Tag: fat and fit

fitness · Guest Post

Big Fat Myths, Or, Why So Many of Us Avoid the Gym (Guest Post)

fatandfitinthesix7 Comments

by Weronika

I’m here to tell you that you can be both fat and fit. read it again. fat and fit. not fat to fit. not fat but fit. fat AND fit. that’s right. and yes, i have read the articles (including the most recent one from across the pond – it wasn’t peer-reviewed if that’s something that matters to you) that argue that fatness and fitness cannot co-exist. i’ve read them, internalized them and spent years unlearning the things they claimed to know about my body.

i also spent years avoiding the gym (and fitness in general) not taking care of my body because the measures of success too often involved scales and shame (so much shame) and a focus on weight loss. well i’m calling bullshit. and i’m asking that we start focusing on measures that make sense for our lives, whether that be having an easier time getting out of bed in the morning or struggling less with our groceries or lifting twice our body weight at the gym. we need to focus less on the numbers on the scale and more on what healthy means to us.

fitness (to me) is about taking care of myself which happens to include my mental health. it’s about listening to my body and loving myself at every size despite what the world tells me. fitness to me is about self-love, whether that be lifting heavier and sweating more at the gym or staying home with a pint of ice cream because the world feels like too much that day. gym culture can make all of this hard because fitness so often seems to equate to thinness in workout spaces but i’ve been figuring out how to take up space at the gym with my fabulous fat (and fit) body, exaggerating moves and turning the whole experience into some kind of performance. but i still totally get why some people avoid it. i did for a long time too. it can be such a toxic place which seems to care about everything but health.

the gym can really suck (especially for those of us who do not fit fatphobic and racist beauty standards) but i’m going to spend my time there trying to make it a space that can not only be fun but also shame free while also totally getting that you can be fit (and fabulously fat) without spending time or money on a place that can still make so many feel like utter shit.

now i’m spending time unlearning fat shame and learning to listen to my body and what feels good for it. and now i can say that my fat body gives me strength and i love it. so much.

Weronika is a white queer working class libra who wakes up way too early, way too happy. They are ambivalently working on their doctorate while distracting themselves with other projects like developing a trauma-informed therapy practice. They are into reading books, lifting heavy things, and making food for and with people. They are also a body positive personal trainer working with those who hate the gym. You can find out more by emailing them at fatandfitinthesix@gmail.com

Fat, fit, and why I want to be leaner anyway
fat · fitness · health · sports nutrition · weight loss

Fat, fit, and why I want to be leaner anyway

Sam B22 Comments

As you’ll know from reading my posts on our blog, I’m fat and fit, aiming to be fitter and to be the fittest I’ve ever been, at 50. (In some moods I prefer big and fit, read why here.)

Weight loss isn’t a direct goal for me in this project. That’s partly because I’m a supporter of the Healthy At Every Size movement, partly because I don’t think there’s a fatness-fitness connection, and partly because for me, personally, there aren’t health related reasons to lose weight. So I take it as a starting point that it’s possible to be the fittest I’ve ever been and not weigh the least I’ve ever weighed. Indeed, although I wouldn’t like it, I might be the fittest I’ve ever been and weigh more than I do now, though I’d much rather that not be the outcome I get.

As I detailed in Fat, Fat, and What’s Wrong with BMI I’m a bit of a healthy living rock star. Yes, I’m significantly overweight but I have excellent blood pressure and heart rate, excellent good-bad cholesterol ratios, and excellent blood sugar levels. I’m also an over-achiever in the bone density department but that’s from years of living large and lifting heavy weights.

(An aside: Bone density is a great reason to lift weights, especially for you small, thin women whose frames aren’t much challenged by the mass you carry around. Weight lifting works to build bones unlike endurance sports such as swimming, cycling, and running which in volume can actually hurt bone density. Read “Training to Improve Bone Density in Adults: A Review and Recommendation here.)

I’m also not sure about the wisdom of picking a goal–long term weight loss–that defeats almost all the people who aim for it. (Read Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss—and the Myths and Realities of Dieting for some of my reasons.)

Oh, and I already eat very well. I’m a vegetarian, aspiring vegan, non-drinker, who stays well away from fast food. I have a bit of a sweet tooth and sometimes I eat too much of  good thing but there’s not a lot of room for nutrition improvement.

But I really would like to improve my ratio of lean to fat, by building more muscle and losing some fat, even if I think that’s got zero to do with fitness or being fittest by fifty.

Why?

That’s a question that in our culture hardly seems worth asking. Everyone I know, pretty much, wants to shrink. The size 4s want to get back to size 0, the 10s back to 4, and so on. It’s a cultural obsession and mega money making industry. I try to stay clear.

Most people assume weight loss is why I exercise. But really, if that were my goal I would have quit long ago. Indeed I worry that lots of fat people quit working out because they aren’t getting thinner and why else would they go to gym? The fat but fit person looks like she’s doing all the work and not getting the rewards. Nevermind that the real rewards are health related and have nothing to do with weight.

So again, why do I want to be leaner?

My main reason I want to get leaner is sports performance. An awful lot of what I do depends on a power to weight ratio. For an explanation of power to weight ratio and its importance when it comes to cycling, read The Pursuit of Leanness over at Australia’s Cycling Tips blog.

I’ll never be a hill climber. I’m a reasonably powerful sprinter and time trialer (for a recreational cyclist in her midlife years!). I know my place in the cycling world. But I’m sick of getting dropped on hills.

My second motivation for the pursuit of lean is wear and tear on joints. I love sports and physical activity. Hard to imagine life without it. But you don’t see many overweight runners in their 70s. Cyclists either. I worry about stress on my knees and hips and think there’s got to be an advantage to weighing less. Or at least if I want to play with people lots younger than me, as seems to be the case with every sport that I do, I want to even the playing field.

Evening the playing field is one of the reasons I feel great being a non-drinker on multi-day cycling events. Stay up, you 19 year olds and 25 year olds. Have another beer. I’ll be asleep, sober, and well hydrated by 10 pm. Not fun now but fun when I see you suffering tomorrow.

Finally, there’s  bad motivation, one of which I try to be wary. And no, it’s not looking good naked. Like Tracy, I’m pretty comfortable in that department. I don’t have a lot of body image issues. I’ve often wondered about why that’s so. I’ve got some thoughts about my resilience in that department, fodder for a later post, I think. (Short answer: Thanks spouse, thanks feminism, thanks queer community.)

Sometimes I want to look like the very fit person I am. There are days when I’m weary of fighting the good fight, challenging our notions of the size and shape fitness takes. Sometimes I want people to look at me and see who I am and what I do.

For example, I’ve got incredible abs. You can’t see them as they are under a layer of fat but they do amazing things. I’m very strong in my core but it’s like they’re a secret super power, my invisible abs.

Not being seen for who I am is a bit of a struggle on my life on a few fronts. (You can read some of my work on bisexual invisibility here and here.)

So sometimes I’m sick of it all and want to be seen as the athlete I am.

But I’m hoping to keep those motivations at bay and focus on the hills and the climbing.