Leanness and Fitness Are Not the Same Thing.
Mary Kane is not the first or last person to be told she needs to be slimmer to be a better athlete, but her colorful story of leaving the Nike running team shows just how damaging this idea can be. She says she was “the fastest girl in America” before changing her coach and finding herself being told over and over again to “get thinner and thinner and thinner.” Her performance deteriorated, as did her mental health under pressure.
Thinness and fitness are not the same thing, but they are combined in almost all fitness posts these days, especially those directed at women. (For a depressing illustration of the dichotomy, look at two companion books for men and women, entitled “ Bigger,” “Skinny,” “Stronger,” and “Thinner,” “Skinny,” “Stronger,” respectively .)
Follow a fitness Instagram account and you’ll probably see a lot of bikini photos; scroll down to r / xxfitness (a fitness community for women and non-binary people) and it seems like there are proud “before and after” pictures every day.
But the point is, if you’re getting in shape and getting stronger, you don’t need to lose weight or gain abs. This is not the natural endpoint of most people’s fitness journey. Models and bodybuilders are often as slim as possible for only a short time each year, and use photographs taken during that time to fill their poop the rest of the year. I follow many Olympic weightlifters on Insta, and a week before a big event (like the recent world championship) many smaller athletes post photos in bikinis. This is because they make sharp and often unhealthy cuts (fast diets) in order to gain weight, and only in these cuts do they have abs in the heat of the moment. They don’t have this body type all year round, and most of them diet primarily because they calculated that a certain weight class gives them the best chance of competing in the Olympics. (For a more in-depth discussion of this, I recommend listening to an episode of Alyssa Richie’s podcast about how struggling to lose weight at the World Championships made her so weak that she was unable to perform the planned exercises.)
In fact, if you do strength sports like weightlifting or powerlifting, chances are you’ll get better in the long run if you gain weight. And this is difficult to comprehend if you have thought all your life that “being fit” means being thin, or at least thinner than where you started. Or if you think diet and exercise go hand in hand. Famous nutty woman Casey Johnston wrote that when you’re in trouble at the gym, often you just “need to get yourself a damn burger.”
Natalie Hanson, champion and powerlifting coach, said in interviews that most of the women who come to her to gain strength are also asking to drop out of the weight class. “You are obviously interested enough in sports to hire a coach,” she says, “but at the same time, this arbitrary number of 63 kilograms is what you want to weigh, even if this number is as it were chosen from thin air by people. in powerlifting “. (Interviewer Greg Knuckles noted that he often suggests that his female clients move up one weight class when he wants to recommend them move up two; he says that even then, they often don’t want to.)
And on another podcast, Empowered by Iron , the hosts (both women) asked their audience what they wanted to know when they started playing sports. In the vast majority of cases, one of the most popular responses was that they would like them to eat more and eat more carbs, and not worry so much about achieving or maintaining a low weight.
I really, really feel it. I’m in a place where I personally probably need to gain weight to get stronger and more competitive, but every time the scales go up, I get scared and change my mind. Meanwhile, athletes like Mary Kane are told that they will definitely improve their performance if they get slimmer. It is not true. You can gain or lose weight if you have a personal or medical reason for doing so, but if you automatically think that being lean and being physically fit always go hand in hand, that’s just a myth.