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Is exercise inherently fatphobic or can it be used as a tool for liberation?

How to move for joy and treat rest as anti-capitalist resistance

Illustration by @tinuke.illustration

I like to think of myself as a body positive person. For years I have followed plus-sized activists and influencers online. I have done my own research on how BMI is bullshit, unlearned the rhetoric that fat bodies are ugly, and have tried my best to love my own fat body. In spite of all of this, the second I start to exercise, all I can think about is losing weight. 

I have always struggled to separate exercise from weight loss. I’m a plus sized woman who is not looking to make myself smaller, yet I feel the need to push myself to exercise more, to burn calories and shrink my body. I find myself sucking in my stomach at the gym even though this makes it harder to breathe. I feel disappointed that exercise isn’t making me smaller and I start to feel unhappy in the body that I have worked so hard to like. 

In a capitalist society, exercise is synonymous with weight loss 

I don’t usually tell anyone about this inner turmoil. “Oh yeah, exercising for my mental health has been great,” I say to my friends, not disclosing how much it is making me dislike myself. I feel ashamed that I even have those feelings in the first place. 

But really, this mindset isn’t my fault. Equating exercise with weight loss is ingrained in us from an early age and its propaganda can be found everywhere. It’s plastered all over billboards, Pinterest, social media ads and influencers’ Instagrams. If you look up the term “exercise” on Wikipedia, the first reason it gives to exercise is weight loss. Even while writing this article, I got an ad for a ‘running for weight loss’ app on Twitter. None of this is surprising when you realise that exercise is intrinsically linked with diet culture and fatphobia, both of which are driven by capitalism. 

The weight loss industry makes billions a year off of us hating our bodies. It makes being slim some kind of trophy to be won, whilst also setting us up to fail. It tells us to eat healthily, whilst placing additives and highly addictive sugar alternatives in diet foods. It tells us to go on expensive diets and try experimental exercise classes to get slim, even though most of these things do not work in the long run. And as soon as you fall off that horse, there’s the more dangerous alternatives, including life-altering plastic surgery and under-researched drugs like ozempic. No matter where you fall in the system, they are profiting from it. 

As a disabled person, I also can’t help noticing the other ways in which capitalism warps our view of exercise. In a capitalist society, we are told to push ourselves, often to breaking point. We need to be productive in everything we do. You can’t just go to the gym one off for fun – that’s not productive – you need to go to the gym every single day to get those ‘gains’. 

You have to push your body past its limits to make it stronger, faster, and in turn make yourself a better tool and worker for society. This capitalist view that a human’s worth is based on productivity excludes many disabled people who can’t always do as much as able-bodied people. 

Pushing your body past its limits – for anyone, but especially disabled people – can cause injury, fatigue, and use up all your spoons in a day. Spoons are a metaphor for how much capacity disabled people have in a day. People with chronic illnesses who have limited energy will often have to prioritise some tasks over others, and forcing yourself to push your body at the gym might mean that you then can’t make yourself a meal or brush your teeth that day. Traditional fitness goals are just not attainable for many disabled people.

How do we liberate ourselves from these ideas? Is there a way to exercise while still loving and respecting your body? Or is it inherently fatphobic and grounded in self-hatred? 

What is intuitive exercise?

I think the question of whether exercise is inherently fatphobic is a difficult one. If we look at it from our current societal mindset that most adults have – which equates exercise with weight loss – then yes, it is fatphobic. However, I don’t think it has to be. Children often spend huge amounts of their days exercising, but they don’t do it for the same reasons we do. 

Children move around by playing sports or skipping or running just for the fun of it. And adults can do it too. This is where intuitive exercise and joyful movement come in. These concepts look at rejecting diet culture and making exercise an activity we do simply because we love ourselves. 

Intuitive exercise shares similar core principles with intuitive eating. It encourages you to ask your body what it wants to do, rather than punishing it through diet culture or harsh fitness regimes. Intuitive exercise can be any kind of movement from going on a nature walk, to bouncing on a trampoline, to gardening. All movement counts. 

I recently listened to a podcast episode by Michelle Elman which explored her take on intuitive exercise, informed by her experiences as a disabled person. Michelle talks about being stuck in hospital due to illness aged 19 and how all she wanted to do was move her body again. So that’s what she did. She started to try exercises she enjoyed without any of her old fears of people judging her or having to push her body a certain way. She did it for self-love and to focus on what her body could do rather than aesthetics. As a disabled person who sometimes worries what people think of me, I found this concept hugely empowering. 

