I have this friend, let’s call her Rose, who is the most disciplined person I have met since freshman year. For breakfast, she eats a yogurt with granola or toasty oatmeal, the perfectly balanced meal to start off the day. For lunch and dinner she eats a loaded salad- only veggies for this vegetarian of course. I have another friend, let’s call her Daisy, who starts her day however she likes, whether it be a yogurt, an omelet, or a breakfast sandwich. She follows this with a carb heavy lunch, a snack, and the fattiest, greasiest food she can find for dinner, all of this before her daily serving of late night at 11 p.m. Now, I realize that these two friends of mine are almost comical extremes, as is the unjustness of their body types (the cautious herbivore much heavier and muscular than my indifferent traditionally skinny friend). Most, including myself, tend to fluctuate somewhere between the two- but this ever present theme of fitness in conversation with the two, as well as within the rest of the student body here at Boston College, raises an extremely important question that I still have yet to receive an answer to: What does it mean to be fit? And why is it that even when we intellectually understand ourselves to be, we remain discontent with our image.
For my first friend, Rose, fitness has always been quite simple. “All I want is to be healthy,” she says quite proudly- and this often puts me to shame. She eats wonderfully, constantly hydrates, and works out daily. She owns up to and readily accepts her body type, a classic proportional pear, who has never fallen out of the normal BMI range. And yet, I find that even though she is outwardly quite proud of herself and her regime, she is constantly frustrated, sometimes to the point of jealousy, by the liberty of those around her. “I’ve always had to work hard to even look like this,” she said to me one day as we walked, almost lamenting her Serena Williams like figure.
Daisy approaches things from a very different angle. “I’m so fat,” she complains “I want to start exercising and lose 5 pounds” It’s hard not to get frustrated when someone who is already a size 0/2 and eats cake every other day says this to you, but this being her personal desire, I must not devalue it. Although aware that she is not healthy, she defines her own archetype of the fit woman as someone who looks like the thinnest version of the current fitness sensation Kayla Itsines, founder and brander of the infamous Bikini Body Guide.
Why is it, that both of these beautiful young women with completely different fitness ideals- both legitimate- seem to always fall short of their goals, and self-acceptance? Because in reality, though it is often branded as separate, fitness (as it is presented to us on Instagram and in magazines like Women’s Health) is all formed in response to male desire. This is not to say it doesn’t ever occur the other way around- movie sensations like Magic Mike XXL have placed pressure on men to look a certain way for women as well, but when we analyze insecurity by gender, as well as basic facility of life for those who comply as well as those who don’t with this archetype, we find constantly that life is easier for men. Many claim that life is easier for women who manage to fit this “beauty” mold, the same way that it is for men who do. But, in a male dominated society these women dissimilarly remain sexual objects in the professional field as well as in the dating scene.
This is the traditional leftist feminist argument, though I will not follow it with a “love yourself no matter what you look like, empower all women as they too are beautiful” because this is much harder than it seems and it is not enough. Nutritionists simple response to “work hard to treat your body as a temple” is not the response either. It’s so much more complicated than this. We can’t as women, for our own health decide that what the professionals say does not matter, because society’s structure, which is not ideal, exists, and to succeed we have to adhere to it in some sort of way. However, we cannot simply “be healthy” without understanding and critiquing this subtly patriarchal structure. Fitness is complicated because it is not quite as easily subjective as beauty though it adheres to the same unrealistic principles. There are many ways to be “fit” (it is evidently personal), but the prescription is always the same: some sorts of physical activity paired with a “healthy” diet all in an attempt to look a certain way.
I’m not a personal trainer, a doctor, or nutritional scientist but I can say with complete certainty that fitness is complicated precisely because it questions many similar problems recently targeted by the beauty industry, sociologists, and other activists. I’m not writing to tell you that there is one or even two ways to be fit and healthy mentally or physically, simply that we shouldn’t forget to consider the complexity of the issue itself when we discuss it, simply because it is too heavy or “deep,” but rather embrace the mess of it all as a simple reflection of our own imperfect humanity.