fat at the gym
This week, I met one of my fitness goals: to do the ‘hundreds’* in my pilates class without cheating. It’s a fairly modest goal, but I was still excited about it.
It was a deliberately modest goal because me and fitness goals, we’re not great together. I often feel defeated by them. I don’t track my progress at the gym anymore because it leads me to comparing and assessing and inevitably judging my performance as not good enough. My one, long-term, abiding goal in relation to exercise is simply to do some. To front up with some regularity and do some stuff. More ambition, more pressure than that, and I stop going. When the goal shifts from ‘move your body in ways you find enjoyable’ to ‘move your body more’, my attendance gets spotty, then ceases all together. It can take months to re-ignite my enthusiasm.
Which is something I try to avoid, because I actually like working out. I like the feel of my body working, and I like finding out what it can do. I enjoy the way that, even in the absence of goals or striving or any great amount of effort, my body inevitably changes, becomes stronger and fitter and moves differently. It’s something of a revelation.
I’ve spent a lifetime being told I was weak, physically incapable, not able to do much of anything at all. Now, some of that is actually true. I have had dodgy ankles and knees since I was a wee thing. I was on crutches due to various sprains and pains for half of high school. I still have some issues now – I can’t walk as fast as most of my peers, and I can’t walk for too long without causing myself a fairly high level of pain. It doesn’t interfere with my life (walking to the train station or around campus or going shopping is just fine), and the only time I really notice is when I’m walking with a group of people and I get left behind because I’m slow. I don’t like it, but I’ve learned not to interpret it as a deliberate snub. Mostly.
Aside from these specific musculoskeletal difficulties which have been been with me my whole life, I’ve always thought my body wasn’t capable because it was fat. Because fat people and fat bodies are weak and lazy and clumsy and lacking in skill and finesse. Ironically, it was writing about Australia’s The Biggest Loser for my honours thesis that made me realise the equation of fatness with weakness just wasn’t true.
It’s true that one of the main aims of The Biggest Loser was to encourage fat people to go to the gym. By ‘encourage’ here, I actually mean ‘shame’. The show went to great effort to emphasise how very difficult physical exertion was for fat bodies. It showed fatties sweating while they ran up sand dunes, puffing while they climbed stadium stairs, straining to pull trucks. The message that was imparted via the filming, editing, and the contestant’s own testimony was that these things were difficult because of their fat; because they had ‘let themselves go’ and ‘gotten into this state’. The thing is, there is no ‘state’ that one can get into where running up sand dunes won’t make you sweat, where doing laps up and down the MCG stands won’t make you puff, where pulling a semi-fucking-trailer is ever going to be easy. Sure, a higher level of fitness and strength will make those things easier, but not effortless. The reason why they’re hard to do, is because they’re hard to do, not because you’re fat.
It took me a while to see that, amidst all the fat-shaming and blaming, what The Biggest Loser showed was fat bodies performing frankly impressive physical feats. Fat bodies which had strength and endurance, which were incredibly physically capable and accomplished, despite what the narration implied. This is in no way an endorsement of the kinds of things the show subjected people to. It was out-and-out sadistic punishment for being fat, and I found the whole thing abhorrent in its glee. But despite the awfulness, it nonetheless showed (especially if you turned the sound down), that fat bodies were physically capable of amazing things. And that was a revelation for me.
It wasn’t until about 6 months after I finished honours (and finished with Loser forever – I cannot tell you the joy I felt!) that I started going to the gym. I’d left a physically active retail job to go back to office work, and my fitness was suffering because of it. I was far enough into fat acceptance that I didn’t have that secret hope that this would be the thing, the change, the miracle that would make me thin. But it was terrifying going to the gym for the first time. Being up-front about the fact I was there for fitness and not weight-loss. Reminding the instructors who designed my program and showed me how to use the equipment when they ‘forgot’ and said things like ‘try to get up to x speed to really burn those calories’ (I’ve since moved and changed gyms). Dealing with ‘encouraging’ comments from gym bunnies, where ‘encouraging’ actually means ‘patronising as fuck’. Dealing with my fear and projection about what other people might think of me, a fatty working out. Dealing with the fact that I really wasn’t very fit or strong. Four inconsistent years later, I’m still neither of these things, but I am fitter and stronger. I’m also bigger – both fatter, and more muscular. My thighs are enormous and wonderful.
When I first started, I could barely manage 3 minutes on the cross trainer. My thighs and calves would burn, my legs turn to jelly, and the instructor who suggested I go faster to ‘really burn those calories’ would have got a punch in the nose if I hadn’t needed to hold on with both hands to stay upright. My free weights exercises were all done with one or two kilogram dumbells, and they absolutely caned. I was using my body in new ways, and it was hard work, and it hurt, and I really, really liked it.
