I recently came across a study that showed that 70 percent of women working in the fitness industry had eating disorders. And this wasn’t just a study with a few people participating. This was a large sample! In my own experience in the fitness industry this seems very true to what I have seen and experienced. Many trainers that I knew, including myself, obsessed with their weight and bodies. We often took extreme measures to achieve fat percentages and certain weights on the scale. We’d spend hours exercising. We’d count calories. We’d measure all our portions. Certain foods were off limits. And in some cases we’d purge the things we ate.
And as beacons as health and fitness many of us were not healthy at all. In fact, we were really NOT healthy. And we were selling a lie.
Many times fitness professionals aren’t honest about what it really takes to achieve six pack abs and a body free of dimples. Instead we hide the true effort it can take to get that lean. As we encourage our clients to strive for thinness themselves, we can often unwittingly also encourage eating disorders.
And most of us didn’t get into the fitness indunstry to shame women into getting thin. We wanted to help people live bigger lives. But we live in a society where thinness and health are often conflated. We mistake thinness for health constantly, mostly because that is the popular message in the diet and fitness industries.
But health comes in all sizes. The fact is, we do know that obesity is connected with some health problems, but we really don’t HOW much extra weight is too much. Is it 20 extra pounds? 50? 100? There is no conclusive data on that. But there is, however, clear data on how bad gaining and losing weight is. Gaining and losing just 20 pounds over an over in our life can drastically shorten our life. And this sounds familiar doesn’t it? Most of us women have been gaining and losing weight our whole lives!
Isn’t it time for fitness that promotes actually health? Fitness that isn’t selling a lie? When you choose a gym, a trainer, or a fitness plan, we hope you choose one that is really honest about how to truly acheive health and doesn’t use shame tactics in place of encouragement.