The Unrelenting Capitalism of Fitness
My body is fine, my brain is broken.
Mrs. Taylor rolled the television into my third grade classroom, signaling what should have been an excellent development. Watching TV instead of learning? Nothing better.
Of course, school TV isn’t real TV. So we spent 45 minutes watching some docu-style program about the food supply chain. Probably. I can’t promise my memories of the the content are complete, but there is one part that is emblazoned fiercely in the wrinkles of my brain.
At some point, a voice from the TV talked about all the wonderful cuts of meat one could expect to get from a pig. One word seemed to rise above all the others and travel across the room: “fatback.”
It is what it sounds like. A hunk of fat used to add flavor to food like collards or green beans, typical in the South. But to a kid in my class named Miguel, that word was the beginning of a joke, one looking for a punchline.
When he called me Fatback, I didn’t get angry. I certainly wished he would have decided not to be an asshole, but I wasn’t mad at him. Because I didn’t think he was wrong. I was in the third grade and already I had rooted deeply in my brain that I was fat. Not as a condition of being but as axiomatic. I was fat in the same way I had pale skin or green eyes. It was who I was, definied.
On April 10th, 2020, about a month after it became clear that the COVID-19 pandemic was going to fuck up everything for every body, I figured I’d spend my newfound time at home focused on fitness. This was not a novel idea (just look at Peloton’s sales numbers,) but it was something that helped me feel like I had control in a time of uncertainty.
Today is April 10th, 2021. After a year of daily measurements, of eating less than I wanted, of lifting more weight than I once thought possible, I arrived at this day wondering what I’m supposed to think about it all.
But before I get into that, a quick look at the numbers:
I had set a goal of getting to 175lbs and 12% body fat, which are represented in the first sets of red lines. I hit those, so hurray! The lowered set of red lines are current goals, which I have not hit. I’ll get to those in a minute.
I also see noticeable differences in my workouts. The following is a side by side video of me doing pull-ups when I started this journey and now (click to play):
There’s been similar progress on other areas of weightlifting as well. Since I hit that 175/12% goal, I’ve been focused on adding some muscle. And as the graph shows, even though I’ve added some weight back, I’ve kept the same body fat percentage (roughly) meaning weight gain includes a decent amount of lean mass.
I feel better. I am lighter on my feet, have more energy most days, and eat healthier that ever. There is no doubt that doing this has helped me feel more in control during a year were so many of us had so little of it.
Yet as the year marker approached, I started to ask myself: Overall, do I feel good?
I had a really hard time with logarithms. I don’t know why. Always quick with integrals and derivatives in calculus, algebra was a cake walk, yadda yadda. But something about throwing log 100 out there gave me the sweats.
Somehow, fitness snaps it all into place . The commonality between the two is the law of diminishing returns. It looks like this:
The more effort you put into the thing, the less and less you get out of it. Going from doing very little to doing a moderate amount sees comparable amount of results. It was in this period that I was able to accomplish that first set of goals (hurray again!) But every additional workout I throw on the schedule or extra fifty calories I cut feels just a hard, every time, but the resulting output diminishes.
And this is where it hit me. I could double down on effort ten times over and I would never hit my goal. Because that red line is not some number on the scale. It’s not a body fat percentage. It’s not how much I can bench press.
The goal is to not be “fat.” But being fat was never defined for me by the scale and therefore no number on the scale will convince me otherwise. I was convinced during my childhood, directly at times and indirectly at others, that I was heavy, flabby, chunky, big boned.
The direct insults from bullies were but part of a larger picture. My mother took Fen-Phen in the 90s to help her control her weight, a drug that was later found to have put literal holes in peoples hearts. My dad was always a runner during my youth, but the flipside was often the insinuation that those who were fat were also lazy. Nothing they did was an attack on me, but I was a kid with a belly and a closet full of “huskey” jeans, I picked up on what was bad and where it resided. On me.
I don’t need calorie counting or to lose weight. I need a Terminator sent back in time to destroy every flashing sign in my childhood that said “you are fat. fat is bad.” I want to think about my weight like I think about my fingernails: once a week and only if shit gets weird.
The constant drive towards self improvement, the press for numbers that justify my self worth, creating KPIs for my humanity, the unrelenting capitalism of fitness is a river of self hatred that pummels me over and over again.
Where does the river go and how do I not find out?
A couple things worth making clear. I’m not perceived as “fat” by others, and so many who are perceived as such are discriminated against in ways that I am not. The intent of this post is not to diminish their struggle by making it about myself. I know I come across as shitty posting pull-up videos and complaining about my relationship with my body. It’s different, I acknowledge and accept it. It is my brain that is broken.
Also, I want to make clear that it is bizarre that I am writing about my inner and external selfs not aligning at a time when, yet again, so many trans men, women, and children are being discriminated against with the full force of the law. I am no one’s political target and I am ashamed to put these words in writing when there are so many more who deserve more compassion than I.
Pour no drinks out for me because I spent a year working out and eating less. I am not persecuted nor am I especially interesting. And I don’t have any answers.
Save for one.
The numbers will fucking wreck you.
Rather than worry about weight and body mass or whatever, I’m going to try answering three questions every morning instead:
Do I like how I look?
Do I like how I feel?
Are they connected?
I don’t know what the answers are to these questions right now. And I certainly don’t know how to change them for the better. But I’d rather find out than I would learn how to lose another 5 pounds.
Thanks for reading,
f.
“And what’s wrong with buying and selling?”
“Nothing. In its place, nothing at all. A simple and necessary thing. But only a small thing in a man’s life - not his whole existence - not an end in itself - not a way of life or a source of one’s beliefs. And this is what it has become. A tragic joke, to make a religion of it... This is spiritual death. Where is there room here for what is good and beautiful, for time to re-formulate the eternal questions, for study of man’s conduct?”― John Marlyn, Under the Ribs of Death