Do You Even Lift?

I’m kinda at this point where I need to embrace some body positivity about myself, but also kind of want to start exercising again because it helps me stay sane and evens out the peaks and valleys of my emotional roller-coaster.

And it’s weird to phrase it this way, but if I get fit, it won’t be so much a warm embrace of fitness culture so much as hate-fucking it with a “yuck” face.  Which is a phrase or idea I’ve never liked, and I kind of hate to use it, but it’s the closest I can come to describing my sense of unease with the fitness industry.  There’s just something cult-ish and unbearably smug about fitness culture as a whole.

For one, there’s kind of this constant mind fuck around attitude that I understand is just an attempt to push me past my bullshit and do the thing, but still, the kind of single-minded zealousness people work themselves into around the gym is very off-putting, especially if you grew up in fundamentalism and are now currently allergic to anything remotely resembling it.  And I think there might be such a thing as fitness fundamentalists.  I can barely go to yoga, even though I like the basic experience of it, because they so rarely seem to be able to leave well enough alone without bringing in some new agey bullshit around the whole endeavor, especially the yoga gurus, who conveniently have a book I can buy.

The other thing that bothers me about “the fit” is this bizarre protestant/capitalist work ethic angle where if you put in the time and the work into shaping your body into something generally regarded as pleasing by modern tastes, you shall be rewarded, and indeed perhaps owed, a relationship with someone possessing a body of equal or better well-shaped pleasingness. On some level, I understand, this is just how humans mate, typically by selecting someone a lot like them, but …. still.  It just makes the whole thing seem so superficial and a little yucky. 

If the over-whelming takeaway message was, “we want you to be healthy and live a long, happy life” I might be able to swallow it better.  But, I don’t know, that’s just not the over-whelming message that seems to shine through the brightest.