Jumbled Words

I listened to another episode of Fatcast. They’re up to ten now, with a couple of extra unnumbered episodes thrown in. Yesterday they talked about exercise and it was so awesome that I feel the need to tell you what they talked about. Sometimes just saying “listen to this” isn’t enough after all.

First of all I should say that they ALSO talk about why they love exercise; Lesley says she feels like a gazelle when she swooshes away on the elliptical for hours on end, and Marianne talks about how she loves running because of the impact with every step she takes, and how it makes her go “wow, I’m HEAVY, and it’s awesome”.

But the part that I found the most interesting was when they spoke about why exercise is such a double-edged sword for most people. And not even in the whole disordered eating becoming obsessed with working out kind of way.

A few things they talked about:

* How classist and ableist it is to assume that a) everyone can afford a membership to a gym, b) everyone has the TIME to go to the gym three-four or more times a week, c) everyone has the ability to run, jump, skip, etc, for hours every week. And in many cases, at least in the U.S. you need a car to get to a gym, and the less than stellar neighbourhoods has no gyms nearby. None. It’s the whole grocery store desert all over again.

* It might be sexist too, and Marianne said this bit awesomely:

“So it’s classist and it’s ableist to have all these cultural expectations that everybody is going to exercise in this one particular fashion and I would also say it’s sexist because it’s predominantly women. There was this study recently about how women past a certain age need to up their exercise an hour a day to maintain their youthful figure or whatever. And that pissed me off on so many levels, I mean, there’s so much WRONG with that kind of bullshit, both from an ageism perspective and a sexism perspective and a general fuck-off-it’s-my-body-perspective.”

* Somehow, in many ways it’s become some sort of demented truth that ONLY THE GYM counts. Like, going out dancing for three hours straight or playing football with your kids in the park doesn’t count. It has to be at the gym and it has to be torturous, apparently.

* The TV thing, and with that I mean that kids are said to spend a lot more time in front of the TV these days, and how people are horrified that it means they’re sitting still. Lesley points out that there’s like a hundred other ways this is troubling, and as somebody who watched some American kids TV with a boy I was babysitting… yeah. I agree.

* Fat people are told they have to work out to become thinner, BUT most of them have grown up learning that going outside in ill-fitting clothes (because workout wear for fats is hard to find), especially to a place where most others are fit and capable of much more than you, is a bad idea. And this is hard to re-learn.

* Just the idea of a gym, especially the big franchises are in many ways advertised as a way of losing weight, and more than that, has ads where everyone is skinny and perfect, which is a way makes you feel like, and I quote “it’s trying to erase your body and it’s trying to erase you as a physical being”.

Marianne talked further of this from a feminist perspective:

“As women we are taught that we need to minimise ourselves, that we need to, you know, take up as little space as possible, that we need to have as small of a physical body as possible and I feel very strongly that that is an actual physical manifestation of the minimising of women’s power and embodiment and self-will and all that stuff.”

So, yes. Regardless of size it’s not as easy as it sounds to “make time” for this stuff. And if you’re fat you have all this extra stuff to work through to get there. And even if you do, you are sometimes made to feel like once or twice a week isn’t enough and makes no difference so why should you bother?

I do want to point out that once you do make it to the gym there’s no pointing and laughing, there’s people of all sizes, everyone works out to the best of their abilities and the trainers (of which I’ve talked to two), while skinny and lean (the women) or ridiculously muscled and shiny (the men) do NOT talk about weightloss unless you specifically ask. They’re happy to find you a workout route that works depending on your abilities and while I was scared shitless the first time I’ve come to love that place.

And that was something I never thought I’d say.

Anyway. Listen to this episode. It’s fascinating as it talks about both the cultural expectations, about the actual physical act of making it to the gym, of alternate versions of exercise (dancing around your living room in your underwear was my favourite), of why they exercise and find it fun, and of course there is a rant about workout wear for fat people…

There’s always at least one rant. It’s awesome.

Last but not least, there’s a few programs to help you get started, if the gym is scary. Tansy talked about Life Be In It, which sounds great but has such a couch-potato-fat-hating comic on the webpage that it makes me want to hit things. I’m told there are good things about it, but as I’ve not experienced it myself I’m not sure if I should actually be linking to it. In the podcast they also talk about the Couch to 5k project, which I looked up. It sounds fairly good, but requires you to run with a stopwatch or knowing the exact distance you run, which is a bit on the obsessive side.

Anyway. Podcast. Listen.