazing ascent.

---

*There are many caveats including auto-immune disorders, menopause, post-pregnancy, PCOS etc that make weight loss incredibly challenging if not impossible. I am instead speaking to the vast population of people who have become 1st world chubby or even fat but do not have underlying conditions except that we pleasantly live a life of ease and endless abundance.

If you are curious about exercise and even HATE it please check out my offerings. Every Virtual Run Club series starts with a group coach call and 9 out of 10 participants begin by saying how much they hate running and don’t ever want to. It’s a wonderful group and many have gone on to create non-obsessive, joyful running practices to this day - see anecdote about the client who changed jobs to keep up her running. I also teach beginner strength and stability via Kettlebells and Pilates as well as several restorative classes and workshops including Anti-Anxiety Cardio and Fascia Release™ all of which are designed to gently shift our bodies into balance without the ableist fat shaming ‘sweat is fat crying’ mentality that infects to much of modern fitness. I also do a twice a year ‘remnants of disordered eating’ de-programming coaching group called NOURISH YOURSELF. It’s worth checking out.

And if none of these interest you. That’s great. Please, you do you.