All About the Aesthetic

Working out is not always easy. In fact, it’s often difficult. It’s challenging to get up early to squeeze in that six AM run before work, to wrap up a hard day and lift before heading home to relax, to choose to put yourself in a sweaty, likely uncomfortable position when you could be lounging on the couch. That’s why it’s so important to have a why, a reason that motivates you to get to the gym, let alone push yourself through a tough fitness routine.

 In the past few years, my personal why has changed drastically. I began working out lightly in high school because I wanted to get fit. I wasn’t particularly active, and I didn’t want to be that person who couldn’t finish the mile test in gym class [that never actually happened, but I did have an irrational fear about it]. Last summer, I found a very different motivation in exercising: I wanted to lose weight. I had gained about fifteen pounds since college began, and I decided that I needed to make changes in my food and fitness routines in order to get back to a place where I felt comfortable and happy in my own body.

 After achieving that goal by losing twenty-five pounds in about ten months beginning last May, I have re-labeled my motivations. Instead of aiming to lose weight, I’ve centered my goals around running a half marathon, getting faster at rowing, and getting stronger on my lifts. For some reason, I’m more comfortable labeling my goals in this way, choosing seemingly objective descriptors centered around athletic performance rather than aesthetic body change, which seems much more fraught and controversial. To some degree, I feel a level of shame associated with setting a goal around changing my body in a way that moves it closer to societally typical beauty standards.

 My self-imposed shame about this type of commitment has nothing to do with feeling ashamed about having weight to lose. In other words, I’m not embarrassed about the presence of the ten or fifteen pounds that I might still like to kick. I am, however, somewhat apprehensive about setting a goal with this specific target, and I think my shame here stems from competing messages in the fitness industry today.

 There are many different ideas circulating in our culture right now about what fitness, and even fitness goals should look like. While there’s always the cultural pressure to use fitness to adhere to societal standards of physical “normal” appearance, there’s also a strong counter movement that opposes said ideology. For the most part, I tend to align with that counter-perspective: fitness can and should transcend the pursuit of typical society beauty standards. This sort of new-age fitness movement is extremely popular right now, and there are many good things to be said about it and the beneficial ideologies it promotes [body positivity! plus size acceptance! having confidence in yourself exactly as you are!]. However, I think this “side” of the fitness debate sometimes takes it a little too far in vilifying exercise in pursuit of aesthetic change.

 I understand the logic to some degree: exercising for the sake of changing your body cannot be good because that tends to mean seeking to make your body adhere more closely to societal standards of beauty. That’s what some members of this body positive fitness camp would argue. In general, I agree with the messages espoused by the section of the fitness industry focused on acceptance. I don’t think that being heavier is inherently worse, I’m constantly working on feeling more positive about and comfortable with my body just the way it is, and I try to practice fitness because it makes me happy rather than because some societally-influenced part of me wants six pack abs [among other things, my unwillingness to give up Ben & Jerry’s has rendered this an impossibility—and I’m not mad about it]. To better illustrate the “spectrum” I’m talking about, I’ve made a little graphic for you guys:

 So, since I align with that pink-er end of the fitness spectrum in many respects, I find it difficult to go against it in my believing that aesthetic motivations are perfectly legitimate and acceptable reasons to exercise. My own fitness journey and the success I’ve found in pursuing fitness today were largely catalyzed by my appearance-oriented goals, and there are still things that I want to change about my body through fitness. Thus, in its most distilled form, the body positive side of the fitness spectrum can be extremely restrictive. Not because body positivity in and of itself is wrong, but because the body positivity movement has taken on other [admittedly related and definitely worthy of discussion] ideologies that take away from the wholesome positivity that the name connotes.

 In triumphing body positivity to an extreme, this side of the spectrum implies that if someone wants to change their body in a way that brings it closer to a dominant societally constructed standard of beauty, then that person must hate their body and not actually be a good example of the body positivity movement at all. [I think that some versions of feminism have unfortunately seen this same struggle in typing some those on any other place on the spectrum besides the ultimate pole as “bad feminists,” if that’s a helpful reference for you all to grasp my point here]. Well, I don’t believe that’s true.

 When you’re thinking about a goal you have related to aesthetic change of your body, I do think it’s important to take a good look at why you desire the change that you do and consider the impact of ever-present media images and negative fitness messaging concerning our bodies. I’ve done this as I grapple with on one hand wanting to embrace body positivity and my own body as it is, and on the other wanting to make aesthetic changes to it through exercise and mindful eating. I have even come to the realization that part of my desire to lose ten more pounds may come from the societal idea that being thinner is more attractive, or that I should want a thinner waist and a bigger butt and slender arms. Yeah, I’m living in this modern American society and I am certainly influenced by it. But I also think it’s kind of silly to dismiss something out of the hat just because it might be a societally-imposed ideology.

