Well hello!

In my experience, a lot fitspo blogs/posts/images tend to be quite harmful and triggering (for me, personally, and for many others).

Perhaps you’ve found a batch of fitspo blogs that have separated aesthetic goals from health/fitness goals, but I’ve yet to find any. Most tend to directly correlate “toned” bodies with fitness ideals, which is simply not practical - “fitness” means different things to different people and different bodies.

Some even triumph one body type against another, as if that one “toned” body ideal is always attainable and preferable. There’s a little more on that topic here.

If you want a toned body, that’s cool and all, but don’t pretend your abs trump my bodacious body rolls. Both body types are beautiful.

I also have a ton of tagged posts wherein myself and some followers contributed to a discussion about fitspo a few months back. If you can only read one of them, I would suggest peeping this one.

As far as the ”dieting under the guise of being more healthy” aspect of that post you are referring to, those words were not mine, so I can not speak to that person’s exact intent. However, I do know that “dieting” in general doesn’t work, may be an indicator of future weight gain, and is generally found to be counterproductive to one’s health and wellness in the long term. So, that might have something to do with it.

Simply put, diets are not the answer.

Have you ever heard of a person on a diet who didn’t start it to lose weight (if not as a result of some sort of medical/environmental issue that requires food regimenting)?

Making weight loss a primary goal is different than making health a primary goal. One focuses on aesthetics, the other on ones own definition of health - which is heavily varied.

If we were all more honest about the changes we want to make in ourselves, it would help clear the air on this disconnect between health and aesthetics. Health and fitness are not universally defined. Weight loss, as a goal, is not always in a person’s best interest. 

I also feel it’s important to stop applying any moral value to one’s health. Health does not equal “goodness” - not everyone wants, or is able, to be “healthy” - so let’s think about how we can stop generalizing that definition. This post from a while back on Health As Virtue speaks a lot on that subject.

And that’s all I got!

Sorry to have peppered this reply with so many links, but I truly hope you will check them out and see what there is to see. I hope I was helpful!

Thank you for contributing <3