Destroy Fitness Culture

Health and wellness have been hijacked by fitness culture — a movement which thrives on shame, judgement and elitist ideologies. Stephen Pham demands it be destroyed.

This kind of behaviour, where a person risks long term consequences for short term progress, is rampant on Instagram. While this visual platform is notorious for self-appointed, photogenic gurus spreading misinformation, it’s far from the root of the issue. That lies in the current iteration of fitness culture. In donning Lululemon, breaking arbitrary personal records, or practising the ‘clean eating’ of diets like keto or paleo, participants of fitness culture can conspicuously aspire to ‘wellness’, objectifying their bodies in the process.

Paleo, the diet associated with CrossFit, systemically eliminates packaged and ‘processed’ foods, alongside dairy, whole grains, beans, and lentils. Proponents argue that modern manufacturing and farming practices produce food that is bad for our bodies, and thus attempt to mimic the diets of hunter-gatherer humans (whose life expectancy was 33 years). In the confusion surrounding modern food production, systems that distinguish between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ food serve as a means of self-empowerment through consumer choice.

I came to learn that what fitness culture thrives on most of all is shame.

Early last year, my friend Maria and I signed up for gym memberships. While I was enthusiastic about going to the gym to practise working with my body, she was reluctant, seeing the gym as a place where seriously fit people would laugh at her for starting out. I confessed that I’d spent two weeks learning movements with an empty barbell. Encouraged, she began going to the gym — not to exercise, but to read novels. She prioritised being comfortable rather than productive within the space first. When she did start exercising, she told me that she was finally learning to love her body. I was excited: we could bond over the joy of movement.

In hindsight, this claim of self-love was a red flag. Weeks later, she began expressing guilt for not going to the gym. It wasn’t long before she stopped going entirely. Although I was sad that I’d lost a gym buddy, her reluctance was understandable. From the very start, the gym was a loaded environment for her, being a place of judgement. And while exercise is a habit beneficial to one’s health, Maria also associated it with body image and productivity. In other words, her love for her body was conditional on its appearance changing and its capabilities increasing. I was careful to express my enthusiasm for weight training without reference to these, but fitness culture — in this case, the ways we talk, think about, and perform exercise — warped it, feeding Maria’s guilt.

Gyms as sites of exercise aren’t shaming in and of themselves. The ways that fitness culture seeps into them, however, make this the case — whether in the infomercials for at-home exercise machines playing ad infinitum on mounted TVs; packets of fat burning powders in the vending machines; or quotes like, “Excuses or results. You can’t have both” painted on the walls. It’s hard not to take some kind of message away from these: that exercise is a joyless endeavour in losing weight; that fat can be passively burned through consuming the right powders; that exercise is an all-or-nothing affair.

On an individual level, fitness culture presents consumer choice as the antidote to shame, even though it is in reality a deflection. Another apparently empowering choice is in dominating rather than listening to their bodies, with the aim of shaping them into an imaginary ideal. Here, the supremacy of mind over body is an inheritance of the Enlightenment: a decidedly colonial, capitalist approach that frames the body as a site of value, to be aggressively extracted. This isn’t sustainable, and it’s no wonder that clean eating gurus have experienced physical burnout from the very diets they’ve prescribed to the masses.

Everyone has to eat, and those of us who are able to move can find great benefit in doing so regularly. We can do these without inflicting shame on ourselves or others, possible through building a culture where we: respect the aesthetic and (non-)productive diversity of bodies as a given, rather than viewing them as ‘before’ shots; listen to our own bodies instead of monitoring them with Fitbits; and nurture relationships with our bodies instead of asserting dominance over them. We don’t need to burn down all gyms, but we do need to destroy fitness culture. We can start by radically reimagining our relationships to our bodies and each other.

Stephen Pham is a Vietnamese-Australian writer from Cabramatta. He is an original member of SWEATSHOP Writers’ Collective. His work has appeared in SBS Life, Overland, Meanjin and Sydney Review of Books. In 2018, he received the NSW Writer’s Fellowship from Create NSW to commence his first manuscript, Vietnamatta.

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