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We are constantly redefining our own perspectives, and therefore tend to write a lot about our personal experiences. Many followers and contributors are living with anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, and a variety of other body image disorders or mental illnesses, so please be respectful and remember that health applies differently to everyone. Any and all potentially triggering content will be prefaced with a trigger warning.
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TW: Weight loss related discussion
Food is Fuel. =)
Is this really about your journey to weight loss? Or is it about your journey to defining and achieving your own personal health and fitness goals?
I guess I’m just wondering, is it really about the weight and aesthetics? For you that may be true, but not everyone has that privilege.
If “food is fuel” is associated with power, nourishment and health, then why is it still about weight loss when it’s all said and done? How do you separate the health and the weight loss?
This kind of messaging that floats around sends mixed signals that leave a bad taste in my mouth. When I see words like these being thrown together, to me they seem to contradict one another. When I think about food as fuel, I don’t think about weight loss. I don’t want to associate it with weight loss. For many people, it shouldn’t be about weight loss. I just wish these things were considered more often, words more carefully chosen.
TW: Weight loss discussion, fitspo, fitness, health…
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.
TW: Body shaming, fitspo (yes, it can definitely be a trigger!), anxiety, and weight loss-related discussion.
When I read this article (“Why Fit is the New Thin”) and reblogged it the other week, the damaging possibility of fitspo made…
I’m going to be honest, here. This really infuriates me. Since when does being healthy and wanting to be better in the fitness world link directly to hating your body? If anything, for me, it’s the COMPLETE OPPOSITE. I want to strengthen my body and see what it is capable of in this life, BECAUSE WE ONLY HAVE ONE. Why not see what amazing measures my body can go to? It’s ludicrous to me that losing weight or toning up means you ‘hate’ your body. I love my body, every single transformation it’s undergone. Yes, you can get healthier without losing a pound but GUESS WHAT: Usually, getting healthier also means you are going to lose weight. Eat healthy, train healthy, your weight is going to drop if you are over-weight. It’s just how it is. It makes me really upset that “curvy” and “overweight” girls feel the need to bash on everyone else in order to get the point across that they ‘accept’ themselves and ‘love’ themselves. Most of the fitspo community on Tumblr have been overweight girls—and so there’s not bashing going on here. We’re not talking down to girls who are over weight or saying how much better we are than them. In fact, more often than anything: the fitspo community is defending over weight people and their health/choices. So I have no clue why in the world the curvy/body acceptance girls of tumblr would find it necessary to hate on the girls who have taken an active stance on their bodies and in their own fitness. I work damn hard every single day to keep my body strong and capable of out running a herd of elephants. Why do I need to see the BODY ACCEPTANCE (key word ) blogs that I follow bashing on girls like me who work hard? I submitted to those blogs when I Was even curvier than I am now, because, I was happy with my body and loved the skin I was in. I decided to lose weight and start getting into shape because I wanted to, because I loved my body and guess what…I still love my body. To this day, I love it. I was almost sure that the point of these body positive blogs was to uplift, not tear down. I’m really disappointed that this is the direction we’re going. Just an FYI, tearing others down does not show that you’re happy or content in your skin. In fact, it shows quite the opposite.
What I’m really asking (and failed to include in my OP) is that maybe those who discuss fitness-related content that involves losing weight should consider prefacing it with a trigger warning so that those who find that kind of content damaging can easily skim over it.
All I’m asking anyone to acknowledge is that fitness and health is different for everyone. I’m not tearing anyone down. I am not bashing anyone. I am suggesting that what is right for you is not right for everyone and asking you to recognize it. That is all.