 It’s all about degrees here, like this: I recognize that society [in this case the health and beauty industries] promotes one version of beauty above others and that I may be influenced by this preference. Magazines often showcase slender, tall models on their covers—I am not a slender, tall woman, so I will not try to emulate these body types. Instead, I will set attainable goals for my body type and the changes that I would like to see. For me right now, I want to tone up my legs and arms [R.I.P. the muscle mass I lost in the few months that I took off from rowing], I want to continue to work on my cardio endurance through running, and I want to do more ab exercises as part of my desire to slim down my stomach, which is where any weight that I put on immediately goes. The byproduct of these goals will hopefully be weight loss.

 Just because I want to change my body and lose weight doesn’t mean that I hate my body now. It doesn’t mean that I think my body is “bad” and want to make it “good” by changing it. I think of my body as an entity that is constantly in flux, an inherently neutral vessel that I can change in any direction in order to suit my goals. I do not think it is wrong for those goals to be aesthetic ones right now. I do not think it would be wrong if, in six months, I decide that I no longer have those same aesthetic goals. These things don’t negate my body positivity. I am thankful for my body because it does so much for me. I feel positive towards my body because I am proud that it can run a half marathon or sprint a 2K on the erg. I love my body because I love the way I look in a bikini—I loved it twenty-five pounds ago and I love it now. Wanting to change doesn’t mean that I’m not grateful for my body every day.

 So, I reject the shaming that the “Body Positive” side of the fitness spectrum enacts on those who want to achieve an aesthetic change. In the same way that the extreme “Aesthetic Change” side of the fitness spectrum can be toxic in promoting potentially unattainable and unhealthy body images [for some people—every body is different obviously!], an extreme interpretation of the “Body Positive” side can be equally detrimental. It espouses a rhetoric that training for an aesthetic result is indicative of mental instability and self-hate [no! not true!], and the only ~acceptable~ kind of training centers around doing cool stuff—running marathons, or improving strength or sports performance. But just as extreme “Aesthetic Change” rhetoric shames certain body types and, extreme “Body Positivity” SHAMES aesthetic-centered training!

 We don’t need to buy into this, guys. I think exercise should be something that you do for the sake of happiness, to feel good about yourself. But if feeling your best involves some kind of aesthetic change, that is more than okay. I think many people who are getting into fitness initially join the exercise community with body change in mind. The body positivity movement claims to counteract the shaming tendency of the opposite end of the spectrum, but in reality can make us feel bad about our goals in a different way.

 So, yes, it is perfectly fine to train for aesthetic change. That’s the main message I want to get across here. You shouldn’t feel ashamed about it—and I’m going to try to stop feeling ashamed about it too. I’m going to stop falsely re-naming my goals to distract from the fact that one of my main motivations is weight loss. I will recognize my desire to lose a few more pounds, acknowledge the fact that it may come from societally-enforced beauty standards, and move on with my day continuing to love my body at whatever point in my fitness journey I’m at. I’m going to be more honest about that with myself and with all of you. The “Body Positivity” movement should be centered on just that—body positivity—and refrain from asking us to totally transcend the influence of society all on our own and then shame us when we as individuals cannot do that. I reject that shame, and I invite you to do the same! It feels pretty good.

 One other take-away while I’m at it: extreme and inflexible fitness camps are detrimental to a healthy mindset in fitness. I think the spectrum graphic illustrates this pretty well. Both extremes have major detrimental factors, as I hope I have displayed in this post. There can be pressure to fully commit to one camp or another, as I have felt and as has brought me shame about my weight loss goals, but I would discourage that method. I think the best way to go about cultivating your own healthy lifestyle is picking and choosing little pieces of different fitness ideologies that individually work for you and then cobbling them together into a kind of personal  patchwork quilt of health. To relate to the diagram, this would be somewhere in the purplish portion of the spectrum probably, and a different place for every person.

 Today, let’s transcend fitness shaming in any form, from any direction, and just focus on ourselves and what’s best for us personally. It sounds so obvious, but it’s much easier said than done. As always, I’m interested to hear what you guys think on this topic—feel free to drop me a comment or an email with your thoughts. Stay happy, stay healthy, stay shame-free!