FitnessFixation.com

Skinny was bad back then too. From Modern Mechanix.Last week I kind of railed against ‘healthy’ for a bit, and my sister asked me about it afterwards. “I just had the feeling there was something else going on there,” she said. “I mean, is healthy all that bad?” She’s very astute, and right in that I’m actually not anti-health or anything. But I think my reaction had more to do with something I’ve seen lots of places and on many fronts. Namely that ‘healthy’ is the new socially appropriate code word for ’skinny’.

I think there was a certain amount of backlash against the “thin by any means necessary” stuff, what with the anorexic models dying and celebrities with ribs you can count easily and the fact that the majority of people do not, and will never, ever, look like those celebrities. So out of that storm came a new movement, one that was anti-diet and pro-health. And believe you me, many in the media heard the cry.

So skinny became healthy. It’s not enough to feel the pressure to be svelte, you also aren’t supposed to have that as your big goal, at least not for body-image reasons. Oh, you can want to lose weight because it’s good for you (though some studies have shown thin doesn’t reap the health benefits once promised, nor does overweight necessarily confer the sentence of chronic illness and death some folks touted) but not because you want to be thin because that means you might be a little obsessed. Or shallow. Or anxious. Or, like, listening to what so many people have told you your whole freaking life.

So yes, the goal of losing weight is okay, but the reasons have to be health and the means have to be good for you. I’m all for doing shit in a healthy way, lord knows I’m the last person to believe in crazy-ass skinnifying stuff. But how come the same people who brought you skinny are now dressing their shit up in healthy? And do people really go for weight loss goals because they really, really care only about health?

So I get people who tell me “I want to exercise to get healthy” and only sheepishly confess later that they’d like to lose a few, or ten, or twenty pounds. Well, welcome to a vast club of many. I just don’t know if what people want has changed all that much, it’s just that how we are supposed to talk about it has.

Now the celebrity magazines don’t just tell you who’s gained too much weight, they also tell you who is too thin, with exactly the same air of righteousness. Oooh, celebrity X has gone way to far. Never mind that we don’t know really what any of these people have done to gain or lose weight, if the ‘healthy’ ones are actually healthy, or if they take diet pills mixed with protein shakes to achieve that healthy figure, or if the too-skinny ones are ill or dealing with trauma. In fact, the ones that have gained “too much” might just be ‘healthy’ too (though usually pregnancy is the first speculation.)

The diet plans have caught on to this as well. Nowadays, “diets” are bad. Studies say so. No, it’s about lasting lifestyle changes—health, if you will. Jenny Craig now has a “size-fill-in-the-blank” campaign that’s supposed to promote the notion that there is no ideal size. I love me some Queen Latifah, but are we supposed to think this isn’t a diet, but rather a health plan? Lots of packaged and processed food, portion control, limited calories…smells like a diet to me, and one that makes you a size smaller, probably as a bigger priority than healthier. I mean, yes, it’s better than promising we’ll all be size twos, but let’s be honest, shall we? But if you think they are alone, talk to Weight Watchers, who now call themselves a “lifestyle program”. Here’s a nice rundown on how this logic works if your lifestyle is one of being a dieter. The programs haven’t changed much, but the way they get framed sure has.

This is not unusual: I recently got an email from the editor of Fitness magazine. She (or her correspondent) first compliments me on my review of disposable panties. Since I’m not even incontinent enough qualified to do such a review, nor have I done one, I’m guessing that means someone made some assumptions about my last post without reading it much, but instead just looked at the pretty picture. The email subject is “check out FITNESS magazine” and the first line is “Wea re changing the conversation from skinny to healthy!!!!!!!!” Direct cut and paste there. Anyhow, if I give Fitness the same cursory pictures-only look, I see that the scrolling stories are, “Lose the desk job jiggle” and “Melt inches off your waist”, plus one on healthy shopping lists. If I click on “weight loss”, which is still a separate category from “health” it says “Drop a jeans size in 30 days”. Wow, is that a different conversation than the one we’ve been having? Maybe it’s all in the titles, ahem. Oh, I guess they never actually said ’skinny’ directly, so…

Look, I’m not totally bummed by the change, and there’s still plenty of bitches out there selling skinny and diet plain and simple, with plans that rarely yield lasting skinny for the majority, and by means that would hardly qualify as healthy.

But I’m here to tell you that I got into exercise for one simple reason: To lose weight. Because of how I wanted to LOOK. Waa waa, does that make me a bad person? Once I was really in, I ended up liking many more things about it. Like the stress relief and the physical confidence and the energy and having something I cared about and blah blah blah. But probably not enough to do something I absolutely hated with no results. And part of why I still exercise is to look a certain way, and that will likely always be part of it, so I am as shallow and anxious and body-conscious as the next person, though interestingly I ended up choosing not the activities that made me skinniest, but what I actually liked the most. I eat certain ways for the same reasons, because of how I want to look and also how I want to feel and so on. I will not follow an eating plan that deprives me of nutrients or requires me to feel gnawing hunger pains or allows me ice cream for breakfast if I eat celery for lunch and dinner or is packaged and loaded with preservatives. Why? I don’t like feeling like crap, and yeah, I prefer being my version of, um, healthy, oh gawd. And sometimes I’m tempted to follow some drastic thing in the pursuit of skinnier, but luckily I have an innate skepticism that won’t allow me to suffer without real results. Plus I know myself well enough to know I can’t do that shit forever, and I’m future-obsessed enough to not want to gain it all back. I also don’t believe I’m addicted to any food in particular, or not enough to give a shit anyway. I eat emotionally sometimes, like when I’m sad or stressed. Hey, quite the human being and shit. And you thought I was a soulless devil forged in hell. See?

If you want to lose weight, you are not alone. Do I sound like an infomercial? If you want to be skinny, you have lots of company. If you desire better health, might I suggest exercise as one good option? But really, just know that if what passes for healthy nowadays just makes you feel like you are bad for wanting to lose weight yet you really want to be thin, I just don’t think that’s a good road to go down. Let’s at least call it like it is, and maybe from there we can move towards determining if being thinner is really important enough to you, if there’s real-live healthy options for getting there, and if maybe you’ll get into something that might give you other benefits along the way. Because if I could replace ’skinny’ with anything, I don’t think I’d shoot for ‘healthy’. I’m thinking more like, ‘Confident’. ‘Content’. ‘A force to be reckoned with’. Oh, and yeah, ‘Totally 100 Percent Badass’.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 10:48 pm and is filed under blah blah, body building, celebrity, exercise, expert advice, fads and facts, healthy crap, nutrition, other mags, relating, sanity, sports, stress, the skinny, weight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.