Michelle recommends trying out different types of movement depending on how you feel – for example, she likes to go swimming to calm down, or if she is angry she plays squash. She talks about going to the gym for fun and bringing back that childlike joy you get when you are young and moving your body in play, and also suggests covering your gym equipment with a towel so that you cannot see the screen with the timer and calorie counter. 

The first time I did this in my gym, I thought I stood out like a sore thumb. There I was, the only plus-sized woman in the room, putting a pink (and slightly stained) tea-towel on the treadmill screen. But I wanted to give intuitive exercise a go, and Michelle’s podcast encourages you not to care what others think. So, while it didn’t come naturally to me, I started the treadmill and tried to tune into my body. 

P.E. should stand for Pain and Embarrassment

I usually put on loud music and ignore my body’s cues while exercising. A part of this behaviour might be left over from my secondary school P.E. experience. For me, P.E. was a painful experience where I was constantly embarrassed by being picked last for team sports or struggling to keep up with other kids. I hated the classes so much that I often chose to dissociate from my body until they were over. And this is a behaviour I have struggled to unlearn. 

I think another reason I usually ignore my body is because, when I do try and push it, I can feel pretty awful. I struggle a lot with breathing while running on a treadmill, and the feelings of breathlessness or dizziness can feel a lot like symptoms of a panic attack. So trying to listen to my body for once seemed strange to me. But I did it. I went faster when I wanted to, because it felt good, and slower to catch my breath. I stopped when I got dizzy, and I decided to finish when I felt my body getting tired. It was quite a liberating experience, and I felt good about it when I got off the treadmill. 

A big part of intuitive exercise is also doing activities you find fun – and this is where it overlaps with joyful movement. Joyful movement is pretty much what it says on the tin. It is all about finding movement that brings you joy, and encompasses mental as well as physical health. It encourages you to do activities you love, like dancing or using a hula-hoop or swimming in the sea. Similarly to intuitive exercise, it encourages any form of movement.

Rest is restorative 

In recent weeks, my chronic fatigue has been a lot worse and I haven’t been able to go to the gym or do regular yoga. At first, I felt the old guilt creeping in. But then I decided to let myself do some softer movements instead. I went on a beautiful nature walk and picked blackberries. I’ve done smaller, 10-minute yoga classes very occasionally. But I have also let myself rest a lot of the time. 

Rest is the key to anti-capitalist exercise. You shouldn’t force yourself to move when your body does not want to. Rest is just as important as moving and can be liberating for those of us who always feel like we should be on the go. Artist and activist Tricia Hersey started up The Nap Ministry, a collective which “engages with the power of performance art, site-specific installations, and community organising to install sacred and safe spaces for the community to rest together.” 

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By viewing sleep-deprivation as a social justice issue, The Nap Ministry highlights the damaging reality of constantly working and pushing ourselves, proving that letting our bodies rest is a powerful act of defiance. As they wrote earlier this year: “Feeling guilt about resting is evidence of your brainwashing by toxic systems. Rest through it. Resist.”

The Nap Ministry examines how the capitalist systems that deny us of rest are both an intersectional and racial justice issue. The work Tricia is doing is vital, and I think this framework of viewing rest as resistance is crucial to liberation. 

Final thoughts

Despite working hard to reframe the act of exercise, I still find it hard to separate it from weight loss. However, like with many things, I think it is a life-long journey and also a choice. We have to make the choice every time we move to do it for self-love rather than as a punishment. We have to choose to like how our jiggly bodies move on the treadmill rather than loathe it. We have to choose to ignore what we perceive to be stares in the gym as we put up our tea-towel. 

But I also think it is okay to accept that you may still get negative thoughts creeping in. Shaming ourselves for having these thoughts isn’t helping anyone. Instead we need to be kind and gentle to ourselves, acknowledge that the thoughts are there, and then re-assert the reasons we are exercising, whether that is to find joy in movement, or to improve mental health, or to be in tune with our bodies.

We have a lot of unlearning to do. Unlearning anything that is systemic, like diet culture, can be hard. But I think it is worth it in the end – because intuitive and joyful exercise can be really liberating. Loving our body enough to let it move and rest when we want to is an act of kindness to ourselves. And I think that’s beautiful.

Illustration by @tinuke.illustration who says: “This depicts the contrasts of exercise for results and exercise for fun. The left hand side is encased in a winding tape measure representin exercise with a fatphobic mindset and a preoccupation with visible results. The negative effect this can have on the body and mind is shown by the darker colours and gloomy background. As opposed to the right hand side of the picture which has a focus on exercise being joyful movement, focusing on what feels good and not pushing the body past its limits. The plants and natural background evokes feelings of peace and finding oneself in a positive mindspace while exercising, the towel over the treadmill screen suggests a lack of interest in the stats and numbers in relation to exercise.”