Once I got more familiar with the gym and the equipment, the anxiety about what people would think or say subsided. I put in my headphones and turn my iPod up and away I go. The music is important. I have a pretty ecclectic range of songs on my gym playlist, from The Pixies and The Clash to Florence and the Machine and Santogold. There’s a lot of Gossip, because I love the Gossip, and because Beth Ditto is one of the most kick-ass fatties I know of and if I’m going to be in an environment which is traditionally positioned as anti-fat, then I want a kick-ass fatty there with me. I get a kick out of being fat and working out and not loosing weight either deliberately or incidentally. I get a kick out of being in the gym listening to someone who tells normative ideology to go fuck itself. There’s also some Divynals, because I get a kick out of secretly listening to Chrissy Amphlett singing about kink and masturbation. Same goes for the soundtrack from Hedwig and the Angry Inch – listening to a big queer musical in a room full of machismo fills me with glee.
The gym I go to now is a Serious Gym. They have heavy weights and host powerlifting competitions and don’t harass you in the street to come along for a free trial. They offer a free trial, but they don’t harass you about it. They don’t market, and they don’t specifically target women, which means that their core business model doesn’t involve selling low self-esteem. Some of the trainers are kind of fat – they’re strong and fit and round-bellied (although only the male trainers – the women are all quite slim). I love seeing the people who work out there, from the super-cut femmey boy who always has a full face of (‘natural’) make-up and looks incredible, to the super-macho body builders who probably aren’t the least bit aware of the homoerotic undertones of their manly bonding which please me SO VERY MUCH. I love the variety of bodies, and admire the work that goes into creating them. I think it’s a shame that bodies like mine aren’t legible as ‘worked on’, though, because what I’m doing when I go to the gym is essentially engaging in body work. I am strengthening and stretching, and challenging and changing and working on my body. That work isn’t aimed changing my size, but it is work on my body nonetheless.
I’m almost wary of posting this, because I’m aware of how discussing exercise can play into good fatty/bad fatty dichotomies, which I abhor – not only because they falsely heirarchise bodies and behaviours, but because they deny the complexity and contradictions of how bodies are lived. Sure, I exercise and I’m a vegetarian with a fondness for greenery, but I also eat an ungodly amount of butter, cheese, eggs, and chocolate. I particularly love eggs served with butter and egg sauces (eggs florentine, come to meeeeeee!). I regularly replace most of the fluids in my body with large doses of coffee and red wine. Paragon of virtue I am not. Hedonist would be a more appropriate label, and one that’s much more applicable to my experience of working out, too. Simply put, I work out because it’s another way that I enjoy my body (and no, I’m not still talking about Chrissy Amphlett here).
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*Hundreds involve lying with your legs raised and holding your torso up in a crunch position for a slow count of 100 while doing various things with your arms. Believe me when I say this is hard work. ‘Cheating’ involves lowering either your legs or torso at the point where you can’t hold them up anymore. Mostly, I’ve been getting through sixties or seventies, so getting through hundreds was pretty damn exciting!
I love this. Love. This.
I listen to Beth Ditto at the gym too, although I’m ashamed to say I only have a couple of Gossip songs on my iPod. But I was listening to them this morning, at the gym, having the same thoughts about how awesome it is to have a fierce fatty singing to me there!
The revelation for me has been how much I miss the gym when I have a break from it because life gets in the way (or, most recently, because I was ill.) I actually start to crave it. Back when I was exercising a lot and was actually fit (I wouldn’t say I’m ‘fit’ now) that didn’t happen. If I had a break, I’d enjoy it, and only go back to the gym because I felt guilty. Now, I go back because I really really want to. Because I go there for me, no one else, and not because anyone else tells me I should. It’s purely selfish, even though others view it as ‘virtuous’, and I love that! It’s like I have a little private joke going.
It’s been really important for me to take a break when I don’t feel like going, or when life gets in the way. I aim for a certain frequency, but friends and uni and lovers and dead hot water systems often get in the way. Once I decided I didn’t have to stick to any particular schedule, it meant missing a session was no big deal, and I’d just go back when I could.
I love feeling like I have a private joke going on there – mine’s mostly about the music I’m listening to, but I also feel like fat acceptance is kind of my own private joke while I’m there too. (Not that I think FA is a joke, but that I imagine people probably think I’m there to loose weight, and that amuses me.)
The more I read of you amazing girls, the more I realise I’ve been doing everything all wrong for years.
Though I absolutely 100% cannot stand gyms and I will never ever go again.
