rinrinfantabulous:

redefiningbodyimage:

TW: Weight loss discussion, fitspo, fitness, health…

nessfraserloves:

fly401:

If it were about you being healthier you would:

• compare distance walked/ran from previous outings
• compare blood pressure results
• compare time to distance ratio on exercise
• say I swam 10 more laps today before I was beat!
• say I walked for 10 extra minutes today without skipping a step!
• compare weight lifted from when you started to now
• speak about extra energy you have getting out of bed in the morning
• compare x activity output from when you started or last week

There are so many things you could be saying about being ‘healthier’ than showing pictures of before and after and showing differences on a scale.

Stop the bullshit and lies about it being about health!

Yep, exactly! If you want to lose weight for aesthetic reasons then YOU WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT FOR AESTHETIC REASONS and that’s cool, but please stop doing all of this dieting shit under the guise of “being more healthy” when it is complete bullshit.

Truth. Health can not be visually represented in an accurate fashion. Neither can fitness.  The way these things apply to our lives is unique and can/should not be based around weight or aesthetic goals. We need to separate aesthetic change from these factors in order to make sense of them, otherwise the implications will remain.

A good friend of mine who is fat - about my size or a bit smaller - has been working with a personal trainer for months now. She can run for miles without being winded for the first time in years. She has made huge strides in improving her overall health and wellness, based on her own personal fitness goals.

But because she isn’t seeing the number on the scale go down, she says she has “nothing to show” for her efforts. She acknowledges that she feels healthier, she has more energy, and there are all of these positive effects - but she can’t get past the instinct that tells her she is failing, despite improving her overall health and wellbeing.

This shit is the number one most frustrating thing ever. Hell, I can’t even keep it from weighing on my self-esteem from time to time, and I fully understand where it’s coming from and why. Ugh.

Word. I can’t count the number of times that I have quit fitness programs because my main goal was to lose weight (always combined with a totally unsustainable diet, of course) and when it didn’t happen, I gave up. Now that I’m done with school and have some time to start taking better care of myself, I’m making an earnest effort to really get fit — as in, get stronger and improve my cardio endurance. But even now, it’s hard to escape the weight loss mentality. It helps that I no longer have a scale and don’t know what I weigh. It also helps that I do a fitness assessment after every 10 workouts and, having just done one, can now state with certainty that I am more fit than I was two weeks ago; I can do more push-ups, more crunches, and more squats. (And it feels totally awesome!)

If you’re going to post thinspo, just call it what it is. Don’t make it about “fitness” or “health,” because, as the OP said, that’s bullshit.

I just needed to say - Escaping the weight-loss mentality is the bane of my existence. It is the single hardest thing for me to overcome. I don’t know why.