The Dark Side of the Health Industry (Is that it’s still an industry)

Look at any fitness website, walk into any sports store, and you’ll be barraged by advertisements selling the best workout clothes, the latest in gym equipment, or the most effective sports drinks. These advertisements feature svelte females mid-run, faces looking inspired, with barely a hair out of place. Or they showcase muscular men weight-lifting with formidable expressions that seem to demand why you don’t look like them. That sure as hell isn’t what I look like when I work out, but does that mean that I don’t count as a runner or a weight-lifter?
When it comes to fitness, there seems to be more emphasis on self shame than on getting healthy. These images are what we have been taught “healthy” looks like, and in today’s society, losing weight has become more important than taking care of yourself. Everywhere in the media, and even in media that claims to promote improving well-being, the message is that weight loss and being thin are the same as being in better shape. Because this message in theory defines healthy, it also promotes certain harmful body images by telling people that if they aren’t as thin as models, they are actually living in unhealthy ways. The fact is, however, that a naturally thin person who lives on burgers, pizza, and soda is probably not healthier than a larger person who tries to include fruit and vegetables in their everyday diet.
Tumblr has a popular group of bloggers who call themselves “fitblrs” and post “thinspiration”, which are intended to motivate people to eat healthier and work out more. These photos often depict young, extremely skinny girls, who have potentially been photoshopped, and captions that describe the desperate desire to be thin and often promote anorexic behavior and constant extreme workouts, to the point where if you search “thinspiration” or “thinspo” on the site, a message pops up from the administrators offering resources for people dealing with eating disorders or self harm. Trending ideals such as the “thigh gap” have become desirable. Many of these bloggers claim to be promoting healthy living, and yet they still put all their focus on weight loss and constantly reblog before and after pictures featuring girls’ transformations from being overweight or even average looking to supermodel thin. Looking through these pictures and reading the advice, it is easy to start believing that by losing weight, all of one’s problems will magically disappear.
The problem is that these ideals are debilitating. When the advertisers and and people we look to for advice are constantly showing us a one-sided idea of what healthy looks like, it makes it seem unachievable. It makes it intimidating to even walk into a sports store to buy shoes, much less actually go to the gym and work out next to all the people who have been doing it for years. The advertised image of “healthy” actually discourages people from trying to get in shape.
But health is not a look; health is a lifestyle. Health is not about losing weight, but rather about making choices that make us feel better in the long run.  I don’t look like a model; I get red, out of breath, and covered in sweat, and that’s okay. I love to eat cookies sometimes, and that’s okay too. I get to decide what is good for me, because healthy is as much mental as it is physical, and loving yourself will get you farther than hating yourself ever will.

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Kristen Sibbald

Staff Blogger Scr ’17