With that, I’m going to go bounce on my trampoline. And when I’m rid of this horrid cold I’m going to set up that pilates DVD again. Not because I want to lose weight – I’ve given up ever striving for that – but because it makes me feel good. Thank you.
TRAMAMPOLINE!
(Ok, now I want gelato.)
YEP! It’s MASSIVE and SOOOO bouncy! I just love it. Now that’s the kind of exercise I can get into.
This is one of the sad things about the obesity-epidemic-panic-end-of-the-world crisis, and that is that so few people are active just because it feels good. So many people approach exercise as a necessary evil, go flat out, don’t see any weight loss (or not enough), decide it’s ‘not working’ and give up. I can imagine that when you said you weren’t interested in weight loss, that would not compute with the trainers.
I’ve also had to back off my own training. I felt like I had to improve with each and every session, which pretty much took all the joy out of it. Now I’m back to loving it again.
I bring the average age of my gym down by about 20 years. Most of the clientele are 60yo+ and it makes me feel pretty great to be a part of that.
I don’t think it’s just about the ZOMGOBESITY epidemic, although I do think that makes everything much more intense. Nobody was talking about epidemics when I was a kid, and I still got all the fat-hating messages and the idea that I was a) disgusting and lazy and needed to punish my body, and b) couldn’t possibly handle a work out because I was so disgusting and lazy.
Most of the trainers at my new gym have been pretty awesome and actually believed me about not looking for weight-loss, but the pressure to always be improving was still there, and it does me no good. Now I know enough about the equipment and my own body that I can make up my own routine as I go along, although I have a pretty set structure that I work within (cardio, chest, back, 2x legs, 2x arms, abs, cardio, stretch).
I was just thinking that. There was no talk about epidemics when I was a kid either, but I still got turned off exercise by the over-competiveness and attitude that I was fat and had to be pushed and pushed until I wasn’t fat, then I’d be able to do things without straining. Which of course was stupid, I was uncoordinated because I have a turned eye and the exercise itself was pointlessly boring and overly strenuous for my age and build.
I can’t really bring myself to like any kind of exercise other than walking, pilates or trampoline. I’m frightened of team sports and much as I love playing soccer, the minute I’m reminded what I’m doing, I bow out. That’s not the fault of being fat, it’s the fault of the bullwaddle peddled by my Dad and teachers and trainers and nutritionists and other kids when I was younger.
I don’t have any Gossip, but I have Tom Smith singing a song about Cartman (to the tune of “Bitch”, yet).
These days I’m kind of eclectic. I mostly walk outside, but I use the treadmill in the mini-gym at work if I don’t like the weather. I have dumbbells in a variety of sizes at home, and I use them, but I also use the leg extension/curl machine in the mini-gym, and I do bodyweight stuff too. So it’s a mix.
I haven’t watched TBL, and really I don’t think I’d like it, but I hear you on the inspiration of seeing other fatties do physically strenuous things. The man of the house serves as an inspiration to me sometimes — he’s also fat, but he’s got a LOT more muscle. A LOT. As in, “he used to wrestle, he still has the build, and can crouch down and pick me up”. When I say I work out so I can keep up with him better? Yeah! Not kidding!
For some reason, I kept reading that as Tom Waits, which, hahahahahAWESOME!
And I’d stick with not watching TBL. It’s pretty revolting.
This was a lovely read. The bit about secret music, having your own agenda to simply work your body with no strings attached…It seems like a very personal experience. It has always been driven into my mind to have goals to stick to when it comes to fitness. Going to the gym? ..How much weight do you want to lose? It takes something that is meant to be good for you and turns it into a chore. Rather than engaging in something personal that may benefit me physically and emotionally, the act of “working out” has somehow turned into something that causes me severe mental anguish. Like I am expected to abuse my body until every muscle aches and push myself farther than I need to go, because that’s what it means to work out and be fit.
I am slowly trying to rearrange my thoughts on that and strip away all of the negative thoughts I associate with working out, because I’m realizing more and more that it holds me back more than benefits me. Reading blogs like yours and finding inspiration in other beautiful, confident and smart women has been so helpful and supportive.
This post hit home with me as well. When the economy was still good and I had the money, I worked with a personal trainer for 2 years. I didn’t lose one single pound. It confounded my trainer. She must have thought that I ate donuts every minute that I was no with her. However, we worked great together and she knew just hom to push me and I went from only being able to walk on the treadmill to actually jogging, yes jogging! It was great and I felt a great sense of accomplishment. I had to quit the gym at least a year ago and my fitness level has suffered. I recently bought a set of power bands and I am going to give those a try. I used them at the gym all the time.
The point being that if the only reason I was going to the gym was to lose weight, I would have quit way sooner and not because of money issues. If I had the cash I would sign up again tomorrow.